Drew Ditzel asked me, along with a number of other bloggers (see below), to participate in a project he is doing for his class on emerging models of church at Columbia Seminary. Drew wants us to write about emerging churches and how they are dealing with leadership – mainly through giving everyone a voice, downplaying the role of pastor (or having none at all), and encouraging equality in terms of leadership roles among all members of the church, no matter how old or what gender. And then of course, what does all this have to do with seminary students?
In an email Drew sees some of the possible problems:
…find some Emerging ideas about church, leadership, and being a pastor so refreshing. But they freak me out just about as much…This idea of a church body participating as producers in worship…[and] that church happens around dinner where seminary degrees and humorous sermon antidotes seem a bit out of place.
Here I want to address the question in three ways, culturally, biblically and then through the lens of the Quaker church.
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This post is a part of a series where I am addressing the church’s mission as it pertains (or doesn’t) to relevancy within culture. I am trying to build the majority of discussion around John Howard Yoder’s work in his “For the Nations.”
Series contents | Introduction | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five
In our previous discussion we looked at how relevancy is often the guiding question for church and mission. If we think of the question in terms of being an axel on a Ferris wheel, it might look something like this.
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But I’ll argue a more theological and biblical starting point for understanding the church’s relationship to culture is to begin with the incarnation as a paradigm for the role of church in mission. In this way Jesus is the missionary par excellence, he is our model for missions more so than even Paul. Switching out the axel on our Ferris wheel for a “Jesus Axel” we might have something more like this.
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With this in mind let’s look at what it was like for Jesus to interact with his culture as a missionary. John Howard Yoder names four options Jesus had for engaging with his cultural surroundings: realism, revolutionary violence, withdrawal, and establishment religion.
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