Do churches want transformation?

"But recalling that Jesus himself was unable to transform the Temple establishment of his day, and remembering that Paul was run out of a good many more synagogues than he was welcome in, I'm not sure that any amount of training can equip seminarians for transformation in churches that are quite happy with how they are—or were, thank you very
much."


~Brian McLaren

Brian McLaren to speak at VTS

from Dean Ian Markham's "Dean's Commentary" today

9/18/2009

I am delighted to announce today the Commencement speaker for 2010. Brian D. McLaren has accepted the Seminary’s invitation to issue the Charge to our graduating class on Thursday May 20, 2010.

Brian McLaren is a leading light in the ‘emerging church’ movement. He is a gifted communicator, a thoughtful theologian, and an inspiring leader of a congregation. As a communicator, Brian McLaren has appeared on a range of television and radio programs, including Larry King Live and Nightline. As a theologian, he comes to questions in theology with a remarkable breath partly because of his training and teaching experience in English Literature. And as a leader of a congregation, he was one of the founding members of Cedar Ridge Community Church – a strong and dynamic community. His writings have won awards and been widely praised. He offers a substantial critique of the Church in an accessible way. Among his many writings, there are The Church on the Other Side: Doing Ministry in the Postmodern Matrix, and A Generous Orthodoxy.

We are truly honored to have Brian McLaren as our Commencement speaker.

The Very Rev Ian Markham
Dean and President

Virginia Theological Seminary

A disciple-making Church, by Kathleen Henderson Staudt

Kathleen Henderson Staudt on discipleship over at the Episcopal Cafe...this is a MUST READ ESSAY!!

I've posted just a bit of her essay below, but I highly recommend it. She is an apt observer of our church, and is a deep thinking who is passionate about the future (and present) of our church.

~Rev. Peter M. Carey

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A disciple-making Church?

By Kathleen Henderson Staudt

Over the altar at Virginia Seminary, where I teach, are the words from Mark 16:15. “Go into all the world and preach the gospel.” (“proclaim the good news to the whole creation” is how the New Revised Standard Version has it.) These words have inspired generations of people called to the ordained ministry of word and sacrament. But as one of the people called to the ministry of teaching in and beyond the church, I find myself drawn, this ascensiontide, to Matthew’s version of the Great Commission, and I wonder what the church would look like if we spent more time reflecting on what Jesus might have meant here. In Matthew 28: 19-20, he says “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

. . . . and . . . .


. . . the idea of discipleship gets to the heart of who Jesus is or wants to be for us. It moves us beyond worrying about the shape of institutions and back to a focus on the mission that Jesus has promised to support, if we try to follow him: “I am with you always, to the close of the age.” What would the Church look like if we thought of “disciple-making” as our core purpose, in adult formation programs, in seminary education, in worship?


. . . read the rest HERE



.

The Emerging Church...Post 3 ... The Search for a Definition

I have been intrigued by what is known as "The Emerging Church" for several years now, and my use of quotation marks is by no means an act of derision, I have a lot of respect for what I know of The Emerging Church, as it is described by Brian McLaren, Tony Jones, and others that speak from within the Emerging Church. I also am intrigued by and highly respect Jim Wallis of Sojourners and people such as Phyllis Tickle and Diana Butler Bass who are, perhaps, not "within" the Emerging Church, but have some respect for it and a good sense of it.

As my ordained ministry begins, I am pretty well entrenched within an institutional church (The Episcopal Church) and within an institution (St. Catherine's School) that falls within the governance of the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia. So, I am, I guess a "part of the system." As a long-time teacher, I tend to like some sense of order, and as a nearly life-long Episcopalian I tend to appreciate the benefits of tradition, hierarchy, and an ordered ecclesiology. However, I am fully aware that the way we've been "doing" church does not necessarily reach the majority of people today, and I am fully aware that our Episcopal Churches are (generally) not doing a good job of attracting and retaining members (otherwise known as Mission and Evangelism).

In seminary, my friend Steve was one of the folks who introduced me to The Emerging Church, and a course I took with Diana Butler Bass more fully introduced me to some of the aspects of The Emerging Church and also introduced me to the idea of the "Practicing Congregation" as one way to help move a congregation to deeper faith and community.

My task here, in the third post on The Emerging Church is to begin to find a way to define what The Emerging Church is, that is, to seek a definition. Part of the reason for this effort is because I have heard from several people their resistance to what they feel is "The Emerging Church" because it is "too conservative," or "too liberal," or "without a tradition," or "evangelical" (as if that was a bad thing...)

(The two other posts here on The Emerging Church were videos by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams on the Emerging Church, here and here)

As a starting point, I offer this introduction from the Wikipedia page on The Emerging Church as (perhaps) a beginning working definition. I hope to offer other definitions, and then to consider how The Emerging Church might interact with/intersect with The Episcopal Church, in which I am a priest. Already, there is an effort within The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion to find a connection with the Emerging Church, and a group of people call themselves "Anglimergent" - and I recommend checking out their network which you can find HERE.

From Wikipedia:

The emerging church (also known as the emerging church movement) is a controversial 21st-century Protestant Christian movement whose participants seek to engage postmodern people, especially the unchurched and post-churched.

"Emerging Christians" deconstruct and reconstruct Christian beliefs, certain culture norms, and methods in ways which will accommodate postmodern culture. This accommodation is found largely in this movement's embrace of postmodernism's postfoundational epistemology, and pluralistic approach to religion and spirituality. Proponents of this movement call it a "conversation" to emphasize its developing and decentralized nature as well as its emphasis on interfaith dialog rather than verbal evangelism. Some of the predominantly young participants in this movement prefer narrative presentations drawn from the biblical narratives over propositional, biblicist exposition.

Emerging church methodology includes frequent use of new technologies such as multimedia and the Internet. Emergent blogs are quite numerous, as are blogs of their opponents. They have not neglected more traditional means of communicating their ideas, however. Many emergent books and articles have been written, and leaders in the movement often conduct seminars. Parallel books, articles and seminars have been generated in opposition to the movement.

Critics of the movement are found mostly in some academic and evangelical circles. Some academics critique the movement for being without legitimate theological, historical and philosophical roots. Other academics like John Franke, Scot McKnight, F. LeRon Shults and the now deceased Stan Grenz have been vocal supporters of the movement. Conservative, evangelical theologians and pastors believe the movement's embrace of a postmodernist philosophy leads to unorthodox theology, relativism, antinomianism, universalism, and syncretism. These critics frequently equate emerging church theology with the liberal theology that has historically been at odds with Christian fundamentalism and Evangelicalism. Other evangelical leaders embrace the missiological insights of the movement.

Read the entire entry HERE.


So, what is YOUR understanding of THE EMERGING CHURCH?

Waking Up to War with Iran? (from Brian McLaren)

Are we ready to take to the streets if the Bush Administration puts us into war in Iran?
Or, are we ready to enlist?
Should we be more afraid of our own government than of Iran?
What should Christians do in this context of protracted war?
Brian McLaren has challenged us in his blog entry on the "God's Politics Blog" that begins to address these questions.

Will we have ears to hear?

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Waking Up to War with Iran (by Brian McLaren)

I am afraid, but not for the reasons our government is telling me to be afraid. I am afraid that I may wake up one morning soon to discover that our government has launched a preemptive attack on Iran. While our government is issuing national orange alerts about "them," I wonder whether we Christians should be issuing global orange alerts about our own government.

I am disgusted, concerned, appalled, and furious about the current saber-rattling of our government - so reminiscent of the buildup to the invasion of Iraq. My feelings intensify in many of our presidential candidates' forums, where each candidate seems to be in a hissing contest, declaring that he or she is the loudest hisser against terrorism - as if the only danger in the world is posed by an evil "them" and not by evil resident within us. Our Congress' bipartisan vote last month, which labeled the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization, seems to me to be handing our president a "go to war free" card, another rather frightening development.

Meanwhile, our media are becoming an echo chamber of fear: after all, fear keeps people tuned in, which means better ratings, and thus more advertising income. Fear pays - economically and politically - but sadly, we haven't reached the point yet of fearing fear itself and what it may do if it keeps accelerating.

On top of these fears, I suspect that many of my fellow Christians will, in the name of God and Jesus and Christianity and the Bible, support and justify a preemptive war on Iran before and after it happens - no matter how unprovoked, no matter how brutal, and no matter how foolish and costly, both financially and morally. Forgetting even the traditional Christian criteria for just war, and forgetting the falsified "intelligence" used to justify our last preemptive war, we Christians in the U.S., I fear, will once again be high on credulity and low on scrutiny - all too eager to believe what our government tells us to legitimize a pre-emptive attack and feed our growing fears. We Christians who cannot follow this path into another war must ask ourselves two kinds of questions:

1. What will we do if we wake up and find our government has attacked Iran while we were sleeping? What actions - public and private - would be appropriate?
2. What can we do now to decrease the possibility of that occurring? What will we wish we would have done in the weeks and months before the morning after?

Follow along with upcoming Brian McLaren blog entries HERE.

Democrats know their Bible better than Republicans; Horrors!!!

Watch out:

pigs fly!
hell freezes over!

My former professor and friend Diana Butler Bass has written a very interesting piece on the "God's Politics" blog in which she offers important reflections about Democrats running for president who may know their theology and their Bible better than Republican candidates. This observation is in concert with her claim that the linear (and simplistic) description of Left/Liberals on one end with Right/Conservatives on the other end of the spectrum is an inaccurate and unhelpful model in both politics and in theology. In my own understanding of politics and theology I cannot any longer place myself in solely "one camp" and I find myself often disagreeing with knee-jerk liberals on many issues, while also finding hard-line conservatives to be unsatisfactory much of the time. Does this mean that I am in the mushy middle? I do not know, and reserve the right to change, develop, listen to a variety of opinion, and find an approach that makes sense to me. Some of the discussion of "Generous Orthodoxy" that Brian McLaren discusses appeals to me, but I am no expert on what this actually means, and need to explore it further

One of the great gifts of seminary was that I developed close friendships with people that "on paper" I should not have been friends with, based on some simplistic theological or political or regional "litmus test." I wholeheartedly believe that God's view is wider and broader and deeper than my own limited understanding, so who am I to judge harshly those who might have a different view. I also believe that at the foot of the cross and on the Eucharistic table there is room for all of us to bring our burdens, lay them down, and find forgiveness, fellowship and reconciliation.

It seems to me, that the Holy Spirit is at work in our presidential politics and doing, perhaps, surprising, new things in unexpected ways ... I am curious about the next chapter of this "book" in which we are all characters!

Tuesday, October 02, 2007 (from the God's Politics Blog)

What Will Dobson Do? (by Diana Butler Bass)

With James Dobson and major conservative evangelical leaders threatening to bolt the Republican Party if Rudy Giuliani is nominated for president, conventional wisdom about God and politics has been turned on its head. For the last 25 years, conservative evangelicals could reliably count on the Republicans to choose a candidate acceptable to their version of Christian politics. This year, however, the leading Republican candidates seem unable to articulate any convincing religious message, much less a strongly biblical perspective on issues. All the while, the three leading Democratic candidates can testify to personal faith, possess robust theological views, and ground many policies in broadly biblical principles.

In recent weeks, Rudy Giuliani has awkwardly quoted scripture ("let he who is without sin cast the first stone") to defend his personal record with adultery, multiple divorces, and family dissension. John McCain, an Episcopalian, said he was really a member of a Baptist church in Phoenix for the last 20 years—only to later confess that he had not been baptized in that tradition, thus excluding him from membership in the congregation. Fred Thompson rarely attends church.

Read the rest HERE.