Second-Phase Emergence

The Current Situation.

First, an observation. Our emerging church, COTA (church of the apostles in Fremont, Seattle), has operated as a sort of spiritual hospital. The "open space" atmosphere so characteristic of emerging churches, where soothing/mysterious ambiance and multiple stations allow for many ways of engaging - rather than a directed experience where all pay attention and participate in the same activities in unison - has proven very healing and important for those who have been scarred or misled in the name of God, but want to maintain their faith and worship. This no-expectations environment allows one to encounter the word and a sense of the enveloping love of God, while at the same time exploring ways to engage with these truths that connect more deeply with the people we experience ourselves to be. The emphasis is very much less on dictates or steps, and the fear these bring up for many from their more fundamentalist Christian pasts makes anything resembling rules loathe in an emerging church environment. For the most part, this is as it should be.

Of course, this approach is far from perfect and cannot describe the whole of one's walk with Christ. Our resistance to being formed, to being told what to do, is part of our sinfulness, and if church never challenges its flock to grow, then it does a disservice, and our opportunities to grow to maturity are diverted rather into the confusing realm of permissiveness. Guidance by a leader who remains connected with the congregation - both its individuals, and as a whole - and can open scripture-described doorways to ways of weathering storms, rather than turning back from them, is essential.

The willingness to question not just the conventional ways, but the ways we ourselves have followed in the past, is important especially given the cultural disposition of our young people today. A generation of self-absorbed parenting, dismal career and economic options, and a host of worldwide social/environmental ills makes it harder to grow up today than ever before, I am convinced, as is evidenced by the growing trend of 20- and 30-somethings who return home to live with parents. Considering this trend toward prolonged irresponsibility, an emerging church becomes a place of temptation toward institutionalizing this irresponsibility. The possibility is implied, just as in an codependent relationship, that if we just focus on our relationship together, all the harsher realities of the world can be held at bay. This of course is not true, and if we insist on propping-up the intoxication common in the first stages of relationship, then we miss the chance of moving deeper into intimacy as community, through facing the real-life challenges together, and learning what it means to apply gospel lessons in how we live this out. Instead, we will find that our relationship has stagnated, the spirit has left it, and that money problems - as in so many relationships - become our downfall. If we fail to learn the lessons of growth informed by scripture in mutual discernment, then after adolescence we will default to cultural norms as the only option for "growing up," as did the majority of hippies from the 1960's who became the wealth-celebrating boomers of the 1980's.


Visions on the way forward

Given the above, it seems clear that at some point in the life of an emerging congregation, it needs to move beyond the simple belief that anything-goes and the Love of God will conquer all. Our default examples of spiritual formation to draw from include the Catholic/Orthodox vein, where a patriarch holds the reins to personal paths, and the Evangelical sciptural-literalists, who preach awkward hegemonic answers from our text. Can there be an alternative, authentic way for the emerging church to grow up? I believe any example of this, for our culture, would need to include some version of the following aspects:

1) The Specificity of Sin. The flipside of the coin of postmodern relativism is that virtually any choice can be validated as part of a justifiable identity or lifestyle choice. While this trend in consciousness has done wonders for destabilizing prejudice and traditional power divisions, it also has opened up a huge berth for sin. Preaching on sin anytime before the 1960's might have easily been understood along common, socially-shared definitions; we could compare ourselves to others and easily know where we were falling short. While these perceptions may or may not have been valid, they greatly simplified knowing when to repent. Today, as divorce and compulsive sexual behavior have become more widely accepted, it takes more work to identify precisely which sins are operating behind them. If we are going to allow ourselves more personal freedom in the choices we make, then I would say the gospel imperative would be to invest greater attention to the workings of our hearts, with the expectation that sin WILL be found. The problem today is that increasingly we can identify with sin only in a general way, as something mentioned in our creeds and that we know God forgives. We coast through church extracting the good feelings of love and forgiveness, without ever looking inside to find what in us needs to be forgiven.

For this reason, I believe that any emerging church to grow past adolescence will need to provide an outlet for exploring what precisely our personal sinfulness entails. This imperative should be preached in general, and the exploration could take many forms. It could be something offered through the pastor or a well-trained pastoral-care team. It could be the subject of small group teams, either during services or throughout the week. It could be the focus of a new accountability trend - one that follows not a prescribed right/wrong behavior definition, but one that holds each accountable to what he or she has discerned in community as an area of weakness. Emerging congregations could take a cue from 12-step groups in encouraging Sponsor relationships, where members are encouraged to call another member of the church when the temptation toward sin arises. This would increase community cohesiveness and bring the Christian walk to inhabit the week between services, without requiring inordinate commitments of time to meetings.


2) Evolving Confession: Confession is one of the poorest-understood aspects of the gospel. The prescription to confess to our brothers and sisters before taking communion is hardly ever followed anymore, as I've observed, except in Orthodox congregations. Part of the problem of course is that we associate confession with sin and, as mentioned above, our church has followed cultural trends such that personal sinfulness can be conveniently avoided. However, I believe that confession in the sense urged by the gospel would involve much more than sin, in today's context.

Confession in the gospel sense is intended to bring us into community with our brethren; to bring our hearts into communion and draw us together as the body of Christ, before taking in the body and blood of Christ. Hence, we must look not just for our "sins" with their murky definition, but anything we hold in our hearts that keep us from feeling open and accepted and connected to other members of the body.

Much more prevalent than sin, for today's Christians, is the tendency to self-police, to judge ourselves as unworthy before God or others may do so. The urge is toward feeling and appearing as one body with other Christians on the surface, and withholding anything within ourselves that may rock the boat, or rub others the wrong way. This withholding I am convinced is the single most spiritually damaging tendency in our churches and culture today; it is the fertile ground for resentments and addictions, the antithesis to intimacy. If we cannot experience being accepted and loved by our brethren after risking the disclosure of our most petty, uncomfortable, or shameful feelings and concerns, then we cannot know the love of Christ.

The realm here is not sin - in the sense of something we have done "wrong," or can find decried in God's words. It is the realm of that part of our inner experience that we cannot validate ourselves enough to choose to speak into community - but which nevertheless may be the unformed urges of the Spirit speaking through us, or a poorly-understood aspect of ourselves in need of God's healing through confession to community. Often, a feeling of discomfort in a situation or in the face of another's words may not find immediate justification within ourselves; but as we begin to share it and find validation and encouragement from others, we find indeed a valid point or constructive feedback that can articulate what others were more dimly sensing, or serve as a gentle piece of information that may help another direct his attention toward an area of growth or repentance. To be able to communicate openly in this way, and find acceptance no matter how intellectually defensible our impression, is a crucial component of discernment in community. An emerging church that is serious about maturing will not only create opportunities, but proactively and regularly pursue the honest experiences of its congregants, as a new form of confession.

3) Facing the Truth: Truth is a funny buzzword for church in a postmodern world. Any objective sense of truth has fallen casualty to practices of relativizing; what is left in church contexts is "Truth" as a stand-in for God and his prescriptions, what can be found in the Bible, sometimes simply the Bible itself. The word truth has little place in emerging churches trying to distance themselves from the evangelical mainstream and its use of truth to punish and ostracize. Yet there is a form of relational truth, which must be explored and cultivated in maturing emerging churches.

Relational truth is that which speaks about what actually transpires between people, and in peoples' relationship to their life circumstances. Relational truth can be understood as opposed to fantasy or hopes which have no grounding in reality, but which seem to occupy greater and greater terrain in the brains of a generation accustomed to irresponsibility. This form of truth helps a codependent couple identify when their relationship is succeeding by virtue of their avoidance of problematic issues such as sexuality, finances, or planning for the future. It helps a young church-planter temper (and support) his dreams of startup success by planning for the finances and activities the first year will require. It helps a young congregation frightened by infidelity in its ranks deal with the people involved directly, rather than distract itself until the problem blows over.

Holding ourselves and our congregations to facing and dealing with the truth is a spiritual discipline as challenging as any, especially when no solution or path forward immediately presents itself, and the uncomfortable truth must simply be held and experienced by the congregation. This is life training desperately needed by a generation chronically falling short of self-sufficiency. Often, the path through these times of uncomfortable truth is not learning or discerning how to move beyond them, but developing the fortitude to endure Dark Nights for a time; indeed for John of the Cross and others, living through times of impasse is key to the purgation of subtler sins, and a path to experiencing God's joy, as opposed to the satiation and distraction our generation is increasingly accustomed to consuming.


The directions suggested above for emerging churches wanting to transition to a next level of spiritual maturity are considered not only from their rooting in the gospel, but more importantly from a diagnosis of the growing systematization of sin in the form of increasingly manufactured, "virtual" realities. The same technologies that facilitate new modes of artistry and communication for emerging churches also increase the potency of materialism that both Jesus and the emerging church originally took aim at. Online and handheld distractions are the evolution of materialsm; whereas the "world" has long been posited in opposition to life in the Spirit within the church, today we have harnessed the materials of the world to enable technologies for creating convincing alternative realities to the world God created. The ensuing distractions bring us further and further out of touch with the plight of the Earth and suffering societies, but more pronounced perhaps is how they more completely sever us from the suffering of those in our communities, even from our own suffering.

Church, in this context, can and must become a space for articulating Jesus' answer to this current circumstance. Emerging technologies must not be simply employed and catered to; moreover they must be put in their place by a church experience that can more deeply probe and heal the pain that technology so temptingly distracts us from. The guidelines above - only a start, a set of suggestions that may be core but can only exist in the fresh expression and articulation the emerging church is know for - should not be conceived of as a "strategy" for the church to merely survive this next wave. To the contrary, this is offered as a suggestion for how the church can be of true value to an increasingly alienated and relationally impaired generation, through the application of Christ's perspective in this moment.

About me - full version

In 2005, as I packed up my things for Harvard Divinity School, I heard a radio interview with James Dobson of Focus on the Family and thought, "these people are my enemies. I am being trained to take them down, and reclaim the title 'Christian' for what it stands for."

A lot of anger there. The anger has been there as long as I remember, taking the form of fiery, often controversial rants that have seemed to define me. While I have had enough reason for anger - from a broken family, to the murder of my grandmother, to a life-threatening disease, to numerous broken relationships and a life I could never seem to manage - the true source of my anger, and the pain behind it, remained hidden until recently.

In 2007, I dropped my Harvard coursework to rush home and care for my Mom who had contracted pancreatic cancer. She died 15 months later, and in the following year my life fell apart. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. Through intensive therapy centered on my ongoing struggles with relationships, sexuality and responsibility, I came to understand a history of sexual abuse in my family, which shaped my understanding of life in ways that have injured my ability to grow and relate as a human being.


I am promised by the bible that God will use all things for good, and I see evidence of that in my sustained, sacrificial devotion to my mother which has echoed out over the years to an extreme sensitivity to and priority on Mother Earth, fueling a dedicated and novel approach to environmentalism, such as the recent project at www.itscool.us. Similarly, the pain and injustice in which I grew up brought Jesus alongside me, and I have felt and known his closeness for decades, even while failing to embrace his healing. Knowing how much I needed it, Jesus stayed by my side, even while I lived blindly in ways that hurt him and others. My pain in relation to Christ has not thus been a questioning of his presence or existence, but an outrage at the ignorance and pain perpetrated by distortions of the gospel committed by most American modelers of Christ. Including myself.

Like most personally familiar with sexual abuse, I have lived with confusion, isolation, and a perpetual procrastination around speaking into the world the gifts and perspective God has given me. I have put off saying what is on my heart to be said, and one way to look at this is the Enemy’s ploy to destroy me early on, laying the seeds of self-destruction that would keep my work for Christ from ever manifesting.

I see now that no education or length of study will perfect my message. Developing my voice around the Climate, Christianity, and the ills in society which distort our appropriation of both will be a conversation, bound to err and offend, made worse only if it fails to start at all. The element of my rants that has been missing in the past – compassion – will now develop along with new awareness of my own injuries. I hope that the outcome can be something of value in this broken world.