Part 8: The Emerging
Church – Circa 1970
(See Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)
Reinventing Clergy
By Sarah H. Leslie
Previous part:
Reinventing Clergy
http://herescope.blogspot.com
– August 23, 2009
In the emerging Church, a new kind
of preacher is coming into his own for whom there is presently
no adequate training .
(p. 59)
a clergyman becomes not a
disseminator but an interpreter of news.
(p. 108)Then it hit me: the only way to
break out of my authoritarian role was to shift the emphasis of
my ministry from giving answers to sharing experience.
(p. 129)– Bruce Larson, the emerging church
(Word, 1970)
A
key tenet from the earliest origins of the Emergent
Church movement was a reinvented clergy. The
pastor-teacher role must be changed. Old authority
structures must be dismantled and new ones
substituted. This all played out in a complicated
dialectic dance over a period of four decades.
Emergent leader Phyllis Tickle credits the small
group structure for much of this change. In her book
The Great Emergence:
How Christianity Is Changing and Why
(BakerBooks,
2008)
she writes approvingly of how the early
principle of
Alcoholics Anonymous
(AA) of worshipping a “generic God” in a small group structure had
“delivered a serious blow to the role and authority of the clergy.”
She takes note that “AA was the first to strike a blow at the
Pastor’s Study as the seat of all good advice, holy counsel, wisdom,
and amelioration.” (pp.
92-93)
“Not only did AA [Alcoholics Anonymous], almost by
default, begin to supplant the pastoral authority of
the professional clergy and open the door to
spirituality in the experiencing of a nondoctrinally
specific Higher Power, but it also revived the
small-group dynamic that would come to characterize
later twentieth-century Protestantism and,
paradoxically, to enable the disintegration of many
of its congregations into pieces and parts…. AA
opened the floodgates to spirituality by removing
the confines of organized religion.” (p. 93)It is significant that Phyllis Tickle would
reference AA in this context.
Faith At Work, the organization that birthed the
early Emergent/Emerging Church movement (as we
documented in
Part 2 of this report), was connected with
Frank Buchman and
Sam Shoemaker, co-founder of AA. In fact,
Faith at Work sponsored Brian McLaren’s “Everything
Must Change” tour last year.
Transitioning the
Pastorate
Step one of reinventing the clergy was to create
new
authority structures, and the small group format
conveniently elevated one’s peer group to a higher
status as “experts” because of
“experience.” This concept rode into
evangelicalism like a freight train during the rise
of the
Humanistic Psychology era, and pastors were
quickly remade into counselors at leading
evangelical seminaries. Pastors evolved into
touchy-feely advice-givers who could
facilitate small groups. It was at this point
that sermons began to change shape from solid
exegesis of the Word of God to feel-good sermonettes
that were loaded with pablum and syrup. Gone was the
Word of God, and
its authority. Replacing it, during this
time of transition, was arm-chair psychologists
and encounter group experiences. Even the excesses
of the
shepherding movement, with its heavy-handed
top-down authoritarianism, and thus the appearance
of a clergy-driven laity, was more an indication of
encounter groups run amok than evidence of biblical,
Word-preaching pastors. And its later offshoot, the
purpose-driven business-leadership phenomena, which
continues to this day, bears little resemblance to
the historical First Reformation preaching and
teaching the meat of the Word of God.David Wells, commenting on this emerging phenomena
in his 1994 book God in the Wasteland,
[1] described this
transition period as a “therapeutic culture which treats badness
simply as disease” and observed the evangelicals’ fixation with
“consumerism, with all of the appetites for purchase, ownership, and
power that go with it,” which he attributed to the evangelical drive
for “cultural acceptability.” But he sadly observed that, by doing
so, the evangelical church was “emptying itself of serious thought,
serious theology, serious worship and serious practice in the larger
culture.” (p. 27)
Pastors were being reduced to “managers” or “psychologists”:“The modern mind will be quick to conclude that
evangelical faith is faltering because it is not
efficient
enough, for example, or because it is not
appealing
enough, because it has not adapted itself adequately
to the inner needs of those in the modern world. It
is thus that many are stepping forward as managers
or psychologists in Christ’s name, and for the good
of the church, to address the world.”
(pp. 29-30)
[italics in original]All of this transition in the teaching pastorate had
the cumulative effect of diminishing the influence,
impact, and salt of the Word of God in individual
lives as well as the culture.
The New Authority
The
transformation of the evangelical church, into
this
“new thing” which is Emergent/Emerging, severs
the old authority structures altogether. The new
authorities in believers’ lives may or may not be
pastors, seminaries, denominational headquarters or
even leaders. Believers are substituting other
authorities for their pastorate — things like
The Shack,
Richard Foster,
Len Sweet, etc. Parachurch organizations helped
facilitate the shift. But this is a new form of
viral networking happening before our very eyes
(some orchestrated, some spontaneous), which is
creating downline authority structures that are
totally unrelated to traditional structures, even
obliterating them or rendering them obsolete.This
new viral marketing authority is accentuated by
the Internet social sites, in which “every man does
what is right in his own eyes, according to the
social network that he belongs to.” The network is
its own authority, and this shifts daily, even
hourly. The Word of God is not at the foundation of
any of this new authority. Experience becomes god.Power no longer rests in the hands of a
biblically-based pastorate/clergy. Power is now in
the hands of the marketing gurus who manipulate the
paradigm shift. Traditional pastoral authority
structures have been eroded to the point that they
have become dysfunctional, useless, unimportant,
irrelevant, and even irreverent.But all is not lost. Pastors can retain or regain
their authority by becoming
transformers. This is why Leadership Network,
which formed the modern Emergent church movement, is
at the core of this
paradigm shift. The pastor in the
Leadership
Network paradigm becomes the
viral networking
agent of transformation.[2]
“Image is
everything.” But he isn’t just a
corporate guru. He is a guru of the
New
Spirituality. And this is the key point. When things
become full blown Emergent he becomes a
shaman.And, this point takes us to Pastor Larry DeBruyn’s
insightful analysis of
Spiritual Directors, which we publish below in
its entirety with permission:
MOVE OVER PASTORS
“Spiritual Director”: A New Gift from an Ancient
Tree
Regardless
of what you might think of the operation of
spiritual gifts–whether all of them, some of them,
or none of them are operative today–we should be
aware of the new spiritual gift on the block; the
gift of “spiritual director.” As one spiritual
director remarks, “I continue to be amazed at the
richness of this gift to the church, whether it is
experienced individually or in groups.”[1]
But just what is this gift?
Alice Fryling
says that, “Spiritual direction is a way of companioning people as
they seek to look closely, through the eyes of their hearts, at the
guidance and transforming work of God in their lives.”[2]
Spiritual director appears to mimic the role of an
eastern religious guru who tries to affect the
spirituality of others in either one-on-one or small
group settings. As Fryling states, “People
throughout the Christian church, including those of an evangelical
orientation, are experiencing again the gifts that God gives to his
people through the loving listening and the gentle guidance of
spiritual directors.”[3]
So what is
the Bible believing Christian to think of this so-called gift of
spiritual director?
We should know first of all, that among the lists of
gifts in the New Testament (Romans 12:5-8; 1
Corinthians 12:4-11, 28-31; Ephesians 4:11; 1 Peter
4:9-10), there is no spiritual gift of spiritual
director.
Second, the central gifts for the church’s
edification are those of “teacher” and
“pastor-teacher.” The risen and ascended Christ gave
these gifts to the body of Christ so that it might
come to,
“the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the
Son of God . . . That we henceforth be no more
children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with
every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and
cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to
deceive . . .”
(Ephesians 4:11-14).
The exercise of these gifts is
consistent with the example of Jesus. In the
Gospels, He was primarily known as,
“Teacher”
(Matthew 8:19). Too, Jesus commissioned the
disciples to make disciples via a two-fold process
of
“baptizing”
and
“teaching”
them (Matthew 28:19-20). According to Paul’s
ministry, the exercise of “the gift of teacher” is
consistent with not only Paul’s example, but also
with his exhortation to Timothy (1 Corinthians 4:17;
1 Timothy 4:11; 6:2). As distributed by the
sovereign Spirit of the ascended and glorified
Christ, the spiritual gift designed to bring
maturity and unity to the local church is
“pastor-teacher,”
not “spiritual director.” That is why Fryling
must state that, “spiritual direction groups” are an “exciting new
branch from an ancient tree . . . a practice that began in the early
years of Christianity when people followed the desert mothers and
fathers out to the wilderness to ask them how to know God.“[4]
There is no gift of “spiritual director” which is sourced in the
Bible and bestowed by the Spirit of the Living Christ.
What is important to the church is not that people,
in one-on-one, or in small group sessions, listen to
spiritual directors and vice versa–though sharing
fellowships have their place in the local
church–but that people listen to God, and the
emphasis upon listening to one another does not
qualify as listening to God, for we are neither God
nor gods. As the Lord said to His people through the
psalmist,
“Oh, that My people would listen to Me, / That
Israel would walk in My ways!”
(Psalm 81:13)
One Old
Testament scholar remarks, “To listen . . . has the double force in
Hebrew which it sometimes has in English: to pay attention and to
obey. So this saying is close to the famous words of Samuel, ‘to
obey (lit. to listen) is better than sacrifice’.”[5]
This
business of “spiritual direction” resembles the experience I once
had in a T-group (i.e., sensitivity training) as a young teacher in
a progressive school district where I worked in the late ’60s. A
doctor from a major mid-western university was my group’s
“director.” The modus operandi of the group was that, “the learners
[listeners?] use feedback, problem solving, and role play to gain
insights into themselves [and] . . . others . . . The goal was to
change the standards, attitudes and behavior of individuals.”[6]I fear that the gift of so-called spiritual director
is just another guru-gimmick which sources
spirituality in religious opinions, teachings, and
practices that are utterly foreign to Holy
Scripture, and such a source of spirituality will
not promote the unity of faith amongst believers, as
does the legitimate gift of pastor-teacher, but a
diversity of beliefs revealing that all the
spiritual directors and listeners are being
“tossed to and fro, and carried about with every
wind of doctrine.”For this usurping of the ministry of pastor-teacher
by spiritual directors in local churches, pastors
are to blame. By allowing methods to trump the
message, they created the spiritual vacuum into
which spiritual directors have moved in, and instead
of being unified, Christians will become
increasingly diversified (and apostate) as
pan-evangelicalism, under the tutelage of spiritual
directors, bows before the mysticism of the
postmodern culture.
The
Truth:
“Study to shew
thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth
not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the Word of
Truth.” (2 Timothy 2:15)
To be continued…..
Endnotes:
1. David F. Wells,
God in the Wasteland. The Reality of Truth in a
World of Fading Dreams (Eerdmans, 1994).
2. For more on this topic see the series “The
Dopamine-Driven Church” published on Herescope in
April and May 2007, starting here:
http://herescope.blogspot.com/2007/04/dopamine-driven-church.html
ENDNOTES –Pastor DeBruyn http://www.frbaptist.org/bin/view/Ptp/PtpTopic20090519192113
[1] Emphasis mine, Alice Fryling, “A First Look at
Spiritual Direction Groups,” Small Groups.com Posted
5/11/09 (http://smallgroups.com/articles/2009/firstlookspiritualdirectiongroups.html).
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Derek Kidner,
A Time to Mourn, and a Time to Dance (Downers Grove: InterVarsity? Press, 1976) 53.
[6] “T-groups,” Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-groups).
© 2009 by Discernment Group