Sunday, Feb. 12, 7:00 – 9:00 p.m., Mudd Theater.

Click here for event flyer. Click here for more information.

Also, here is a conversation I had with Doug Pagitt regarding the Emergent Village Theological Conversation.

Yet some of us are still hanging in there. In fact, in the midst of the increasing skepticism, a number of good things are happening. For one, more people are speaking up about what’s wrong with the institutional church, making bolder calls for it to change and adapt. This is good. Don’t forget that Christianity has its heritage in the Jewish prophets, who took the religious institutions of their day to task for a multitude of sins. And the first-century rabbi whom Christians follow modeled himself on the great prophets of the Hebrew Bible. It’s high time for a more prophetic, more counter-cultural Christian faith.

Knowing the Doubts from the Inside…

Perhaps the best thing that’s happening is that those of us who remain are beginning to get it. We realize that “cultural Christianity” — religious belief and practice that’s “just obvious” because it’s been inherited from one’s parents and culture — is largely a thing of the past. The burden is now on believers to show why their tradition is still relevant in today’s world. As we know, many of our friends and critics doubt that it still is.

The ones who are best at speaking to a generation grown skeptical about religion are the ones who have felt the force of the criticisms, up close and personal. They are producing courageous (and widely read) manifestos for the future — books like Tony Jones’ The New Christians, Peter Rollins’ How (Not) to Speak of God, Diana Butler Bass‘s Christianity for the Rest of Us, and Brian McLaren‘s Everything Must Change.

The sad thing is: much of the institutional church is going to turn its back on this new generation of spiritual seekers. It will declare them too heretical, or it will find their questions too troubling. It will ask them to shut up and sing the old hymns.

In some ways, these new Christians expected that. They are meeting in homes, in office buildings, in pubs … and even in churches, when they are welcome there. They are finding what it means to form deep communities, to practice deep discipleship … and then to sort out the beliefs as they go. Soon, I predict, this new movement will begin to dwarf some of the more traditional forms of religious expression.

What to Call This Movement?

Years ago they were called “Jesus People.” More recently people have been talking excitedly about the “emerging church” movement. Brian McLaren describes it as a “generous orthodoxy” and “a new kind of Christianity.”

However you describe it, the movement breaks with the religious politics of division and calls for a return to a “big tent Christianity.” “Big tent” evokes the image of the revival tent that folks used to set up just outside of town. Here differences were (in theory) set aside while people sought transformation and a new direction in their faith. If you’re skeptical, follow it on the web and judge for yourself. People will be live-blogging the next “Big Tent” conference this Sept. 8-9 in Raleigh, NC, and many of the (mostly younger) leaders of the movement will be speaking.

“Big tent” is also a prophetic challenge to the rancorous debates and condemnations that are the public face of religion today. The Religious Left and the Religious Right look more and more like Washington: people sit on one side of the aisle or the other; everything they say and do seems to play just to their own party members. More and more of those in the younger generations are tired of the combative attitude. They look for something different, something more positive, from Christian faith.

What Do Emerging Christians Believe? Is It Biblical?

Let’s name the really contentious issue. The criticism one most frequently hears is that all the emergent church really stands for is a kind of lukewarm, perhaps slightly updated liberal theology. Is it true?

Although conservatives frequently make this charge, it does not seem to be accurate of the movement. Think of the “Emergent Conventions” that took place over the last decade, or the “Emergent Theological Conversations” that have continued, featuring theologians such as Jürgen Moltmann as discussion partners. Whether at the larger meetings, or the high-volume websites such as HomebrewedChristianity.com, or in small-group meetings around the country, I see young men and women deeply concerned, almost obsessed, with theological issues.

Neither their approach nor their conclusions fit the classic definition of liberal theology. They do not start with a clear philosophical position and then mould Christianity to fit. Their interest is not confined to the human dimension and implications of the faith. I find people preoccupied with Jesus’ enduring question, “Who do you say I am?” (Mt. 16:15). That humans are imperfect and in need of divine grace, that Jesus is unique and not “just another prophet,” that God is somehow active in the world, that Christianity must offer a hope and “good news” if it is to merit our attention, that discipleship should be serious and life-transforming — all these are themes that I hear heatedly debated, adapted, and adopted.

True, emerging Christians often don’t lead with these assertions. As Phyllis Tickle notes, their movement tends to be “belong … behave … believe” rather than “believe … behave … belong.” Given their stress on the Jesus of the gospels, their ecclesiology (doctrine of the church) focuses first on creating communities of acceptance and honesty, communities where questioning is okay. But neither community nor politics nor social action is the final goal. Across the movement I see a strong desire to rediscover a deep, vibrant form of incarnational Christian life and faith–one based not on an economy of exclusion but of embrace.

For this reason, it’s natural for emerging Christians to invite churches back to the “big tent” vision. The invitation extends to liberals who want to be able to say what is distinctively Christian about their progressive stance, and to evangelicals who want to really engage contemporary culture and thought from a biblical perspective. Some will decline this call to Christian unity for the sake of the purity of their non-negotiable doctrinal boundaries. But others, growing tired of the increasingly hostile disputes, are finding ways to proclaim a common vision.

Why It’s Urgent to Look for Common Ground

Many of the old religious institutions are withering away. People are voting with their feet on Saturday and Sunday mornings: “if that’s what religion is, I’m not interested.” Much changes in turbulent times–especially the face of religion. If “Christian” is just a label for warring factions on the Left and Right, each ridiculing the other and declaring themselves the only true heirs of Christ, then yes, more and more will become post-Christian.

But why associate Christianity only with this battle? Why not join the increasing number of those who want to leave it behind? The way we navigate our spiritual identities is changing; a revolution is afoot. Why limit spiritual practices only to the forms of the past? As the debates and distinctions of bygone eras cease to matter so much, new spaces of acceptance are opening up, bringing with them new forms of Christian practice. Should we not welcome them, rather than seeking to squelch them?

This piece was also published on the Huffington post at:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/philip-clayton-phd/should-we-all-be-postchri_b_698218.html

I’d have thought that transformation is a key concept in any and every strand of Christianity. Classical evangelicalism, for exam[le would be serious about sanctification – even if struggling with its social consequences – which is transformation. I can’t imagine any Christianity – indeed any religion – which would make a call to us to remain as we are.

Beautifully put. It would have been better for me to say “But to those who oppose ‘big tent Christianity’ and all moves in that direction…”  The day I responded to Ian, the internet was filled with hostile attacks on me and on the Raleigh conference that opens in ten days. There are certainly those who think that emphasizing Christian unity as Brian McLaren and I and the other speakers are doing betrays Christ. They say that we must emphasize the differences in order to judge the many, many people who hold false theologies.

It’s not for me, for anyone, to define the boundaries of the tent. In Raleigh some will join us for whom it’s very uncomfortable to do so, since their colleagues will condemn them for having sold out merely because they are sharing a stage with some of us. I admire their courage and Christian vision.

And let it be said that there are some on the liberal end who will condemn us for meeting together with more conservative Christians rather than challenging their views.

For some of us, the task is to make the invitation nonetheless. No one owns the “big tent” of the church. All who wish may come. Some will stand outside, in their own smaller tents, so that they can condemn the big tent project and many of those who enter in. They focus attention on the boundaries and on who should be excluded. We focus attention on the One whose life and teaching and salvific actions draws us together in the first place. We leave judgement about who is “really” in or out to God.

Ian Carmichael also writes,

The point of my faith needs to be transformation – which needs to be the point of the activity in my ‘small tent’ as well as that of the activity in the ‘big tent’.

This is a great take-home point. It’s what we do in our own home communities that counts in the end. Once in awhile, however, it’s great for us to join together to show the world what a rich community it is that seeks to live in the Way of Jesus.

– Philip

If you don’t see the video, click here.

I just wrote on these themes in a special guest blog for the Washington Post/Newsweek site, “On Faith.” Check it out — and leave a comment if you can!

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/guestvoices/2010/07/how_i_rediscovered_christianity_through_islam.html

Check out my newest post on Patheos on the topic, “New Visions: Or, Church for People Who Aren’t So Sure about Religion” by clicking on this link:

http://www.patheos.com/Resources/Additional-Resources/New-Visions-Or-Church-for-People-Who-Arent-So-Sure-about-Religion.html

While you’re there, check out the other contributions by Christian leaders in the forum on “The Future of Mainline Protestantism”:

http://www.patheos.com/Topics/Future-of-World-Religions/Mainline-Protestantism.html

Yet the responses to the Covenant have been as revealing as the Covenant itself. Shortly after the Covenant was signed, Dr. George O. Wood, general superintendent of the Assemblies of God, asked that his name be removed from the list of signatories. Juleen Turnage, spokesperson for the Assembles of God, explained Dr. Good’s reason for his action. In the process, she explicitly rejected the possibility of any “big tent” within which all Christians might stand:

“The problem is the tent that has grown so large on the signatures of this that are including people who are supportive of gay marriage and abortion rights,” Juleen Turnage, spokeswoman for the Assemblies of God told Religion News Service. “He (Wood) just felt that he could not become a part of a large tent.”

Daniel Schultz, a UCC pastor in Wisconsin, cites this response in today’s blog on ReligionDispatches.org. He uses it as the occasion to fire back a matching salvo:

“The long and the short of it is this: the Christian Century-mainline church crowd should really think twice before signing on to one of these wild goose chases. They always promise more than they can deliver. The fact of the matter is that the American right wing, religious or otherwise, is only interested in meeting you halfway insofar as ‘halfway’ is defined as you changing all your positions to match their own. It’s all very nice for them to be civil—as long as you give up on gays, lesbians, reproductive rights, and probably a whole laundry list of other positions.”

The symmetry between Rev. Schultz’s piece and those whom he’s attacking is perfect. Schultz rejects dialogue with evangelicals because they’re too far to the right. This drives him further to the left, and now he doesn’t want to be found in any tent they are in.

The whole exchange shows even more strongly how urgent it is to reclaim a Big Tent Christianity, a centrist return to “just Christian” in word and action. The two poles are driving each other ever further apart, spawning ever deeper hostilities. The solution — in American society as in the church — certainly is not to let the other’s anger fuel my own. As leaders it’s our task to help break the cycle of anger, of rejection leading to rejection, and to foster a radically different understanding of the heart of Christian faith.

Does the exchange make me worry that the public conference on “Big Tent Christianity” that we’re planning for Raleigh, NC on September 8-9 is a mistake? No, it seems even more urgent than before to invite the combatants to lay down their weapons and to look for something deeper and more enduring in Jesus’ call to the kingdom of God.

– Philip

Should the church adapt? Well, imagine the alternative. Indeed, there’s an easy way to see it up close and personal: just go to the websites of the critics of the Theology After Google (TAG) conference. Ken Silva called the TAG conference a “heresy fest” and, later, “nothing more than a warped and toxic twisting of the actual Christian faith.” You — each of you, each reader — has to decide for himself or herself. I encourage you to go to Ken’s blog and read it with an open mind. In the same vein, I’d encourage you to watch the professors at Southern Baptist Theology Seminary tear apart Brian McLaren’s newest book, A New Kind of Christianity, in a panel discussion. Decide for yourself whether adapting to the world (and the people!) around us amounts to selling Christianity down the river.

You may agree with Ken and the irrate professors. Or you may even think that our TransformingTheology project — the call for the church to adapt to an emerging world and emerging technologies — is even worse than Ken thinks. Perhaps the TAG conference, and the present writer, should be put on his sidebar of dangerous leaders, alongside Rick Warren (and, if you follow the links on Rick, alongside “radical Roman Catholic apostates such as Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the militantly pro-Roman Catholic Church spiritual Gestapo Unit known as the Jesuits”).

On the other hand, you may endorse the motif that ran through every speaker and every workshop at the Theology After Google event: we best follow Jesus by attempting to be Christ-like to the people around us … by attempting to meet them where they are. Using new technologies, and thinking in new ways about our faith are part of that. The central Christian questions and concerns are still our concerns, but the answers can be affected by the new things we’re learning and the new conversations we’re having.

It really is a choice. Ken Silva and the Southern Baptist seminary professors really do embody a different attitude toward the world “after Google” than we do. Which way will you choose?

In one sense, it’s enough that it happened. I don’t know of any place on the web where you can see Dan in dialogue with a moderate, reflective, religious person. But that’s only step one. The harder question is how to interpret what happened.

Dennett supporters are already posting on the web to say what they thought it was about. One points out that I do not share the assumptions of most analytic philosophers, and hence fail to pass the test for analytic orthodoxy. Both in the debate and in Mind and Emergence (chap. 4), for example, I use the work of analytic philosophers in ways different from what they intended. But surely that isn’t what was at stake in today’s discussion. Other bloggers may question whether I made any errors in describing evolutionary theory; perhaps they’re arguing that, if I did, that proves that evolution and theism are incompatible. But, again, surely that was not the real topic of the debate.

John Cobb comments, “[Dennett’s] view that worldviews have no practical importance expresses a provincialism that is really inexcusable. Surely comparative cultural studies are not wholly absent from the contemporary university.” That comment comes closer.

What was at stake today was not whether theism and atheism are finally identical; surely that much is beyond dispute. Instead, what most divided Dennett and me was the question whether in the end worldviews make any difference. Dan is prepared to call religion “benign” — which means: not outright malignant — when it supports values that he endorses. (His friend Richard Dawkins would not give as much ground.) Beyond that, however, religion is of little interest to him. For religious believers like me, by contrast, religious belief is never reducible to the moral convictions it supports or the behaviors it produces. It functions as a entire world- and life-view, permeating all that I do, affecting how I see, interpret, and evaluate everything I encounter. It’s that truth that I sought to communicate this afternoon.

Dan Dennett and I will probably never agree on whether it’s probable that God exists. But I hope that those who view today’s debate online will ask themselves why it matters that we were defending different understandings of what ultimately exists. If we can’t even agree on the significant difference between the two speakers, and how that difference is revealed in our different ways of approaching a whole host of philosophical questions, we won’t begin to be able to evaluate the competing arguments for our different positions.

Watch the debate online here.