More on McLaren's quote

Here is the quote again:
"One of my mentors once said to me, 'Remember, in a pluralistic world, a religion is valued based on the benefits it brings to its nonadherents.' This surprised me, and I thought about it for days. Many people think the opposite of what my mentor said: that religions offer benefits to adherents and catastrophic threats for nonadherents. This offer/threat combination motivates people, they assume, to become adherents out of fear of catastrophe and desire for benefits." p. 111

I think this is a very important observation for the church today. He doesn't say that the offer/threat combination isn't a part of the Biblical record of the Gospel or necessarily out of bounds, but it has in evangelicalism held center stage. I think McLaren is right that this needs to change.

Brian McLaren on Valued Religion in a pluralistic society

Out of Brian McLaren's "A Generous Orthodoxy":

"One of my mentors once said to me, 'Remember, in a pluralistic world, a religion is valued based on the benefits it brings to its nonadherents.' This surprised me, and I thought about it for days. Many people think the opposite of what my mentor said: that religions offer benefits to adherents and catastrophic threats for nonadherents. This offer/threat combination motivates people, they assume, to become adherents out of fear of catastrophe and desire for benefits." p. 111

Does Jesus split Love of God and neighbor in the Good Samaritan?

I’m working on the passage where Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan. I’m rather amazed that I’ve never preached or taught this passage before. Perhaps it is because I’ve always assumed the passage was simply a nice moralistic tale about helping someone in need. This certainly in our culture is what it is assumed to be. Someone is a "Good Samaritan" if they help someone else out.

The story, however, is goes much deeper than that to say a number of earth moving things in Jesus’ day and today.

Thoughts on generational church movements

I've been around, just not by computers. A couple of thoughts about the seeker movement and the emergent movement and where they come from. Both seem to come out of frustration with the generation before. The stark generational gaps and the clear demographic lines between groups certainly speak show both movements to have their sources in our generationally stratified culture.

I do find, however, there motivations to be noble. The seeker movement has a deep heart for the lost and wants to get them "saved" by any means necessary. The boomer generation where the best educated generation "to date" in their arrival. They saw in social sciences, in business, in communications tools that could be employed to get people to "cross the line". They used all the tools they could find to employ in their holy effort.

The busters and those who followed are perhaps the most managed, most market targeted, most manipulated group to date. They were studied, analyzed, processed in factories of education, therapized and drugged to become and achieve the results, the perfection the boomers and their experts craved sometimes with the best intention. This generation finds their voice in the movie "Garden State". I'm currently reading McLaren's "Generous Orthodoxy". (McLaren's a bit old for this movement but we often find the prophets of a generation to actually be from the previous that they respond against.) I really hear the emergents wanting out of the "program" and striving to love well. Their songs fall over backwards apologizing for themselves so that no one imagines they have the kind of ulterior motives that have been foisted upon them.

Of course these are archetypes and generalities, individuals in the wild are much more complex and less consistent. Who will follow the emergents? We already start looking for them even before the emergents have finished emerging.

Emergent church and the Reformation

Someone on CRC Voices pointed me to DA Carson's critique of the Emergent Church movement. I think it is a helpful piece. One line, however, I'd like to comment on:
Quote from the article:What drove the Reformation was the conviction, among all its leaders, that the Roman Catholic Church had departed from Scripture and had introduced theology and practices that were inimical to genuine Christian faith.

The Reformation, like the Emergent Movement was a large, complex, and dynamic movement. There were plenty of actors in that movement who were, either consciously or unconsciously, working their reformation of the church into better fitting cultural shoes than the ones they had inherited. Motivations inside all of us are slippery things. Many scholars have noted very significant cultural, economic and social factors in the Reformation that played a huge part. Why the success in Northern Europe compared to Southern Europe? Both the Emergent movement and the Reformation were reactive movements. I doubt, however, that the Emergent movement will historically be anywhere near as significant as the Reformation. What we may in fact be seeing is simply the playing out of generational differences and we will have to "suffer" a new "reformation" every twenty years in the Western church. When I listen to SOME of the leaders of the seeker movement or the emergent movement I hear men (not many women point leaders here either) wrestling with the basic question: "How can the church today be like the early church in its power?" This question has been asked by many generations of church leaders, often yielding significant and helpful reformations within western Protestantism. You see it often in church history since the Reformation. This ultimately might be one of the big legacy items that the Reformation really left for the world, the perpetual angst of the "not yet" manifesting itself in perpetual institutional revolution in the church. pvk