I don’t know that we’re far enough into this thing called emergence Christianity to proffer any definitive statements in the other direction, so I tender these suggestions humbly and tentatively.

First, while Pentecostals have, as I said, excelled at listening to the voice of God open the scriptures, particularly to individuals, the emergent church has worked at listening to God’s voice in corporate environments.  As my own community of faith, Solomon’s Porch in South Minneapolis, the weekly sermon is both prepared and presented communally, with contributions from those of us with PhDs to those us with GEDs.  Every member of the community is considered an “expert,” albeit one is an expert in Greek or Hebrew and the other in lawn mower repair.

Yet there is a presupposition that all voices are valid and important.  To put it another way, each individual believer is equally capable of being used by God’s Spirit and a vehicle of God’s truth.  God’s ability to use an individual to speak truth the community is neither enhanced nor hindered by number of letters after one’s name, how much is in one’s bank account, or which set of genitalia one has.

It seems to me that this egalitarian sense of God’s activity among humans, this “communal hermeneutic” would resonate among Pentecostals and would even hearken back to the early days of your movement.

Second, and also related to the genesis of modern Pentecostalism, is the emergent church’s commitment to a fully-orbed gospel, encompassing both kerygmatic proclamation of the salvation message and activist transformation of the sinful structures in our society that oppress so many of our fellow human beings.  From what I understand, early Pentecostals were groundbreaking in their commitments to racial diversity and harmony, women’s suffrage, and care for the poor.  Much of the power of Pentecostalism, and what seems to be driving much Pentecostal growth in the Global South, is the fact that Pentecostalism has always appealed to those in society who are often overlooked and taken for granted by the older (and stuffier) versions of Christianity.  I believe that the emergent church will be a willing partner with you in this commitment to the poor.

Third, emergent can challenge you to develop a populist theology.  A Reformed theologian once complained to me that, in the Global South, liberation theology “lost,” and Pentecostalism “won.”  He thought this was tragic because, although he had issues with some aspects of liberation thought, at least it was a “theology.”  He considered Pentecostalism to be a/theological.

The very existence of this group tonight defies that opinion.  However, you all have a massive and daunting task on your hands: You have to provide modes of theological reflection (not to mention philosophical and epistemological reflection) for the fastest growing movement in the history of Christianity.  Although on a much, much smaller scale, the emergent church has excelled at provoking theological conversation far beyond the walls of the academy, and we’ve seen an overwhelming interest across the board in deep theology.

My challenge to you is to learn from the mistakes of your Presbyterian, Episcopalian,  and Methodist forbears: Don’t let your theology migrate north – and by “north,” I mean up, from the heart to the head, from the streets to the ivory tower.  Forget about trying to impress the Ivy Leaguers – they’re the past, not the future.  And forget about “trickle-down” modes of theological education, where the smartest person in the room teaches the next one down, and so on and so on.  That, too, is the past.  Instead, learn how to blog.  Tweet your theology.  Write popular books instead of monographs.  In other words, teach everyday people how to think theologically.

Fourth, and finally, I think that the emergent movement might serve as the conscience of Pentecostalism.  I know that it hasn’t always been easy to be Pentecostal over the past century.  Often, Pentecostals have been misunderstood, caricatured, and even sinned against by the rest of the Christian church.  I imagine, for instance, that it’s harder to get tenure at a public university if you speak in tongues.  And I bet it’s harder to get elected to political office.  I know that recently, the Southern Baptist Convention has attempted to purge itself of Pentecostals.  And it doesn’t take much time in Google to discover that the very elements of faith that you consider spiritual gifts, others within Christendom regard as marks of the devil.

To me, this kind of behavior among fellow Christians borders on blasphemy of the Holy Spirit.  I take Jesus’ admonition against blasphemy of the Holy Spirit in Matthew 12 extremely seriously, as should all Christians.  So much so, that I think our default response to novel movements within the church should be that they are of God, not that they are diabolical.  Because if we get it wrong – if we point to something that is the work of the Spirit and instead claim that it’s the work of the devil – well, I don’t need to tell you that kind of mistake comes with consequences.

And yet, as evidenced by the controversy surrounding my invitation, it doesn’t take long for those who were once excluded to become the new gatekeepers.  In only a century, the tables have turned, insofar as some from outside this group, self-appointed “theology police” it seems, attempted to interfere with the academic discourse fostered by SPS.  It’s just ironic to me that it wasn’t so very long ago that the “tongue-talking holy rollers” would have been the ones moved off campus.  In other words, don’t forget your roots, and don’t forget what the experience of being the outsider, the misunderstood one.

It’s on this very point that I’d like to suggest that emergents can learn from Pentecostals how to talk about the Spirit of God.  In yesterday’s theology session on the emergent church, there was much talk about the need for emergents to develop a “robust pneumatology.”  I agree, in part.  For I think that emergents have a robust pneumatology, but I don’t think that we’re very good at talking about it.

As I argue in The New Christians, I think that most American Christians are “binitarians.”  That is, while they profess a belief in all three persons of the Trinity, their practice of the faith betrays that the Father matters to them, and so does the Son, but the Spirit is an afterthought.  As reflected in hymnody and praise songs, sermon titles and prayers, the Spirit gets far less than one-third of the time in the spotlight in most churches.

I think that emergents know, in our guts, that the Holy Spirit needs to make a comeback in our churches.  But we’ll need some brothers and sisters in Christ to show us the way.  I ask you who are Pentecostal and Charismatic to help us in that way.  Give us guidance in putting words on and legs to that pneumatology that lies latent within our movement.  I do believe that you will find willing dialogue partners in this endeavor.

And that leads to a second area in which Pentecostals have something to teach emergents: I ask that you teach us how to discern the movement of God’s Spirit.  For over a century, Pentecostals have been speaking with confidence about what God is up to in the world, about how, in the words of the Separatist Pilgrim pastor John Robinson, “There is more light and truth yet to break forth from God’s Word.”

Let me speak personally.  I grew up, not far from here, in a mainline, Congregational Church.  On the walls of the narthex hang copies of the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, and the U.S. Constitution.  In other words, we took our Congregational roots seriously.  And a big part of those roots is education – as a youth, I often heard that in Jonathan Edwards’s day, the minister was the most highly educated person in a village.  My own pastor had degrees from Harvard University, Union Theological Seminary, and the University of Edinburgh.  The faith in which I was reared was both rational and reasoned.  Nary a hand was raised in the church of my youth.

So it came as a bit of a shock to be exposed, first in college and then in seminary, to Charismatics and Pentecostals who spoke easily of the Lord’s word to them for the day – heck, they even received words for me for the day!  Even more mindblowing to me was speaking at a YWAM conference in Chico, California years ago, and being introduced to “Bible Roulette,” in which the scripture is flipped through until one’s finger lands on a verse, and that verse is God’s word for you today.

I realize that’s an extreme example that’s probably not taught by any of the biblical studies professors with us tonight, but it nevertheless bespeaks the ease with which Pentecostals talk about God’s activity.  And if it is extreme, so is my tradition, in the other direction, far too often talking of God in the abstract and overly reticent to testify to God’s activity.

I consider theology to be reflection on and articulation of the nexus of divine and human action.  And I have a suspicion that Pentecostals are more viscerally aware of this nexus than most Christians.  I believe that theology lies latent in all human enterprise, from the most poignant to the most mundane, and my hunch is that Pentecostals more readily acknowledge this fact than the believers of my tradition.

I can tell you that I and other emergents experience God’s activity today, but we need help in finding the language to articulate that experience.  As Pentecostals, you have worked for over a century to forge a theological language that articulates divine action – what you likely call a “fresh movement of the Spirit.”  My hope is that emergents can learn from Pentecostals how to discern the movement of God and articulate that in ways that will build God’s kingdom.

In any version of Christianity, certain things bind the persons who affiliate with that variety together.  For some, it is ethnic heritage, and for others, a certain confessional stance.  Most emanate from a particular individual, or, in the case of Pentecostalism, a particular event.

The emergent movement has no such genesis, and no such confessional glue.  Within emergent, you’ll find Southern Baptist preachers and lesbian Episcopal priests, Missouri Synod Lutherans and Quakers.  For what binds emergents is not unlike what binds Pentecostals – it’s an ethos, a posture.  In fact, I might describe it as a posture of openness to the movement of God’s Spirit in the world.

Thus, you could walk into a United Methodist Church with the an organist and choir and a minister in alb and stole, and stroll down the street to a Vineyard assembly with a rock band and a preacher wearing shorts, and each could self-identify as emergent.  Why is that?  What in God’s name do these churches have in common?

They are, as I said, open to God’s Spirit, moving and active in the world today.  In the words of Tim Keel, late of Jacob’s Well Church in Kansas City, “My job as a pastor is to figure out where God is active in the world and then get my people there, to cooperate with God.”

It’s probably this idea of “cooperation with God” that makes the young, restless, neoCalvinists particularly uncomfortable, for to them that sounds like an undermining of God’s sovereignty, an implication that God is dependent on human beings – in fact, to hear those Calvinists, we humans might be a royal pain in God’s backside.

But contrary to that opinion, I think that emergents share a particular sensibility with Pentecostals: God gratefully and graciously uses us in Kingdom-building work.  I think that we talk about it differently – you’re unlikely to hear too much overt Holy Spirit-talk from emergent; instead, it is usually God-talk, as in the aforementioned quote from Tim Keel.  But I do believe that we mean the same thing.

Getting one’s arms around the emergent church is no mean feat – indeed, I believe that the same may be said about Pentecostalism.  In a sense, the genesis of the emergent movement was the disenfranchisement of GenX evangelicals in the 1990s.  But in another sense, of course, the Bride of Christ is always emerging.  It is, as Brian McLaren has written, better referred to as “the church emerging” than “the emerging church.”

Further, those of us involved in the emergence Christianity have a particular antipathy toward rubrics, labels, and categorizations.  They seem to us convenient ways of boxing someone in, which all too often leads to writing someone off.

Please allow me a tangent: Was Thomas Aquinas a “liberal” or a “conservative”?  Well, we might at first paint him a conservative, for he rescued orthodox Christianity from a particularly stagnant period by recovering – i.e., conserving – scripture and tradition.  But how did he do that?  By entering into a thoroughgoing dialogue with the Aristotelian philosophy of medieval Islam.  I daresay that if a theologian today were to admit that he or she was dipping into the wells of Muslim philosophy in order undergird Christian theology, that theologian would be condemned as having slipped off the slippery slope.

My point is that the question, Was Thomas a conservative or a liberal? is nonsensical, because “liberalism” and “conservatism” are modern categories, linked to modern (read, analytic) philosophical presuppositions.  If I can make the point even more strongly, they are not theological categories.  Thomas was not a liberal or a conservative, Paul was not a liberal or a conservative, Jesus was not a liberal or a conservative.  And, if I may be so bold, I am not a liberal or a conservative.  Those non-theological categories become less helpful each day.  I suggest we stop using them.  OK, end of tangent.

Further still, I have already used several terms in this essay: emerging church, emergent church, emergence Christianity, emerging movement, the church emerging.  The lack of consensus on terminology betokens both the youth and the fluidity of the movement.  Imagine, if you will, that you were at the Azusa Street Mission in 1906, and in 1916 you were asked to address a guild of Presbyterian scholars and give them some sort of definitive description of your nascent movement, and you might be able to understand my reticence.

But, alas, define we must.  The most oft-quoted definition of  the movement come from Fuller Seminary professors, Eddie Gibbs and Ryan Bolger, who write, “Emerging Churches are communities that practice the way of Jesus within postmodern cultures.”[1] Scot McKnight, who authors the highly influential blog, The Jesus Creed, finds Gibbs and Bolger’s definition too broad, as do I, and thus McKnight specifies it further: “Emerging churches are missional communities emerging in postmodern culture and consisting of followers of Jesus seeking to be faithful to the orthodox Christian faith in their place and time.”[2]

[2] Scot McKnight, “Blogossary,”  http://blog.beliefnet.com/jesuscreed/2006/11/bloglossary.html.

Good evening and thank you.  I want to begin by thanking the executive committee of the Society for inviting me, and thank Kim Alexander in particular.  When Kim invited me over a year ago, little did she know the time and energy she would have to put forth defending that invitation.  I am especially thankful that the committee in general, and Kim and Arlene Sanchez-Walsh in particular, took a stand for academic independence, freedom, and integrity.

I also want to thank a few others.  I reckon myself to be a bit of a populist theologian – it’s why I spend more time writing blog posts than I do on completing my dissertation.  So, one of the ways that I prepare for a gathering like this is to ask the blogosphere and the twitterverse what they think, and the responses are almost always enlightening and edifying.  On this topic in particular, that online community has been particularly helpful, filling in some of the many gaps in my knowledge of Pentecostalism.  Some people in this room have been kind enough to chime in on those discussions, including one who heartily recommended Amos Yong’s book, which I have truly enjoyed.  My thanks to Baker Books for rushing me a review copy of that title.

Jürgen Moltmann has said that hearing someone talk about theological method is akin to listening to a person clear his throat.  But, I must confess a personal weakness for prolegomena.  It is, in many ways, my favorite part of theology.  It’s a bit like an auto mechanic who spends his day organizing his tools, but never gets around to fixing the car.

Indeed, my single favorite piece of theological writing is from Moltmann himself.  A section in Theology of Hope or a paragraph from The Crucified God?  Nope.  My favorite theological essay is Moltmann’s preface in The Trinity and the Kingdom of God.  On occasion, I read those six pages devotionally.

Therein, Moltmann describes his methodological pivot, moving from his first three books – in which he attempts to describe the whole of theology through each of three prisms – to his latter six-book cycle, which he calls his “contributions to theology.”  These contributions are planned and orderly, he writes, but they avoid the seductions of systematic and dogmatic thinking.  And, referring to himself, Moltmann continues, “The writer recognizes the conditions and limitations of his own position, and the relativity of his own particular environment.”

And then, he pens one of the most theologically significant statements that I have ever read:

Behind all this is the conviction that, humanly speaking, truth is to be found in unhindered dialogue.  Fellowship and freedom are the human components for knowledge of the truth, the truth of God.  And the fellowship I mean here is the fellowship of mutual participation and unifying sympathy.

The influence of this theological method on the emerging church cannot be overstated – it is what emergent is all about.

Last week, I had the pleasure of presenting — alongside Phyllis Tickle, Bruce Reyes-Chow, and Philip Clayton — at Emergence NOW, the mid-winter conference of Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia.  Columbia is one of the better hosts for a conference like this, and they treat their speakers with warm hospitality.

Phyllis Tickle led off, working out some new angles on her Great Emergence ideas.  I think she’s hitting the authority question harder than ever (and I think that will be the basis of my paper next month at the Society of Pentecostal Studies).  I like that Phyllis continues to let her ideas evolve, and that she has listened to, and responded to, criticism as she’s presented these ideas over the past five years.

I went next, presenting the 10 Myths about Emergence.  I basically used each as a jumping off point to say something interesting and positive/constructive about emergence.  You can see my slides, and all of the many wonderful tweets from the event, at the ENow Twub.  Phyllis and I rounded out the day by taking some questions from those assembled.

On the second day, Philip Clayton told us that emergence is.  It simply is.  That is, emergence is the primal quality of the cosmos, from the atomic level, all the way up to the cosmic level.  And the emergence of our social structures and our religious understandings are right in the sweep of that all-encompassing emergence.

Then, Bruce Reyes-Chow gave the most honest presentation I’ve ever heard by someone in a position of denominational power.  He spoke of the changes in the PC(USA) and of the reality that his position of moderator won’t be around much longer.  He also spoke hopefully about what denominationalism can be.  And, in what was the most intriguing and inspiring part of his talk, it became clear that his own identity as an urbanite, lover of San Francisco, and planter of a wonderful church is what guides him.  That strength-of-identity seems to free him of the need to play denominational politics.

There were, of course, workshops, conversations over meals, and more.  Troy Bronsink led singing in his inimitable way, and Barbara Brown Taylor’s preaching reminded me once again what a master of the English language can do with a manuscripted sermon. I met twice with the Atlanta Cohort, and we even had a self-described “Emerging Muslim” join us at one of those meetings.  Awesome.

I came away from it all with a renewed sense of hope and friendship.

I attempted to track all of the books written by or mentioned by the presenters. See the entire list here.

Others’ reflections: Kimberly Knight; Bruce Reyes-Chow.

That’s the question I will attempt to answer in March when I deliver a paper to the Society of Pentecostal Studies.  I’m no expert in Pentecostalism, but I’m sure that some of you are.  And others of you can probably conjure up some opinions on the matter, too.

So, what does the emerging church have to learn from Pentecostalism, and what does Pentecostalism have to learn from the emerging church?

For all of us who fret about such labels, Zach has a good word:

In a way, I can truly relate to those who are find the descriptor “emerging” to be troublesome. In Jimmy Eat World, we’ve always struggled with the word “emo.” While we’ve never once called ourselves “emo” and have always loathed the term, we have continually been linked to the term by journalists and well-meaning fans. As a band, we just chose to ignore it. Our hope is that the term is sort of like a young puppy that continually jumps up your leg. If you pretend the puppy doesn’t exist, it will realize it’s efforts to get your attention is a pointless exercise. If you freak out and yell “No!!” each time the puppy jumps up, it’s learned how to get your attention.

via To Those Who Want to Ignore “Emerging” Terminology | Finding Rhythm.

David Fitch, a pastoral theologian, or theological pastor, is usually a voice of reason.  He’s lent that reasonable perspective to all of the recent balderdash about the death of this movement and that.

When we see things fall apart, split into factions, or splinter off personalities, we should not worry. What is of substance will last if it rooted on the ground in real life communities. What was a fad needed to die anyway. Let those people move on with what they’ve learned and be part of something real. Yet we often see people clamor to keep the fad going. Perhaps these folk were invested in the benefits accruing to them as part of the fad. People like to keep the feeling alive of being involved in something important. But again – Methinks We Worry Too Much. Fighting too much to keep something going is itself a sign of a fad. The people fighting for it should let it go and devote themselves to what is happening on the ground.

via Reclaiming the Mission.

Rick Bennett is at his sardonic best:

MINNEAPOLIS — The Emerging Church, the controversial Christian movement that inspired many to plant churches, leave behind their faith and question authority, died in her sleep Thursday following a short illness. She was 21 (according to some sources).

He continues…

Not surprisingly, in today’s celebrity culture, some of her friends and followers have set up vigils protesting the news of her death. Close personal friend, Tony Jones tells anyone still listening; “now I don’t want to get all Tupac, or Elvis on anyone, but she isn’t dead. Her demise is a ploy by her enemies to destroy her credibility and the credibility of those who work on her behalf. She is alive and well, but probably being held hostage by John Piper. I have sources that tell me she was last seen in downtown Minneapolis near Bethlehem Church, in a blizzard I am sure Piper will say was caused by her friends, the Gays. I am sure the body they have is a double found at a local morgue.” As of now, he is the spokesman for what could be a large contingent of possible conspiracy theorists demanding more answers. Some have called this group Emergent Truthers.

via cheaper than therapy.

Be sure to read the two other posts as well.