I have high expectations for Pete Ward’s recent book Liquid Church, which I’m embarking on now that I’m done with Crux of the Matter. See Coop’s book review for a great overview:

What is Liquid Church? Liquid Church is a response to our rapidly changing society. Where the local parish at one time was built by farmers and manufacturers who were geographically stable. As we move to a geographically and culturally fluid culture where change comes in many shapes, ways and sizes, the church needs to be more flexible to move through, around, and in amongst today’s culture.

Let me know your thoughts if you’ve read the book or the review.

The Restoration Movement has been characterized by the “Restoration Plea” for a return to first-century Christianity. I’d like to re-formulate that slightly to meet the current need for restoration in the churches of Christ’s present situation.

From Crux’s final chapter:

A historian and friend of the Stone-Campbell Movement recently questioned whether or not Churches of Christ will survive in a post-Enlightenment age. He recognizes that the age in which we have lived has deeply affected the questions we have asked, our approach to scripture and church, and our particular brand of Restorationism. For that reason, he rightly asks whether or not the church as we have known it will continue to exist in an era in which this worldview and many of its practices and understandings are dying away.

…if in fact our questions and conclusions are utterly time-bound and, therefore, irrelevant for a different day, then perhaps our Movement should die away.

…the call to restoration ought to bridge the times and transcend the particular methods and eccentricities of a certain era, even the modern one. This would mean, of course, a serious rethinking of positions and approaches, not to accomodate them to the culture but to approach the Scriptures again in each age, for each generation. It means being part of a church that is adaptive and flexible, allowing the changeless Word to find its voice and its relevance within a changing culture. p241

I wrote nearly the same thing several months ago. Restoration of biblical Christianity is only real restoration insofar as it happens each generation, incarnated faithfully into each new context. To import a church from another era or place is to impose our inventions on God’s organism, and, like a rootbound potted plant, restrict the growth of the movement He is growing. We need, in the words of Pete Ward, a more liquid church of Christ.

May the work begin in my generation.

Crux explains the discomfort some conservative C of C members have with current ways of interpreting scripture:

…our views on how to study the Bible and how it functions authoritatively for us have undergone significant changes over the last 50 years…attempting to understand the Bible within its literary, historical, and theological contexts….Listeners who are used to hearing dozens of verses cited from all over the Bible sometimes feel that this approach is not biblical, much to the consternation of the preacher who believes he is walking squarely in the way of the text, trying to say faithfully what Scripture says. This has also, no doubt, helped to create a climate of crisis within many Churches of Christ. p238-239

I’ve never thought of it that way before: Christians have been trained for decades to quote verses in rapid-fire format to support a given idea, and in some circles this was viewed as the ultimate in biblical literacy. Context was not on the radar.

There is hope, then. People who quote verses out of context, yet mean well, can be educated on the literary nature of scripture, and come to see that it is even more conservative and faithful to the text to respect the context than to pull out single verses. While this may be derisively referred to as “The New Hermeneutic” by a few, it’s certainly not new, but rather the way that, say, the churches who received the Epistles read them - not as holy writ, but advice and encouragent and admonition from a spiritual mentor to their church.

Winn Griffin of Allelon has some great reflections on the day some Allelon folks spent with Eugene Peterson. (He doesn’t use permalinks; I extracted that one out of his source, so I hope you appreciate it! =) Excessive filter-blogging today, I know…but this is good stuff.

From YouthSpecialties.com:

The number of lives touched by Mike is beyond what we could even estimate. He is the father of modern youth ministry in many minds. Through his books, speaking engagements, and YS events, he has ministered to untold thousands all over the world.

The world needed Mike. He served God’s purpose for his life, stirring up controversy and provoking the kind of thought needed to transform ministry to young people. He will be missed.

Andrew over at Backyard Missionaries asks the right question about our churches’ theological reflection:

what is striking me and giving me some cause some for concern is the amount of time spent focusing on ‘what we do when we meet’.

I wonder if this communicates what we feel to be at the heart of ‘church’? I believe our ecclesiology follows our missiology and once we get a focus on mission we will form up our church structures (or unstructures) and gatherings appropriately. As one in a new ‘church’ I don’t think our meeings are ever going to be whiz bang affairs, but they ought to sustain us in the mission we re called to. I guess I’m really saying who cares what we do when we meet if it renews and nurtures us to be sent out again. (just to clarify - i do see a place for prayer, scriptures and the whole one another stuff happening)

A number of the emerging church blog chats have had this focus also - now its not bad - don’t hear me say that - but i sense we spend too much energy trying to get the meeting ‘right’ and in that focus risk creating nothing more than a smaller version of what we have all come out of - a meeting centred ecclesiology.

If this were the view of the churches of Christ at the middle of the last century, we would have emerged from it far more relevant and poised to impact the world than we currently are.

If you don’t read Hamo’s blog regularly, stop reading mine and get over there.

Robert Webber, in his worship newsletter:

I suggest that God’s transcendence is substituted by a worship characterized by “distance.” When worship is tedious, dry, and intellectual, some think, Well, at least we achieved transcendence. But that is not the case.

Just as some substitute true transcendence with dead worship, there is a tendency to express God’s immanence with familiarity. “Let’s make God real through a fun-filled, engaging, relationship worship.” This is not immanence.

Here is the dilemma. Traditional worship, with its emphasis on hymns, creeds, and stained-glass windows, makes God remote. Contemporary worship, with its casual “bring your coffee to worship and slap your neighbor on the back as you sing, shout and sway with your hands in the air,” makes God too common.

Remote does not make God transcendent. Familiarity does not make God present. Have we demystified both transcendence and immanence? [hopefully this article will be archived here soon]

I think Webber is right to focus on the paradox of the immanence and transcendence of God. Elsewhere in the article, he discusses how the incarnation is just such a paradox - something we can understand two sides of, but we can’t choose one over the other. Likewise, we must appreciate the paradox of immanence and transcendance in worshipping God (which, as you might imagine by my other writings, I don’t limit to “worship services”), and not emphasize one to the exclusion of the other.

I am near the end of Crux of the Matter now, and the authors have made some great points, which I hope to bring out more fully later, perhaps in an article. But they touch on something in the chapter entitled “The Future of the Churches of Christ” that I cannot pass by without comment.

From p230:

Many of the things that have divided Churches of Christ over the past two centuries have not been crucial matters–that is, issues and practices directly tied to the cross of Christ. This is not to say that these matters were not important or should not have been discussed. Issues such as Christian pacifism and pre-millennialism, lively topics of discussion early in the twentieth century, are important topics of conversation. But they are not at the crux of things. They are important skirmishes on the boundary, but not critical for the defense of the capital.

I’ll say. The single greatest qualm I have with the churches of Christ in general is the ridiculous focus on peripheral matters. I don’t take the more ecumenical standpoint that they aren’t worth discussing, but sometimes the level of Pharisaism among c of C people is astounding:

We realize how volatile such topics as [instrumental music] can be. Recently, Jack [one of the authors] publicly quoted a man who sincerely believes that handclapping in our assemblies is a far more significant issue that the worldwide AIDS epidemic. Implied, of course, was Jack’s questioning of that assertion. In reply, and earnest brother made clear his opinion that handclapping, as well as raising hands, women leading in worship, and fellowshipping denominations, are doctrinal issues, not matters of opinion. He asked, “How many souls can AIDS destroy? How many can be destroyed by false doctrine?” Since handclapping does not have a “thus saith the Lord” in the New Testament, it is therefore false doctrine, and its prohibition must be among the fundamentals of the faith. p231

If you are from a non-church of Christ background, this is probably astonishing. Either way, it’s disturbing. This is a recent book, not something from a hundred years ago. There are still people who think like this.

I don’t have much hope for being a redemptive agent of growth and renewal among people like this. But I think there is much to be done to awaken more progressive churches of Christ to the emerging context, and to issue a new call to return to scripture.