There is an exciting movement afoot in Christianity at the moment. The movement is ecumenical in that it embraces all Christian denominations, from Evangelical to mainline Protestant to Roman Catholic. It is a movement that favours conversation rather than polemics, that prefers to ask questions rather than provide answers, that seeks grace in “doing church” rather than “being church,” in orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy. This phenomenon is called the emerging church.
The emerging chur
ch movement did not begin with the Catholic Church. But as a Catholic writer, I tend to explore issues concerning the Catholic faith, and as a progressive Roman Catholic, I have been dissatisfied with the unrelenting doctrinal absolutism of my Church.
I am powerfully attracted to the emerging church idea, primarily because it replaces absolutism with relativism, strict rules for belief and behaviour with a conversation characterized by humility.
The most prominent Catholic spokesperson for the merging church is Franciscan priest, Father Richard Rohr. Father Rohr is founding director of the Center for Action and Contemplation (CAC) in Albuquerque, New Mexico and author of over 20 books on prayer and spirituality.
In an interview with the National Catholic Reporter in 2007, Father Rohr first offers his understanding of the emerging church phenomenon in terms of what it is not. The emerging church movement does not promote “the expectation of any new denomination: you’re never going to find a church with the sign ‘Emerging Church’ on the front of it.”
Instead, Rohr believes it to be “a consciousness…that is rather quickly emerging among Methodists, Lutherans, Anglicans, Catholics, Congregationalists.” Rohr calls this movement a new Reformation, but one in which a person does not have to leave his or her own church in order to participate.
Father Rohr identifies a number of characteristics that make up the essence of the emerging church movement. One of these is “an honest, broad, ecumenical Jesus scholarship.” He claims that there is a “strong consensus emerging” among scholars of all denominations that what most churches have traditionally emphasized about Jesus is quite different from what Jesus himself taught.
The emerging church is also characterized by “a contemplative mind” that “receives the whole field [of Jesus scholarship] and simply lets the whole field — what I understand and what I don’t understand — teach me.” This emphasis on contemplation involves a renewed interest in contemplative prayer, a major element of the practice of faith in the first 1300 years of Christianity.
Rohr sees in the emerging church movement “a recognition of social justice,” — a conviction, in other words, that Christians must be concerned with suffering in the world. Finally, what he says is emerging slowly is a sense of “what are the new structures, the new community mechanisms that can make this possible” without having to create a new denomination.
I am one of those people who, for various reasons, feel they need to belong to a church community. A cradle Catholic who fell away from the Church at the age of 19 and returned at 55, I have spent the last four years trying to reconcile my love of the Church — the beauty of the liturgy, the commitment of the Church to social justice, a deep sense of community at the parish level — with my distaste for its increasingly anti-modern and rigid orthodoxy.
While I have ceased being an active member of the Church due to what I perceive to be its institutional homophobia and will likely join the Old Catholic Church or a gay-friendly Anglican church, I still consider myself Catholic. Thus I find the values and practices of the emerging church immensely appealing.
As Richard Rohr says, “You stay Catholic, you stay Lutheran. You know it’s your Mother Church, your tradition. You own what it gave you, you’re grateful for all it taught you, but you find a congenial, compassionate way to live inside of it and yet outside of it. That’s the emerging church.”
What I also find appealing about this movement is its emphasis on conversation. In a Bible study class I attended in my former parish, the facilitator liked to quote a prominent monsignor in the archdiocese on how to read Scripture. The monsignor said that it was dangerous for Catholics to read the Bible on their own lest they come up with an “incorrect” interpretation. In class I found myself constantly fighting the urge to rebel against the literal and narrow interpretations of the New Testament texts we were reading.
I often wanted to ask why such-and-such a passage could not mean something entirely different from the way in which we were told that it must be construed. I was not always able to control that rebellious impulse, and on one occasion I articulated my frustration. One of the other participants responded by saying that studying the Bible was like playing chess: you can only play the game if you know and follow the rules. I found it prudent to end the “conversation” at that point.
In the kind of conversation suggested by the emerging church, the “I am right, you are wrong” argument gives way to a kind of welcoming of uncertainty. A theme that runs right through Richard Rohr’s talks on the emerging church is non-dualism. The emerging church proposes taking a fresh look at our Christian faith — at Jesus, at the Bible, at Church tradition, at doctrine — “but not in an angry way, not in an oppositional or adversarial way, but a kind of hopeful, prayerful, desirous way.”
It does not seek to throw out all the current denominations because they got it all wrong and we got it all right; it recognizes rather that every church, every pastor, and every Christian holds a pearl of great price. As Christians we should all appreciate both the value of that pearl and its limitations; one church does not have all the right answers.
Because it is cross-denominational, the emerging church phenomenon defies neat categorization of concepts, personalities, beliefs, and practices. To me, it is an invitation to remain within my own tradition but to confidently yet reverently question my faith, wrestle with scripture and tradition, experience other denominations with an open mind and an open heart, and look at Jesus in a new way.
Nothing is scared and everything is Sacred.
Photo Credits
Photo by Susan Mogan
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