The shaping of the emerging church (part 2)

Editor's Note: The first part of this two-part series appeared in Ministry's September issue. This second part attempts to express some of the practical implications and applications of that presented in the first.

The church today has, by and large, forgotten that it is not synonymous with the kingdom of God. We have spoken of "growing the church" and "building the kingdom"  as though they were the same thing. But the kingdom of God is much more than the church and cannot be contained by it or in it.

The most urgent question the emerging church should now face is one that strikes at the heart of its very existence: What is the role of the church with respect to the gospel? Jesus said, "But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses" (Acts 1:8, NIV). In this passage, we are called to bear witness to the present reality of the reign of God among us here and now and extending into eternity. This was manifested definitively in the epochal arrival of Jesus the first time and will be climactically exposed when the full manifestation of the kingdom comes when Jesus arrives the second time.

In the meantime, we as the body of Christ are the visible representatives, or "ambassadors," as Paul put it, of the good news of the kingdom of heaven (2 Cor. 5:20).

Darrell Guder says, "The church of Jesus Christ is not the purpose or goal of the gospel, but rather its instrument and witness."¹ We have structured our ministries as though the gospel's purpose was to serve the church. We talk as though the church is the point. But the church itself is not the point. Instead, the good news of God's reign is the main point, and the church is the organism that embodies, serves, and proclaims the reality of the gospel, even though the church would never have existed had it not been for the gospel.

Threefold ministry of the emerging church

The first practice of the emerging church is to embody the truth of Jesus' teaching about the kingdom. It should be a foretaste of the kingdom, a living demonstration of what the kingdom is like. One striking feature of the emerging church is its commitment to being the community of God's presence in the world. Thus it is called "the body of Christ." Before we say or do anything, we, as the church, minister the reign of God to our world by simply becoming healing communiyies of God's reconciling love, even as Jesus Christ was. We exist to demonstrate and to live our faith, not merely to proclaim it.

Nothing speaks more loudly or persuasively than people who live their lives together in kingdom relationships, preferring one an other over themselves, forgiving one another, giving to one another as each has need, laying down their lives for their friends.

Jesus said, "By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another" (John 13:35, NIV).

The second practice of the emerging church is to serve in God's kingdom, showing the world the nature of His kingdom. God's purpose, from the time He called Abraham, has been that His people would be a blessing to the world (see Gen. 12:1-3; 1 Peter 2:9-12). Jesus came, proclaiming that the kingdom had come. He then commenced His life of healing, forgiving, and simply serving people.

Jesus spent more time healing than preach ing. Why? Because He was here to teach about His Father's kingdom, and the best way He could do that was to be a living demonstration of what that was like. So today, whenever the people of God go beyond proclamation to alleviate the suffering of His creation, the kingdom of God is made visible. We give witness to the reality of the kingdom by our acts of wise love and mercy.

We, the church, are ambassadors of the kingdom when we, in addition to proclamation, seek justice for the oppressed and healing for the broken.

The third practice of the emerging church is to speak on God's behalf, telling the world who God is and that His plan is to restore His creation. Just as Jesus proclaimed the gospel, so we must proclaim, with our mouths, that Jesus is Lord (Rom. 10:11-14). By speaking, we clarify for the world what we mean by how we live and what we do.

Traditionally, we've been better at proclaiming than becoming and doing. Proclamation alone is not sufficient. It will never achieve the goal by itself. Our community or lack of community, our good deeds or lack of good deeds, betray or illustrate our words.

If all we do is tell the world about the kingdom of God, we have in fact said very little. We even may have made things worse. It is probably better for the world to remain in ignorance than to experience the witness of words that are contradicted by our actions or robbed of their meaning by our lack of congruous action.

This understanding of the church as missionary called and sent to bear witness to God's loving reign, both now and in the future has pro found implications for how we view conversion, church membership, apologetics, evangelism, and especially discipleship.

Further, this new missionary con text, this more living view of the church, forces us to rethink our role in society. We need to look at how the changing world requires a rehearing of the gospel and see that this rehearing gives life to the emerging church and points to three primary contours of that emerging church: to embody, to serve, and to proclaim the reality of God's present reign among us.

Let's take yet a closer and more practical look at the contours of the threefold ministry we have already discussed.

Be the message

Again, the first calling of the church in this new missionary and eschatological context is to be some thing something peculiar and beautiful, something powerful and significant. The church must be the community of God's presence in the world. Jesus said, "You are the light of the world." By this He inferred that we are a watched people "a city on a hill cannot be hidden" (Matt. 5:14, NIV). The emerging church is renewing the notion that faith is far from being a private matter; it is a matter of public witness. Again, the genuineness of our claim to be followers of Jesus is verified only by our practice of love for each other (John 13:35). Jesus prayed that Christians would be united in oneness with each other in the same way He is united with His Father. But this oneness is not just for our personal happiness. It has a missiological purpose "that the world may believe" that Jesus was sent by God the Father (John 17:21, NIV).

Therefore, learning to live lives of grace, forgiveness, and service is central to the church's mission. Spending time in fellowship; caring for one another's needs; loving one another across social barriers of age, gender, and race; is mission.

Thus it is especially sad when churches experience all the dysfunction they do. Harsh words are spoken, revenge is sought, grudges are held, and battle lines are drawn. In many churches there are groups of people who haven't spoken to each other in years because something was said in haste and frustration. Cliques form along class and racial lines. Animosities develop between different age groups over their vision of what the church should be.

There is nothing new about this. There may have been a time when churches could survive on logical teaching even if the church family was toxic. But now, our world is more attuned to truth that is transmitted culturally, through life experience, and not just verbally or in print.

The emerging church understands that an adequate defense of the faith will come from and actually depends upon a visible demonstration of the gospel embodied in the faith community and not from mere words and clever, logical, or even scriptural arguments. The alternative way of life that the church embodies is the church's greatest apologetic.

That's why the first part of my church's mission is to be a "healing community." We have found that the more we ask ourselves what that looks like and seek to live it, the more God draws people to us. As we look back over the dozens of people who have joined our community in the past couple of years, we ask ourselves, "Where did these people come from?"

Frankly, in many cases, we have no idea! We didn't advertise to them, we didn't knock on their door, they didn't see a piece of literature. They just showed up one day. Why? Our suspicion is that God is working in the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in our area whom He would love to expose to a safe, authentic community of faith; one that is a living demonstration of the redemptive relationship He seeks with us.

Could it be that He has a hard time finding a good place to lead them? So the minute a church decides it wants to reflect, even embody, the character of Christ by the way it lives its collective life, God is right there leading people from who-knows-where into its midst.

For us it is an issue of stewardship. Are we going to be stewards of the witness God has given us? As soon as we decide we will and act to remove the human obstacles to the visibility of God's kingdom, God will lead people to the church.

Do the message

After we have made an effort to be the message we must do the message. The One who said, "You are the light of the world," also said, "You are the salt of the earth" (Matt. 5:13, NIV). Jesus also added that salt that has lost its saltiness is good for nothing. Churches that take seriously this second calling of the emerging church find them selves a blessing to the world.

The current missionary challenge the church faces is this: Will we be salt to our world or will we be, essentially, "good for nothing"? In other words, Would our local community be noticeably worse off if our church suddenly vanished? If not, the salt has lost its flavor, its life-promoting, life-preserving essence.

Part of the difficulty we encounter in being salt to the world is theological. Our churches today are mostly built on the notion that the various "ministries of healing" are not, in and of themselves, our mission, but merely a means to an end sharing the gospel. By gospel, of course, we mean the truth that Jesus died to save us from our sins. So we speak of com passion ministries as an "entering wedge" to get into people's lives to give them the really "important stuff." But the good news is that God is accessible and present among us and we are invited to enter a relation ship with Him now.

If our calling as a church is to bear witness to this fact, ministries of com passion are themselves precisely that witness. The proverbial cup of cold water, according to Jesus, is not a means to some other end or a pass port into a person's life, but an act of kingdom witness that earns its own reward (Matt. 10:42).

It is worth repeating: Jesus spent more of His ministry healing than preaching. When Jesus instructs His disciples before sending them out, the pattern is the same: "As you go, preach this message: The kingdom of heaven is near.' Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons. Freely you have received, freely give" (Matt. 10:7, 8, NIV).

Jesus repeats His message often: "The kingdom of heaven is near." That is to say, God's government of peace and justice is within your grasp it's all around you, in front of you. What are the disciples to do besides preach ing the fact of the matter? They are to heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, and drive out demons. The disciples have already received abundantly from the kingdom of God. Now they are sent to give a taste of the kingdom life to others.

And the way Jesus teaches them to share the message is through healing. The physical healing that Jesus brings is a sign and foretaste of the kingdom and a demonstration of the power of the King. It is tangible evidence that God reigns and that His reign makes an actual, tangible difference in the world. The presence of God's king dom is more than a metaphysical reality; it affects the created order.

The ministry and teaching of Jesus should be enough to convince us that ministries of compassion and healing are not a pre-anything. They are the thing itself. When we understand the gospel as the here-and-now availability of the kingdom of God, suddenly, tutoring a child becomes just as cogent a witness as we consider a sermon to be if not more of a witness.

Proclaim the message

Now we're talking! The Bible calls it preaching or proclaiming. This part of our ministry is profoundly impor tant. The prophets of old and Jesus sincerely believed that they could speak the kingdom into existence. What I am suggesting, however, is that, because we have done so much talking, it might be best for most churches not to worry so much about the traditional matter of talking and instead to focus on the first two points first being and doing the message especially when it comes to our interaction with non-Christians.

The reason for this concentration is twofold. First, the quicker we are to speak, the more likely we are to miss the heart of the matter the shared experience of something life trans forming. We also risk trivializing the monumental issues of life.

I cringe with embarrassment when ever I hear a Christian trying to explain the problem of suffering, especially to someone who is in the midst of it, as though the experiencing of pain was a piece of theological software. This kind of speech normal ly does a disservice to the inquirer, who is more often than not simply longing for a friend to share the pain and identify with the apparent absurdity of their agony. In so many ways, this sort of friend is himself or herself the best "explanation" that could be given.

Second, if we are experiencing some success at being a community that witnesses to God's kingdom by its very life togetherness, tangibly loving the world for God's sake, people will inquire of us about why we do what we do. And that is precisely the point of proclaiming the good news. It clarifies the why question. It gives us an opportunity to verbally explain that we are followers of Jesus and are anticipating the full presence of His kingdom when Jesus returns and puts all things right.

These days, people are immediately suspicious about an organization that constantly has to prop itself up with lots of talk. But when our words of proclamation arise naturally from our being and doing the message, they go to people's hearts. The less we feel compelled to prove it by our words rather than letting our lives speak, the more authentic our witness will be. That authenticity will be noticed by our media-saturated, smoke-and-mirrors world, and it will be magnetic.

In proclamation what we say is also crucial. We can follow the same threefold pattern. Rather than inviting people to embrace mentally a particular teaching, we can invite them to believe something namely, the reality of the kingdom. Belief in the reality of the kingdom is followed naturally by an invitation to enter that kingdom and its fellowship in the church; such an invitation makes sense to searching people because the community we are asking people to become a part of is one that the people we are inviting have seen to be truly desirable.

This means inviting a person to join the community rather than take a Bible study as a first step toward Jesus. After joining themselves to the community, they might begin to act like Christians and join other followers of Jesus in blessing our world in Jesus' name. All along this process they will refine their theology and their worldview. Because of their new context in the church, their new beliefs will constantly be reinforced by new practices worship, prayer, fellowship, forgiveness, service.

Eddie Gibbs is among recent authors who have popularized this way of evangelism by suggesting that in the postmodern world we must create a place for people to belong before they believe. Others have added to this by saying that the sequence might look like this: Belong-Behave-Believe;² back to front as this may seem to be when looking through traditional eyes.

We can probably all think of some one who started coming to church but expressed some misgivings about the teachings of Christianity or Adventism. However, little by little they became followers of Jesus and committed to His church. The emerging church is discovering that this might be an intentional way of evangelism rather than something that happens by accident to those brave enough to join us before they believe exactly as we do.

The best evangelistic strategy is to be the church Jesus intended; to take as our message the message of Jesus and the apostles to courageously be the people of God living in kingdom relationships, doing the works of God as signs of the kingdom's presence, and speaking the words of God so that people develop a clear picture of who they are worshiping and the ultimate purpose of God for His people.