My Ancient Emergent Theory

  History repeats itself.  Argyle sweaters look stylish again to young people whose grandparents wore them sixty years ago.  Bellbottoms will certainly experience a second coming-- or is it a third coming?  What goes around comes around again in the next generation.  New church leaders make the same mistakes as their predecessors.  Because of basic human inclinations-- sometimes running along family lines-- we are destined to repeat many of the mistakes of our forefathers.  Our nesting instincts will undermine our missionary instincts, keeping us at home when Jesus said "Go".  Our desire for comfort and security will foil our humanitarian intentions.  And so there will always be a struggle within the Body of Christ, a disparity-- like the Apostle Paul talked about-- between our good intentions and our actual behaviors.

  Yet some of us are more inclined to behave in certain ways than others.  Some are adventurers because we come from a long line of adventurers.  Some are more likely to be stuck in the mud of familiar old traditions, while others seem to have a sort of holy dissatisfaction with the status quo and a knack for shattering the normal-- and breaking other things as well.

  So, I say that what is happening in the church in the Western world is about personality types.  Not only that, I say it has always been about personality types, that every spiritual revolution has fallen out along certain behavioral lines that correspond with types of people.  I'll call them activists and passiv-ists.

  Or you could say they are consumers and producers, or givers and takers, or any number of other labels, but what I am theorizing is that the emergent religious landscape in America is actually a battlefield that is overrun on the one hand with believers who are comfortable with church the way it has been for most of their lifetime, and on the other hand, those who are disillusioned, dissatisfied, and even up-in-arms, over the endemic complacency of their counterparts.

  And, as I was making the point at first, it has always been this way, even as far back as the Exodus.  When God sent Moses to rescue the Israelites out of Egypt, many of them didn't want to be rescued; they were comfortable where they were, and later, when their comforts disappeared, they made it known to Moses in no uncertain terms.  

  Forty years ago, the Jesus People emerged to challenge the accepted norms of religion in America, some of them even forming communes like Koinonia Farms, in an effort to break the traditional mold.  It was a quest for greater authenticity, for true and practical spirituality rather than religion, an attempt at having a relationship with God, not just a form of godliness.

  And so it is now. Only this time it is speeding up, it is gaining critical mass like no other movement since the Protestant Reformation.  It is rocking the religious boat so violently that some are predicting the swamping of the boat, calling America a post-Christian culture and reporting the end of evangelicalism.  

  And the passiv-ists don't like it, so they oppose it and they demonize it.  "Heretics!" they yell, "These house churches are full of false doctrine!"  while they separate themselves more thoroughly from a needy world while going through their order of worship every Sunday morning.

  Okay, maybe I'm being a little rough here.  Maybe even a bit hypocritical, because, even though I see myself as an activist, one who disparages the irrelevance and the arrogance of the typical church in America, there are days when I get weary of the struggle, days when I want to be comfortable and secure as well, so on those days I'm a passiv-ist like my friends.  I also think that age and environment and a whole lot of other influences can affect this thing, and I think it is possible to move from one personality type to the other-- and back again, depending on lots of variables.  I have become less passive (and less patient) as I have matured.  It's a journey, folks.

  Anyway, I don't think that there is much that is new about what is currently emerging in the church to address the changes in the emerging culture.  I think that God will always make sure that there are activists in any place and time, like the Old Testament prophets, who will challenge the complacency and the hypocrisy of the church of the day, and the farther it gets off track, the louder they will cry (and the more unpopular they will become).

  Solomon speaks for me when he says, "What has been done will be done again, there is nothing new under the sun." (Eccles. 1:9)

  By the way, in this post I have ignored certain factors that may be fueling the current revolution and creating the illusion that it is something unlike anything that has happened before, such as epic shifts in the culture, etc.
  Hmm.  Wait a minute.  Maybe it's not about personality types after all, maybe it's about different spiritual gifts.  You know, those with the prophetic gifts are always clashing with those who have the administrative gifts, calling them stick-in-the-muds, and such, because they resist change and all.  Shoot, I'll have to work on that; I guess I'm not quite ready yet to write my book and make a million bucks on this emerging church phenomenon.