"Church" verses/and/or/both/ "Kingdom"

Ξ May 12th, 2007 | → 6 Comments | ∇ Cultural Architect Stuff |

Well, Ken a very good friend (and fellow pastor) of mine left a comment to the last blog post just talking about the emphasis of the “emerging” church (by the way: I really desire to focus on “emerging” and not “emergent”…there is a difference and it sounds more and more to me that even the “emergent” people and using the term “emerging” because of some of the negative connotations of “emergent”…that is a whole other post…but anyway.. I wanted to put Ken’s comment to the last post up and since my response was getting too long, I decided to make it another blog post here instead…so here goes:

this is Ken’s comment to the last post (below):

“D.G., not having read the book, my comments are more about the whole “emergent” movement and are probably a bit out of context with your post — BUT… With regards to point #1, I think that is my biggest issue with some of the writers/leaders of the emergent movement. Regardless of how the established Church (or denominations) have or still do miss the point — the Church was God’s idea. I don’t think that just means some loose confederacy of people who make vaguely the same confession about Jesus Christ and then just stop worrying about the rest of orthodox belief. I believe that the organized Church is a vehicle of Christian community, of orthodox truth rooted in Scripture and Christian conversation, of commissioning and equipping people’s calls to ministry, and of engaging the world in corporate mission and witness. I also believe that right belief is critical to right action!

I’ve been reading a book called “Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail” by Robert Webber and another called “Working the Angles…” by Peterson. I think both of those books offer a healthy counterbalance to the McManus, Easum, McClaren, Sweet etc. crowd. ~Ken”

(I added some links to the books you suggested) (oh and here is another post talking about the Peterson book from a friend of mine Todd)
And here is my response:

Awesome Ken! Now I will have to add two more books to the shelf that I will never get to read, heh. But I see your point and that is kind of what this book (and you will find out in the next posts) is dealing with,and says that we need to stop thinking about emerging church, and see that the emerging church is just another expression of a larger deep church. Thanks for reading and please keep up the discussion….. but here is my thoughts to your point….

I do not think that “emerging” movement is doing away with the church….it is just putting it’s focus on Kingdom…and not church…they realize that the church is a part of the Kingdom, but not vice versa. And when you realize that the kingdom should be the main focus, then you realize that the church is not the end, but it is a means with-in the Kingdom to be (all the things you listed: “a vehicle of Christian community, of orthodox truth rooted in Scripture and Christian conversation, of commissioning and equipping people’s calls to ministry, and of engaging the world in corporate mission and witness”

And when Kingdom language is used it does promote a larger sense of the place of the church in the kingdom..and in my mind promotes more of an understanding of living missional in this world.

As a (loose) quote from Reggie McNeal says, “Christ did not say that he came to bring church and to bring it in abundance, he said ‘life’…people do not wake up in the world and think to themselves, “man I need more church”‘, ha ha ha… Christ came to bring life in the world…and the church is not the end result of being in the kingdom, it is a life lived in relationship with allowing Christ to be your king. Now sure we all need support, equipping, encouraging, being help to our full potential, and that is the place and role of the church, but the church is in existence to take us to the next “place/level” in the Kingdom. The church is not the desired location for the end of the journey, it is just the airport hub (image from Reggie again) to help us get from here(our current faith/depth of relationship with Christ) to there (a deeper relationship with Christ that is missional at the very core of our being….i.e. Wesley would call it, entire sanctification)

But with all of that said, I do think that we are all saying the same thing, but putting the emphasis on a different terminology.

ALSO, Ken seriously keep reading the posts I put up from this book,because they are proposing that we should be seeing much larger in these regards (i.e. I read Kingdom mindedness) and think of the church in a much larger context, and they call it “deep church” (including all of church history, and high church, and house churches)…so anyway… anyone else want to add to the conversation?

Hey you! Jump on in! The friendship is warm and the discussion deep, welcome to growth! KUTPs!!!