Thesis | Brian McLaren and Emergent Soteriology: From Cultural Accommodation to the Kingdom of God - Chapter 3.2

CHAPTER 3.2

FROM ACCOMMODATION TO THE
SOCIAL GOSPEL: A HISTORICAL SKETCH

Brian McLaren and the Emerging Church

       
Though modernity is fading into postmodernity, the question raised by Machen remains: ‘What is the relation between the modern culture and the church?’  Eddie Gibbs records the major responses to the culture since 1985: “Church Growth Optimism” (1980s), “Church Health and the Megachurch” (1990s), and the Emerging Missional Church (21st Century).  Each of these is a response to the change in culture, and to Gibbs, the Emerging Church has the best chance to survive.  The culture has become post-Christian and thus the Emerging Church has begun  ministering in such a culture.[1]
       
The Emerging Church follows the same pattern set by modern liberals.  Like a generation before, Emergents look to culture for theological inspiration.  D. A. Carson argues:
       
[The Emerging Church] is a plea for reformation based first and foremost on perceptions of changes in the culture . . . This is not a plea to Scripture . . . but what drives it . . . is the perception that the culture has changed and therefore, the Church must adapt while still remaining in line with Scripture.[2]  

Carson links the birth of the Emerging Church to the desire to “keep up” with the culture.  Throughout the Emerging Church the prominence of adapting to the culture is eminent.  Perhaps the clearest example comes from Kester Brewin who describes the church’s need to adapt to its surroundings in terms of evolution.  The church must re-emerge by evolving:
       
If churches are going to be reborn, to emerge and evolve as self-organizing systems, then they are going to do so as organisms adapted to their unique environment.  Why do leopards have spots and tigers stripes?  Only local knowledge can help answer that question . . . Success . . . lie[s] “among us” in our shared, networked, distributed knowledge of the particular space we inhabit, whether geographical, social, or cultural.  The key cannot be found from without in some general formula for success . . . It must be conceived, nurtured, birthed, and given space to evolve from within . . . What is important for our purposes is to understand that this change-from-within is triggered by the environment in which the slime mold is existing, and that central to its survival is its ability to read and respond to this environment.  If the slime mold was unable to do this - was a system closed off from its environment - it would quickly die, just as any church sealed off from the outside world will die too.[3]

Brewin is clear that in order for the church to survive, it must adapt to its surroundings.  If the church does not adapt , he fears, it will be fossilized and left for “museums and history books.”[4]  As a result, Brewin is unsure what the “organism” is going to look like in the end.[5]  In fact this evolutionary model for the church implies that each local church will be distinct.  Each church must adapt to its local “environment,” and since every local culture is different from the next, the church must also vary.[6]
       
The purpose of this adaptation is to reach the surrounding culture.  Incarnational ministry becomes a high priority.  Each church must adapt to the surrounding culture in order to live incarnationally hoping to reach persons with the message of Jesus.  Just as Jesus and the apostles adapted to each local culture, so too the local church must do the same:
       
It will be newness that is born into a culture and therefore totally and naturally immersed in the codes, the language, the history and life of that which it comes to serve...In the same way, we need to re-emerge and be reborn into specific places and cultures in order to be truly incarnate to them and so to reach them.  God came all the way to us - yet we now expect people to come so far toward us in church.  Far away from their music, far away from their vernacular, far away from their visual language, their codes and symbols.  God was born again - became nothing and re-emerged - in order to reach us in our own language, to live and grow up among us.  As the body of Christ, we must do likewise.[7]

Similarly, Gibbs and Bolger present various reasons why the Emerging Church mirrors the culture.  The first reason they give is “because of the Incarnation.”  Like Jesus (as in John 1:14), we must “immerse ourselves in the local cultures of our time,” in order to offer a critique.[8]  Secondly, the Emerging Church invests itself in the culture “because cultural understanding has always been essential to good mission practice.”  The church is being left behind.  “The church,” they argue, “is a modern institution in a postmodern world.”  In order for the church to survive, it must “embody the gospel within the culture of postmodernity.”[9]
       
Also, modernity is in rapid decline and as a result, church attendance is in decline.  Therefore, adapting to the culture is imperative. Only the boomer generation, they argue, is content with modern churches, thus to the broader culture, the church is outdated and unprepared for current generations.  These shifts in culture, the authors argue, require:
       
significant theological reflection.  Pastoral leaders must listen carefully to culture and be prepared to abandon cherished church forms if necessary.  To pastor missionally, church leaders must understand the cultural changes that have occurred outside its doors.  For the church to be able to situate itself in culture, an understanding of these social processes must be pursued.[10]

Similarly, the culture that the church currently finds itself accommodated to, modernity, no longer exists.  Therefore, the church must “de-absolutize many of [the church’s] sacred cows in order to communicate afresh the good news to a new world.”[11]  This involves the shred modernistic strongholds and instead embrace the philosophy of the culture: postmodernity.

Conclusion

       
Though the past suggests otherwise, Emergents believe that this incarnational approach will succeed and bring about the kingdom.  In UnChristian, each contributing evangelical leader was asked to suggest where he saw the church in thirty years.  In 30 years, McLaren hopes Christians will love people, “whoever they are – gay or straight, Jew or Muslim, religious or atheist,” will do more than anyone to stop the HIV/AIDS crisis, will be gravitated towards the poor and show compassion seeking justice, will be “willing to give their lives for peace,” will “care for the environment,” have integrity, and build “harmony among races.”[12]
       
McLaren’s answer gives clear indication where he is hoping to take the church.  Rather than focusing on the gospel, like Rauschenbusch before them, McLaren and the Emerging Church have turned to social issues in hopes for relevance in the broader culture stripping the gospel of its power.
       
This accommodation to culture is why former leader and pioneer, Mark Driscoll, refers to the Emerging Church as the “latest version of liberalism.”  Pointing to Mechen, Driscoll argues that just as Protestant Liberals accommodated modernism, so also the Emerging Church, the “new liberalism,” accommodates postmodernism and has abandoned the gospel.[13]
       
In the end, the similarities of Protestant Liberals and the Emerging Church are staggering.  Their presuppositions are identical: in order for the church to survive and remain relevant, it must adapt to the culture.  By beginning here, the Emerging Church, just like its liberal counterpart, have reshaped the gospel believing the church and its message to be irrelevant and outdated.  In so doing, postmodern liberalism will suffer the same fate as modern liberals. 


[1]  Eddie Gibbs, “Church Responses to Culture Since 1985," Missiology 35. 2 (2007): 157-168.
[2]  Donald Allen Carson, “What is the Real Emerging Church?” Cedarville University, September, 2005.
[3]  Kester Brewin, Signs of Emergence, 97-98.
[4]  Ibid., 84.
[5]  McLaren makes a similar argument.  He compares theology to art, “Few artists have said, ‘I have finally finished the definitive landscape.  Everyone else can put their brushes away now.’Most painters know that landscapes evoke multiple artistic expressions, and an artist’s work is never done.  If that’s true of a painted landscape, how much more is it true of the Creator of all actual landscapes, known and unknown?” in Brian McLaren and Tony Campolo, Adventures in Missing the Point: How the Culture-Controlled Church Neutered the Gospel (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003), 43.
[6]  Brewin writes, “To summarize: we cannot tell exactly what form the Emergent Church is going to have, as it will evolve in local places under local conditions in different ways,” in Brewin, Signs of Emergence, 116.
[7]  Ibid., 68-69. Later, Brewin adds, “We are hosted by a culture, and in order to survive in that culture . . . we must open ourselves to it and adapt to it.  We can have absolutely no chance of shaping it unless we can sense and respond to it . . . Of course, there are those who still see the church as a holy lifeboat, attempting to save as many as possible from the sinking vessel that is modern culture, and that any attempt to adapt to it will result in us getting pulled down too, but it seems impossible to defend this position when we read of a God who got struck in and involved in a culture at every conceivable level . . . We need to imitate Christ and return to a radical reliance on our local communities for survival.; culturally and socially we need to be dependant on them, not independent of them,” in Ibid., 101-102.
[8]  Gibbs and Bolger, Emerging Churches, 16.  Later, Gibbs and Bolger add, “Ultimately, Christians who want to serve within Western culture must be trained as missionaries.  They must understand both the incarnational demands of the gospel and the surrounding context.” in Ibid., 26.
[9]  Ibid., 17.
[10]  Ibid., 18-19.
[11]  Ibid., 21.
[12]  Kinnaman and Lyons, UnChristian, 246.
[13]  Mark Driscoll, Confessions of a Reformission Rev. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006), 150.  See also Mark Driscoll, “A Pastoral Perspective on the Emerging Church,” Xenos Summer Institute Conference, December 2008.


Thesis | Brian McLaren and Emergent Soteriology:  From Cultural Accomodation to the Kindgom of God - Chapter 1
Thesis | Brian McLaren and Emergent Soteriology:  From Cultural Accommodation to the Kingdom of God - Chapter 2.1
Thesis| Brian McLaren and Emergent Soteriology:  From Cultural Accommodation to the Kingdom of God - Chapter 2.2
Thesis | Brian McLaren and Emergent Soteriology:  From Cultural Accommodation to the Kingdom of God - Chapter 2.3 
Thesis | Brian McLaren and Emergent Soteriology:  From Cultural Accommodation to the Kingdom of God - Chapter 3.1


For more:
Theology/Reviews - "A New Kind of Christianity" - A 11 part review and critique of McLaren's book
Reviews - McLaren - A Generous Orthodoxy
Reviews - McLaren - A New Kind of Christian 
Reviews -McLaren - A Search For What Makes Sense: Finding Faith 
Reviews -McLaren - Adventures In Missing The Point 
Reviews - McLaren - Church On The Other Side 
Reviews -McLaren - Everything Must Change 
Reviews -McLaren - Finding Faith 
Reviews -McLaren - More Ready Than You Realize 
Reviews - McLaren - The Justice Project 
Reviews - McLaren - The Secret Message of Jesus 
Reviews -McLaren - The Voice of Luke  
Theology - Revelation and the Ambiguity of Justification: McLaren Adds to the Confusion 
Theology -  Does McLaren Reject Penal Substitution?: A Review of the Evidence
Theology -   Hamilton: McLaren and Whole Foods Stores
Theology -   SBTS and McLaren: A Response to SBTS Panel Discussion
Theology -   The Evolving God: McKnight's Critique of McLaren
Theology -   The Future of the Emergent Church: McLaren Weighs In
Theology -   The Immutability of God: Its Truth and Relevancy - Introduction
Theology -   The Postmodern Social Gospel: Brian McLaren Proves My Point
Theology -   Where to Begin?: 10 Emergent Must Reads
Theology -   Who Isn't One?: Brian McLaren and Social Christians
Theology -  A New Kind of Christianity . . . Indeed: The Narrative Question - Part 1
Theology - A New Kind of Christianity . . . Indeed: The Authority Question - Part 2 
Theology -  A New Kind of Christianity . . . Indeed: The God Question - Part 3 
Theology -  A New Kind of Christianity . . . Indeed: The Jesus Question - Part 4
Theology - A New Kind of Christianity . . . Indeed: The Gospel Question - Part 5 
Theology -  A New Kind of Christianity . . . Indeed: The Church Question - Part 6
Theology - A New Kind of Christianity . . . Indeed: The Sex Question - Part 7
Theology -  A New Kind of Christianity . . . Indeed: The Future Question - Part 8 
Theology -  A New Kind of Christianity . . . Indeed: The Pluralism Question - Part 9 
Theology -  A New Kind of Christianity . . . Indeed: Where Do We Go From Here - Part 10
Theology -  A New Kind of Christianity . . . Indeed: Some Final Thoughts - Part 11
Theology - The Clarity of Ambiguity: The Erosion of the Perspicuity of Scripture in the Emergent Church - Part 1
Theology -  The Clarity of Ambiguity:  The Erosion of the Perspicuity of Scripture in the Emergent Church - Part 2
Theology - The Clarity of Ambiguity:  The Erosion of the Perspicuity of Scripture in the Emergent Church - Part 3
Theology - The Clarity of Ambiguity:  The Erosion of the Perspicuity of Scripture in the Emergent Church - Part 4
Theology -  The Clarity of Ambiguity:  The Erosion of the Perspicuity of Scripture in the emergent Church - Part 5