Emergent church trends outside Adventism and its influence inside

koot van wyk (DLitt et Phil; ThD)

Kyungpook National University

Sangju Campus

South Korea

Conjoint lecturer of Avondale College

Australia

26 September 2010

The word emergent to emergent church, is cardinal in this whole discussion. The word means to rise out or to extricate, to come up, to get clear, to become evident. This is the old Latin meaning of the word. What it has come to mean in Christian theology is that the church move away from its status quo and take up other tasks that may conflict with the position it had with the status quo stance in the past. It attempts to create a revolution in the church, whether evangelical, Catholic, Orthodox, Protestants in all their forms, even Seventh Day Adventism. There are groups or networks currently set up sometimes under the umbrella of the SDA administration that fan out to these ideas spin around by the emergent church theology trend in contemporary times. The cause of this whole investigation is an innovative, creative, brilliant member of the Seventh Day Adventist church in South Africa sending me two links and asking my opinion about this. He was not happy with the situation although he was innovative enough to help set up the Creationist Society by Seventh Day Adventism in South Africa. He had many other innovative missionary projects like academic evangelism which was to bring scholars from Andrews University and arrange for them to lecture at all the universities in South Africa. He did not like the Partners in Innovation methodology.

Partners in Innovation is a missional endeavor launched by the Ohio Conference of Seventh-day Adventists in partnership with several church-related organizations.

(http://sdapartnersininnovation.org/page/who-we-are).

There modus operandi is spelled out in the following statement:

Partners in Innovation is a collaboration of people and organizations committed to cultivating an environment for the emergence of fresh expressions of mission and ministry in North America. Our goal is to create a culture of innovation that is shaped by sound theology, missiology, and other related disciplines. We seek to develop communities of people who will be carriers of faith into the complex world of the 21st century.

The statement is filled with good content that is part of the modus operandi of many of our scholars already. One cannot survive as a scholar without circumspection. The statement is nothing new. I think that my comparison of Neil Diamond's "I am I said" and the Bible is not far from what one can call contemporary reflection of the Bible with circumspection. See http://www.egw.org for a couple of these kind of articles. But there are rules that the innovator, the out of the ordinary writer must abide to:

1. it must be done with faith and not a grudge against faith of your denomination.

2. it must be done with happiness and thankfulness for the innovators of the past of your own denomination that brought you up to this point in time with such a rich understanding.

3. it must be done with the confidence that Biblical understanding has reached very high proportions in your spiritual growth and that considering culture, politics, technology and other topics will not cause one to get lost.

4. it must be done with the full understanding that cultural revisionism is necessary since there is no such thing as cultural purity and thus, cultural romanticism is out of the question.

5. Instruments of innovation can also be instruments of destruction. Innovation by itself is no guiding force for the future a process must follow.

6. If the innovation is to apply hermeneutics of suspicion instead of hermeneutics of affirmation, then the innovation is no innovation at all. Such deconstruction models already existed since the fall of man. Said Satan to Eve, "God will not do what He said."

7. The Bible was not written to have meaning until John the Revelator but was written for all ages until the eschaton and beyond to the beginning of eternity. Therefore, absconding the Bible or doubting the words of the Bible, or parking the words of the Bible as exclusively belonging to far back history, is definitely not innovative.

8. In the process of finding contemporary cups to fill our messages, we cannot ignore or downplay the cardinal doctrines of the Bible. There can be no conflict otherwise it is not innovation.

9. Pluralism, ecumenicalism, mysticism, spiritualism, evolutionism, cannot be made to fit Adventist Biblical doctrines, since they are all non-biblical.

10. If a person is following practices of Buddhism or Hindu joga or doctrines of other denominations or Christian groups, the person is no longer a pure Seventh Day Adventist but a hybrid who is trying to jump the wire to bring in outdoor practices into the church, regardless if it is a world famous specialist at Kettering Hospital or Brighton, California donating a lot of money for church projects. Hybrid Adventists are not to be supported, whether by members or by the administration. Activism against them is not encouraged but personally individually every one must make their decision and choose not to follow these deviant workers against the Biblical positions.

It became clear in this research of online resources that there are networks, groups and individuals on behalf of networks and groups outside of Adventism which are trying to infiltrate their ideas into Adventism in order to deconstruct the Adventist Truth. They are people who are coming from other denominations or were studying there or are so linked to other denominations that they are funded to proceed with a trojan horse method, as specialist at our Hospitals, as teacher at our Universities, to undercover carry out a task of systematically breaking down Adventist positions on doctrines. They all have the same characteristics with one, more or all of the following : humanistic, social gospel, liberal lifestyle, pluralists, ecumenical, and a superficial Bible understanding. They see themselves as people with vision and mission to change the church and correctly so, if the question can be answered who they are representing. The battle between Christ and Satan is not yet completed.

Emergent Church trends are also widespread.

A number of youtube presentations gives us insights into the struggles evangelicals, baptists and catholics have with this new theology.

From three videos that we will mention in the sources below we learn that:

1. According to the catholic video on this topic they are characterized by four elements: honesty, broadminded, ecumenical and participating in the Jesus scholarship.

2. The cacradicals want the following: "contemplative mind that receives the whole field uncritically. At variance with what our churches have believed."

3. From the evangelical video we learn that these groups:

a. have a connection between post-modernism and the emergent church.

b. They deconstruct language and deconstruct truth claims.

c. They are against absolutes in truth.

d. They are overly cognitive in their mainstream.

e. They share Brian Mclaren's relativistic understanding of truth.

f. Today's liberals were evangelicals yesterday.

g. They are bored with God.

h. They are anti-doctrine.

i. They are against right and wrong categories.

j. They don't want a credal posture.

k. They do not want propositional statements.

l. Someone said: "When the tide is low, every shrimp has its own puddle".

m. This attitude appeals to the members who do not want to get into division and fighting.

n. People are reluctant to answer about their Adventist truth since they are afraid they will offend someone. There is an abdication of Christian responsibility or Adventist responsibility.

o. They write their names on a cross during service or they worship on sofas instead of benches.

p. They practice joga in church like the Baptist pastor in Michigan, Rob Bell. He wants to carry over what is in Buddhism and Hinduism into Protestantism, namely breathing exercises during worship etc.

q. They emphasize the experiential.

r. They use drama, lights, participatory worship styles.

s. They wear blue jeans, sing with electrical guitar and have a penticostal flavor.

t.  Diana Butler Bass said that they should "reach to new kinds of church styles".

u. They are less certain of theological positions.

v. They are angular or intolerant of truths.

w. They have a theological sloppiness or messy theology.

x. They want members to listen to "enlightened pagan ones".

y. H. Williams wrote a book explaining that every human being has a spark within him [thus gnosticism] and Rob Bell the joga worship preacher from Michigan practice this in the Baptist church citing her.

z. The emergent church believes you can worship God through joga.

Rick Warren said of the book by Dan Kimball, The Emergent Church,