John MacArthur - Please Get A Clue

Yet another of America's religious leaders has weighed in on the emergent church discussion. John MacArthur, well-known for his religious broadcast "Grace To You," has a new book, The Truth War: Fighting for Certainty in an age of Deception. His thoughts are highlighted in an article from onenewsnow.com:

http://www.onenewsnow.com/2007/06/macarthur_says_emerging_church.php

MacArthur makes the same mistake that many in the fundamentalist wing of the evangelical world make regarding the emergent church. He has taken the example of a few nuts and painted the entire emergent church with the same broad brush as people who do not believe in absolute truth or moral absolutes. That is fairly insulting to thousands of believers, like myself quite conservative, who do not resemble that remark in any way.

It is sad that so many of today's religious leaders feel compelled to take cheap shots at people who differ from them, denigrating their Christianity, and basically making completely false statements about the emergent church and those involved in it.

Let's try to define it a bit. The emergent church is not a church that has embraced postmodernism and denies the fundamental truths of the Bible. It is a church that recognizes postmodernism is upon us, sees the devastating effect that postmodern society will have on the church in the next two or three decades, and reacts to postmodernism in such a way as to try to PRESERVE Biblical truth in a world that no longer believes it.

Mr. MacArthur, methinks you need to do some more research. Try meeting a few of us before you write your next book.

Colson On Relativism And Today's Church Kids

I enjoy reading Chuck Colson's Breakpoint e-mail that I get each day, usually. Yesterday's column really bothered me, not because I disagree with him, but because I know it to be so true. He commented on the influence of relativism on our society, and even on kids who are Christ-followers. Click below to read this important commentary.

CLICK HERE

This is truly the postmodern society come to fruition. This is why I believe that today's churches are failing miserably. We are too busy preaching three-point sermons and putting on nice shows, and we are not influencing the fundamental understanding of truth among our people. It is a recipe for disaster among the churches. Today's new churches must deal with this squarely. Unfortunately, for many long-existing churches, it is already too late. They have lost this generation, and will not be able to get it back.

New Tri-State Churches

There is hope in the land, my friends, as two new churches are making their way into the tri-state area.

My good friend Russ Moore and the new organization New Churches For The Kingdom are making plans to plant a number of new churches in the area. They have set their sights on planting the first one in the Rome Township/Proctorville, Ohio area. You can get more information on this group at their web site, www.new-churches.org.

Also, Brad Seevers is now working with a new church being planted in the South Point, Ohio area, the Harmony Point Christian Church. Our best wishes to Brad and his fellow-workers as they seek to spread the gospel in their community.

It's Like Going Back Home

Those of you who have known me since I was a kid will know that my very first job was as a radio announcer at WGOH/WUGO in Grayson. I drew my first paycheck in February, 1976 just a few months after my fifteenth birthday. I had actually been training at the station since I was 13 or 14. I was making a whopping $2.30 an hour, and thought I had struck it rich. It was the best job any teenager could ever hope to have. The first time I walked into the radio station, I was hooked for life. Those of you who have worked in radio know exactly what I am talking about.

After having worked at a number of radio stations in our area throughout my adult life, including the last 4 years at WLGC, I have returned to the place where it all began. I have signed on as a sales representative with WGOH/WUGO, developing new accounts for the station outside Carter County. It feels very much like going home, and I am enjoying being part of this award-winning radio station once again.

Who says you can't go home again?

Where Do We Go From Here?

Now that I have had a few days to toss around the implications of the decision to suspend our plans to plant a church at the mall, there is much to be said about what is going through my mind at this point.

First, let me say that I have an incredible sense of relief. That may sound to some like I have backed down on my commitment to God, as if I am relieved that I don't have to do his will now in my life. Nothing could be farther from the truth. If anything, I now am faced with the task of figuring out just how I am to put into practice all the things that I have learned. I doubt that I am the first person who has ever concluded that God also works in very non-traditional ways. I am sure there are those who will not be able to grasp the concept that God does not always work in the same way. At this point, I am not sure that I will ever plant a church in any type of mold that resembles the typical church. To be honest, I'm not sure I will ever be part of that type of church again. I have come to call into question far more about Christianity in the 21st century than I ever expected I would. To totally explain that would take far longer than I am willing to spend at the keyboard trying to put it into words. But to explain it briefly, my involvement in the emergent movement has led me to deconstruct nearly everything I have ever believed about the kingdom of God and make it pass the Biblical test. Once it is tested against scripture, we can begin to reconstruct a more Biblical model of Christianity. I believe that there is one out there that is far better than what is found in most churches today, and I can no longer allow myself to settle for something that is far less than what it can be.

My relief comes from the fact that I have recently been very frustrated at the prospect of doing this work alone. While I am extremely grateful for the remaining handful of people who were still involved with us, and their commitment to the work, the prospect of starting over from scratch with no funding and no one else sharing the bulk of the load was just no longer appealing to me. I destroyed my health twenty years ago in a church where we had two full-time staff members trying to do the work of ten. I won't do that again. It is foolish, and I don't consider myself a fool.

And quite frankly, the farther I have progressed in my emergent thinking, the less I believed in the type of church that we would have started at the mall. With the proper funding, it could have grown like many of the new church plants being started by Christian churches. That is just not where my heart lies at this point, and if I was not committed to that type of church plant, it would have certainly failed.

So, I find myself a man without a church. Where do I go from here?

In my mind all along this venture has been the concept of incorporating a network of house churches as part of the Crosspointe ministry. I am now considering whether this may be the primary work that we are to try to accomplish. I think I would be a LOT more comfortable with that type of work. I'm tossing it around, reading about how it is being done in other places, and asking God to lead in this decision.

If a house church sounds appealing to you, let's get together and talk about it.

The End, Or Is It The Beginning?

If you are on the Crosspointe church mailing list, you probably have read by now that we have suspended our current attempt to re-launch the Crosspointe church in Boyd County. I am sure that e-mail caused several different responses yesterday, including the following:

1. I knew it would never work. That emergent stuff is of the devil anyway.

2. I knew Mic was not capable of pulling it off.

3. There was no money, no support, and not enough similarity to a real church. It was destined to fail.

4. The concept was wrong for the area.

5. The concept was right for the area, but the area wasn't ready.

6. The concept was right, the area was right, but the church planter wasn't ready.

7. What's emergent?

So, is it the end, or is it just the beginning? Time will tell, as the Lord directs.

To make a long story short, I'm not giving up. I still believe in the concept, now more than ever. If we are to plant an emergent church here, there must be a solid core group of people committed to seeing it through to the end. I am interested in pursuing the house-church discipleship option of building a core group of people. From that, a new church may or may not develop. If you would like to be part of that type of process, let me know.

Mic

What's So Different About The Emergent Church, Part 5

I can spot one a mile away. It is especially true here in hillbilly-church-land. You know one when you see one. I'm talking about a church member.

In spite of the hundreds of denominations we have managed to break the church into, we have, for the most part, managed to keep church cultures remarkably similar. Each individual church has its own culture, mainly because churches are often built around a particular culture within a culture. The Baptists have their own. The Pentecostals come from a different culture, but nevertheless one that is particularly theirs. Christian churches have their own culture. All of them have the same basic cultural elements. What differentiates them are their minute cultural distinctives, even moreso than their individual doctrinal beliefs.

And yet, in nearly every one of these distinct cultures, the adherants in that particular tribe have formed their understanding of Christianity around their own culture, and often find a different cultural expression of the faith to be difficult to accept.

If you look at the churches in Northeast Kentucky, you will find that most of them are of a distinct culture, and they exist among the adherants of that particular culture.

Country churches tend to gravitate around the hillbilly culture, and it is often expressed in the form of country or bluegrass music in worship. To many of these people, any other cultural expression in worship is not Christianity. It may even be of the devil.

Most of the churches in the towns of our area are traditional in their approach. These churches are mostly made up of very traditional people, with a heavy emphasis on family. Many of these churches are in fact family churches.

The more contemporary of the local churches are made up of semi-traditional people, and their worship expressions are less traditional than the previously-mentioned group. They are typically made up of baby boomers and their families.

The emergent church breaks out of all of these models by attempting to minister to truly post-Christian people. The traditional churches are mostly not prepared to minister to post-Christian people, because there aren't any there, and they have little understanding about how to do so if they were to actually attract some. The typical approach would be to try to convert them to a modern way of looking at our world. That is a little like trying to teach a mule to swim underwater. The emergent church is designed to minister to post-Christian people.

One of the problems we have had in trying to get the Crosspointe church going in Ashland is identifying who our target is, and effectively ministering to them. We have met a number of contemporary Christians along the way, and they have spent a few weeks as part of the Crosspointe church. But as I expected, most of them have ended up going back to a contemporary traditional church. None of them are still around, because they were not the people this church was designed to reach. They had a difficult time assimilating into a church designed for a post-Christian culture because they really are not part of that culture. They are immersed in the Christian sub-culture, and you cannot break out of that without a complete deconstruction and subsequent reconstruction of your faith to make it function within a post-Christian setting. A modern-thinking Christian in a post-Christian world is about as useless as... Well, you get the picture.

Crosspointe is designed to reach the person who has not grown up in church, and who has had little connection with Christianity. Christians who have not grasped the concept of ministering in a post-Christian world may be more harmful than helpful to a church like this. They tend to bring all their pre-conceived ideas with them, which serves to muddle up the whole thing. Billy Joel may actually have had a point after all when he wrote "I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints. The sinners are much more fun."

Give me your beer-drinking, foul-mouthed, woman-chasing pagan any day of the week. I can teach him about the kingdom of God and convert him. I'm really not too sure what to do with the Christians.