Today was the carol service at Bethel. It was a good service, and contained many of the elements that I find very attractive in the emerging church movement. But let me start at the beginning of my Emerging Discouraging Today
We woke up (some of us later than others...ahem) and got ready to go to church. We have to leave about 45 minutes before church starts in order to get there with time to chill with people before the service. But today, the car wouldn't start. It was too cold, and the battery had died overnight.
None of our neighbors had jumper cables.
After checking askmen.com I decided to try to push-start the car. Well, that was a total disaster, and after about 10 minutes and four runs up and down the street, my legs were shaking and my lungs burning. I felt faint and sick for the next half hour, and while laying down with a cold cloth on my head I fell asleep. I woke up to find the sky clouded with smoke (see previous post). So we didn't get to church, and I was very discouraged, both because I couldn't get the car started, and also because I had really been looking forward to church this morning.
Not to worry...we had the carol service at Bethel to look forward to. At that didn't disappoint...sort of. Here are some of the elements I really liked about it. I'll say up front that these are elements that connect to themes within the emerging church, even though Bethel itself is neither a church nor emerging.
1. A reappreciation of Scripture as story - specifically Jesus' story: We basically read the Christmas story, weaving the different gospel accounts together into one. There were different readers for the different speakers in the story, but nobody acted anything out...it was just good story-telling.
2. Yes, I'll admit we had the room lit with candles...if you are in an emerging church, you know this is a very "non-emerging" thing to do; if you aren't in an emerging church, you think this is the definition of emerging church...but hey, it's Christmas, and you just gotta have candles.
3. We saw the entire evening as celebration. So we gave out drinks as people came in. We had gifts at the door for each person as they left - and not cheesy gifts either. Somer made and hand-wrapped a packet of Peppermint Barkfor each person. We wove a few songs into the mix of the story, because every good party needs some singing. And then, of course, lots of food at the end.
4. A missional focus - we had invited all of our friends who were not church-goers to come along, and had set aside a few reading parts for a couple of the younger Hub guys. Somer's friends from moms & tots were coming, as were a number of our friends from the estate. And here, I think, is where we stopped emerging and started looking a lot more traditional, and in the end why my day was an emerging discouraging day. Because none of the people we had invited came. There were a fair number of people at the service, but they were all Christians, all church "insiders".
There was only one person there who I think was not a Christian - a woman from a different faith.
Maybe that's because the service wasn't really as "missional" as we thought it was. Maybe the whole idea of "missional service" is an oxymoron.
What are your thoughts?
3 comments:
Dan, sorry that your day emerged to be discouraging at the last. I had an interesting conversation last week with one of the emerging church leaders who is starting a church here in Durham. At one point I asked him about non-Christians coming in, and he had a few good stories to tell (all from the previous week!).
But then he redirected and said that his first purpose in the group was not to be a haven for unbelievers (something that might be better approached some other way than starting a church), but to create a community of believers that live missional lives.
I'm not saying whether this is ultimately right or wrong (probably, there is no 'ultimately' right answer to that question), but that it might provide a different grid for assessing Bethel: Are the Christians seeing it as their own job to love the people in their neighborhoods and workplaces in the name of Jesus? Did they invite people? Are they sharing the love of Christ where they are? If that ethos is being developed in the community, then you might have more to be thankful for than your current assessment standard might otherwise indicate.
Remember that one person's heart is important to God. If one person of another faith is touched by something that occured or somthing said, than the evening was a "success" from God's perspective.
I think you have to focus on what "missional" is. I think for a church to be truly missional there are two aspects.
First, the service is relevant to the type of person you hope to attract (in this case a person outside of faith in Jesus), and the Christians involved obviously need to be both open and inviting.
Second, a church is not a building but the group of Christians that call that church home. So only the people can be missional, and for them to be missional means they are disciples of Christ that live their own lives and as a community in such a way that people outside of faith in Jesus see what is going on, and whether they can explain it or not, desire to see themselves involved in this community as well.
The thing I often forget is no matter how missional myself or my church community is, in the end it is God who changes hearts and redeems souls.
It takes time for churches to become filled with missional people. I suspect that experiences like the carol service you described take these people closer to being just that.
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