Is this a fair analysis of the 3 movements? Are there more movements?

Which of these is your church?

Steve
A House of Prayer By T.M. Moore
6/1/2006

Recovering the Purpose of the Church

*And Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who sold and bought in the
temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of
those who sold pigeons. He said to them, "It is written, 'My house shall be
called a house of prayer,' but you make it a den of robbers." *( Matthew
21:12, 13
<http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matthew%2021;&version=47;><http://w\
ww.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matthew%2021;&version=47;>)


A kind of bidding war is heating up for the identity and loyalty of the
evangelical Church. Like suitors wooing a prospective bride, proponents of
three schools of thought are competing for the affections of this segment of
the Body of Christ. Each claims to provide the best hope for her future, the
most promising path to prosperity and fulfillment. Each hopes to convince
evangelical believers that it has discovered the Church's proper identity.
And each is working hard to woo and win evangelical church leaders to its
camp and campaign.

There is in this a sense of the evangelical Church's needing to be cleansed.
Something has gone wrong in that movement that arose in the middle of the
last century, which set itself apart from fundamentalists and charismatics
and took a bold stand for Scripture and the Gospel against widespread
liberalism and neo-orthodoxy. For over fifty years, evangelical leaders
worked hard to establish a movement with a clear and consistent vision and
identity. Evangelical believers took the Bible as the last word on all
matters of faith and life, and the Gospel of forgiveness and peace as the
first order of business.

Showing disdain for contemporary theological fashion and only modest
interest in the long heritage of the Christian past, evangelicals carved out
a place for themselves among American churches, then fortified and expanded
their presence through theological seminaries, Bible colleges and liberal
arts colleges, media and pop culture, conferences and seminars, journals and
periodicals, and aggressive efforts in evangelism and disciple-making
through church and para-church ministries. Rising from obscurity in the late
1940's, evangelicals attained so prominent a status-ecclesiastically and
socially-that, by the late '70's, even secular journals declared "The Year
of the Evangelical."

But along the way, and with only a few people taking notice, evangelicalism
seemed to have lost sight of its purpose, and acquired some rather
unbecoming attributes and practices-attributes and practices that look more
like the modernist culture in which evangelicalism emerged than the
simplicity which is in Christ. Antinomianism, crass commercialism, political
activism, and a consumerist and therapeutic mindset established firm
footings in the evangelical camp, appealing to religious shoppers both
outside and inside the movement, all in the name of honoring God and
securing His blessings. Certain evangelical leaders latched onto secular
strategies for marketing and fund-raising, secular philosophies of media and
communication, and even secular lifestyles of sensuality and indulgence.

Before long, movement enthusiasts began to sense a foul smell, and calls for
reform were heard throughout the Church. Now those calls have crystallized
into three distinct reactions against the tarnished image of evangelical
Christianity, each of which holds promise for showing the way to evangelical
renewal, but each of which also contains seeds of further corruption. Each
of these movements needs to consider how its peculiar emphases threaten to
compromise the purpose of the Church, and whether its chief objectives for
the evangelical Church are in line with those of our Lord Jesus.

*THREE MOVEMENTS *
*The Emerging Church *. By far the noisiest and most confident of the three
movements calls itself the "emerging church." Emerging church advocates
scorn the epithet "evangelical." They welcome postmodern emphases on
individualism, experience, and "non-narrativism," to coin a phrase. Their
approach to being the church is decidedly casual, spontaneous,
non-structured, flexible, and attune to the surrounding culture. Emerging
church enthusiasts express little use for Church history or the heritage of
doctrine and confession accumulated over the centuries. Their interests are
strictly here and now. Heaven is a distant thought, and the future is
nothing more than the next present, when we get to it.

Emerging churches feature music with contemporary melodies and beats,
preaching that concentrates on story and affirmation rather than
proclamation and conviction, worship that is welcoming and casual, and
ministries that speak to the felt needs of people at every stage of life.
The driving force behind emerging church plans and formats is how best to
appeal to postmodern relativists who still harbor a sense of needing to
connect to transcendent experience.

**

*The Ancient-Future Church . *At the opposite end of the spectrum from the
emerging church is that movement which refers to itself as the
"ancient-future church." Leaders in this group agree on the need to reform
the contemporary evangelical Church, but they look not to the postmodern
environment of the Church but to her long history and heritage as their
focus for renewal. Citing studies showing that younger believers long for
more tradition, solidity, and decorum in their churches, ancient-future
leaders believe the way to capture the rising generation for future church
leadership is to look back to the Christian past in order to recover forms
of worship, evangelism, and church structure that proved effective in
previous ages for advancing the Kingdom of Christ.

Ancient-future leaders call for a return to fixed liturgies, established
confessions, venerable hymns and forms of pastoral ministry, and more
traditional approaches to church architecture and ministry structure. They
insist that such practices need not be "stodgy" or boring, but that, when
properly explained and passionately employed, they can be a source of
renewed vitality and dramatic appeal to church members and seekers alike.
The driving force behind the ancient-future church movement seems to be the
preservation of past value for present renewal and future longevity.

*The Missional Church . *A third movement calling for a reform of the
evangelical Church is the "missional church" movement, a movement that has
grown out of the impetus provided by the late Anglical missionary and
prolific writer, Leslie Newbigin. After a long career in foreign missions,
Newbigin returned to the West, only to discover that it had become the
greatest mission field for the Gospel. He set about to call his
contemporaries to consider ways of recovering the mission of the Church-the
proclamation of the Gospel in terms relevant to the culture of the day-in a
culture in deep decadence and decline. His writings have conjured a literate
and enthusiastic following, and the missional church movement now reaches
thousands of pastors with its message of relational evangelism and
culturally relevant witness and worship.

In many ways the missional church movement combines the best of emerging
church passions and ancient-future church burdens. Moreover, it has the
distinct advantage of promoting a view of the Church that is more committed
to cultural renewal and a kind of "Christianity-on-the-ground" than either
of the other two schools encourages. Its vision is decidedly centrifugal
while the other two schools are rather more centripetal in their focus: more
"go/tell" than "come/see," if I may borrow a phrase from my friend, Robert
Lynn. Missional church leaders want to commission every believer to go tell
the Good News; for their work in advancing the Kingdom they do not depend so
exclusively on what happens when the church is gathered as do emerging
church and ancient-future models. For missional church leaders the gathering
of the church needs to acknowledge the interests and concerns of the
surrounding culture, at the same time preserving the historic forms,
elements, and contents of Gospel worship.

*THREE CAVEATS *
These three schools of reform offer much promise for charting a course for
renewal of the evangelical Church. Yet each model harbors a tendency which,
if not corrected, can lead to further deterioration of the Church.

*The danger of near-sightedness . *The first danger, posed by the emerging
church, is a kind of ecclesiastical near-sightedness. Following emerging
church inclinations, it's just possible that the Church could become so
rooted in and blinded by contemporary culture, by what is merely near at
hand, as to lose sight of the vast heritage of theology, confession,
culture, tradition, liturgy, and example from distant generations of
Christians. Just as no one can row safely across a lake without referring to
fixed points in the distance, so the Church cannot expect to navigate the
waters of postmodernity by concentrating on those waters alone.

*The danger of far-sightedness . *Similarly, ancient-future church advocates
are in danger of ecclesiastical far-sightedness, of being able to see only
what is long ago and far away. They are like a person who is running
pell-mell into a forest, looking only backwards to where he has been, and
not paying much attention to what's going on around or in front of him. In
this way lie pain and distress, I fear.

*The danger of one-sightedness . *Missional church advocates are in danger
of promoting a kind of one-sightedness-ecclesiastical tunnel vision, as it
were-in which everything the Church does or aspires to be is pursued through
the lens of mission, of reaching the lost. In the process, things like
spirituality, holiness, and the creation of things beautiful can get lost in
the frenzy to invest all our energies in being all things to all people.

Leaders in these three movements-the emerging church, the ancient-future
church, and the missional church-can make solid contributions to cleansing
the temple of evangelicalism and re-establishing a proper identity and
mission for the Church, but they must be careful to guard against tendencies
that can compromise that identity and mission.

And they must make certain to focus on one overarching purpose for the
Church.

*ONE OVERRIDING CONCERN *
As Jesus indicated in Matthew 21:12 and 13
<http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matthew%2021;&version=47;>, the
overriding concern of the Church is toward the triune God, Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit-not the present, the past, or the mission of the Church. The
Church is the Body of which Christ is the Head. Her primary reason for being
is to know and enjoy God, to love and glorify Him, follow wherever His
Spirit leads, and embody the plans and desires of the Head of the Body,
Jesus Christ.

The Church, in short, is a people called to prayer, to constant and deep
communion with the living God, so that He may communicate His love, indicate
His will, and empower obedience in those who thus worship Him at all times,
in all situations. Let the commitment to prayer become the over-riding
concern of all who are eager to cleanse and renew the temple of
evangelicalism, and we will find a meeting ground where Jesus Himself will
keep us on course and united in His love.

*FOR REFLECTION *
With which of these three reform efforts do you most identify? How are you
trying to make prayer more a part of your life? Of your church? With whom do
you regularly meet to seek the Lord together in prayer?

*T. M. Moore is a fellow of the Wilberforce Forum. He serves as pastor of
teaching ministries and director of the Center for Christian Studies at
Cedar Springs Presbyterian Church in Knoxville, Tenn. Readers can visit his
daily blog at **www.cedarspringsccs.com * <http://www.cedarspringsccs.com/>
*. T. M. is the editor of the series *Jonathan Edwards for Today's Reader *(P
& R), the latest volume of which is *Pursuing Holiness in the Lord *. His
latest books are *Consider the Lilies: A Plea for Creational Theology *(P &
R) and *God's Prayer Program: Passionately Using the Psalms in Prayer
*(Christian
Focus). He and his wife and editor, Susie, make their home in Concord, Tenn.
He can be reached at nacurragh@... . All Scripture quotations are from
the English Standard Version (Crossway). *


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