Interview: Emerging Church and the Nobodies God Uses
Dr. Robert Schuller of the Crystal Cathedral recently launched his first Faith Forward Forum. There, a broad group of thinkers, from Pentecostals to Calvinists as well as emerging church leaders and scientists, brought their voices to the same table to grapple the issues of today and strategies for tomorrow.
Among the speakers was Jim Palmer, author of Divine Nobodies. Just coming out of the three-day forum, Palmer spoke to The Christian Post about the diverse open conversations Christians are having and the hard-to-define emerging church movement.
CP: Firstly, how did the Faith Forward conference go?
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Palmer: It was a great conference. The idea is just pulling a lot of different people together into one conversation about issues related to going forward with the Christian faith and just bringing everybody to the table and what that involves.
The Crystal Cathedral and Dr. Schuller have had church conferences in the past. The thing that marks this one as more different is the fact there was a lot of initiative to pull in leaders and voices from different church traditions and other fields altogether. There were a couple of scientists who spoke, people associated with the emerging church. It was kind of the first of making a forum open for this diversity of voices, to get together in one room and appreciate and learn from one another’s differences and what we can take and build on from that.
CP: Mike Rapp who was at the forum said that “The goal was to teach ideas and methods that looked to turn skeptics into seekers as opposed to just turning seekers into believers.” Can you explain that? And are churches then taking the wrong approach in reaching out?
Palmer: A good bid has been made about the fact that here in the west and the U.S. there's kind of this cultural shift – something called post modernity. Part of that shift is sort a general questioning and skepticism about traditional religion, organized church, modern forms of Christianity. As just part of the journey, people feel a real need to kind of delve into the difficult questions about our faith and need to have a sort of permission to ask all the questions and be able to talk through them.
Too often I get people who have questions about faith and things of this nature. It's sad that often the place they feel the most threatened to ask these questions are with religious leaders or a church. The idea is that this conversation should be a table that anybody can come to with their questions, with their skepticism, maybe even people who have been hurt or disillusioned with church or religious faith. So I think that there's a sort of exerted effort to encourage this conversation, allow this skepticism and questioning to occur, just to help be part of the journey, to encourage leaders to recognize this and how they might be able to do this in their context.
CP: There’s a lot of effort and talk about reaching the new and younger generations in innovative ways. What is that at the cost of? And are churches then turning away from the older traditional believers?
Palmer: My own personal experience has been that … I guess this is a generational thing, I don't think it is completely, but unfortunately sometimes people find in their religious experience that it's somewhat shallow and narrow and I think particularly emerging generations are looking for a spirituality that has some depth and width to it. Up and coming generations tend to value the technological expressions of that - a diversity of creative expressions of spirituality.
Some of the generations kind of pressed on to the scene and their interest with spiritual things can’t be confined within a lot of the typical or traditional forms of doing church, so therefore, giving people permission to go outside the typical or ways of doing things allowing there to be more creative expression. But even within all of that, I think the danger is always focusing on the form or style or worship when really it’s a spiritual hunger that wants to press beyond a shallow and narrow faith to something that's deeply relevant to their day-to-day lives and a message that promotes peace and justice in our world, a spirituality of being directly connected with God and having a relationship with God. It’s not just the challenge of the form or the medium but I think it’s also a challenge of the message which sometimes is very legalistic and shallow and at times not much more than that.
CP: So what did you talk about at the conference?
Palmer: I’m the author of this book, Divine Nobodies, and so my talk was really focused on this basic idea that one of the mentalities that you pick up in traditional religion is that the people who know the most about God or the people who will make the biggest difference for God are people who are church leaders or have a seminary degree or have a position of prominence in some way in the religious world. But my experience has been the opposite. Some of the most important people that God has used in my own journey include a waitress at a waffle house, a hip hop musician, a tire salesman, a mechanic, just any, everyday ordinary people. And so my talk at the conference was trying to challenge this notion that there are two different classes of people within the church and that we need to get back in this place where we realize that every person– no matter how marginal they may be or what their education is or whatever – is a person that God wants to use to birth His kingdom in our world.
And so we ought to be encouraging and letting people know about their identity in God so they can live this out in the world and not feel they need to depend on the structures of church or allow them to see that they come equipped to be an expression of Christ in the world all their own. And sometimes organized church works against this a little bit. It’s kind of implied; somehow people learn that maybe they’re not as important as other people in terms of being that link for somebody else into a relationship with God.
[My book] was published at the very end of October. The subtitle is “Shaving religion to find God and the unlikely people who help you.” Despite my being a person who has the masters of divinity degree, who served in Christian leadership positions and this sort of thing, it was these nobody types of people who God used to kind of awaken me into a deeper faith in God and to shed some of these religious mentalities that I was carrying around that were really working at cross purposes with what God wanted to do in and through my life.
CP: There have been reports about more people turning to orthodox Christianity. How does that compare to this MySpace generation movement and the emerging culture?
Palmer: The word “emerging” is so broad and has so many different meanings depending on who you are. I don’t think that emergent is so much changing the message of orthodox Christianity but I think that it’s pressing in to understand its implications in different areas and on different levels. Maybe pressing a little harder on what some of the rightful applications of some of our orthodox Christianity would be in the world.
And it’s an interesting thing that even to some degree the emergent church is not necessarily coming up with something that could be said as “new.” In many cases, it’s recovering some of the original aspects of authentic Christianity and looking for ways to live these out in the times in which we live currently. I think emergent …. kind of gives people permission for people to separate God from religion and even the person of Christ from more modern expressions of Christianity in search of truth. Like I mentioned before, we live in a day and age where people are more likely to have that kind of skeptical, questioning mentality when it comes to their faith.
I think the other thing too is there’s always going to be religion of any kind that tends to divide people. I know for myself, and I would consider myself emergent in many respects, but I also find among the emergent people I know, a respect for the different expressions of the Christian faith. You find in a lot of emerging churches this kind of eclectic feel that includes maybe some of the historical and traditional expressions of Christianity in church kind of mixed in with contemporary expressions of worship, combining them together.
I think sometimes the problem is that it’s human nature for a group of people to say I’m right and you’re wrong or I’m more right than you are. And that’s why I appreciated this Faith Forward forum because I felt it was a situation where people were respectfully valuing the differences and trying to learn from each other. But in general, I think the emergent church is appealing to the MySpace generation because there tends to be a little bit more freedom in expressing one’s Christian spirituality in different ways and even the way “church” and even a church service functions is much different and includes creative elements that the MySpace generation probably value and appreciate more than others – the use of multimedia, the Internet as a sort of online community that’s meaningful for people, involvement in social justice. All these sorts of things tend to be a very compelling aspect that the MySpace generation is looking for in their spirituality.
CP: Would you actually be able to define the emerging church movement? What churches fall under that?
Palmer: It’s a good question that’s almost nearly impossible to define and even moreso, I think people who associate themselves with emergent, if there ever was one solid definition, they probably would’ve felt that the movement failed at that point. The typical mindset is to try to very rigidly define something and then it’s not long before it’s institutionalized into its own heartened rule of practice or something of that nature. It’s rare you’re ever going to get one single definition of emergent but you’ll probably hear people describing characteristics of the emergent movement. And they would be things like a real valuing of conversation as something that really is a spiritual discipline, allowing anybody and everybody into that conversation. It’s a very Christological sort of movement. It very much is really centered in the person of Jesus Christ. A lot of recent books associated with the emergent movement are really coming back to focus on the person of Jesus – his message, his life, delving into the implications of the person Jesus Christ and what his message was in terms of the here and now. Too often, people think that Christianity focuses on the afterlife, the gospel of Jesus was sort of a formula into getting into heaven after you die. And the emergent church tends to focus more on the present implications of Jesus’ message and they see it very much tied into the here and now.
I think a very conversational spirituality, a very Christ-centered spirituality … probably does take shape in a certain form of church. How would one organize church around some of these principles? Maybe people are seated in a circle, implying that we’re looking at each other, it’s a level plane field. It’s likely that ‘emergent’ churches would be churches that utilize this sort of eclectic aspects of spirituality.
In the end, one of the characteristics among emergent folks is the refusal to be defined. Like I said, the minute that there is this hard and fast definition people would feel disappointed that we’re going right back down the path of defining people, sticking someone in a box, creating a label and before long it’s reduplicating some of the similar problems of the past.
An example would be social justice. It’s not that we’re sitting around twiddling our thumbs, waiting for Christ to come back to work out all the problems in the world in the end. But we take Jesus’ message seriously, going into the world and being people who live our lives for beauty and justice and peace in the world now.
CP: So what’s new or big in the emerging church movement?
Palmer: I think that something like the Faith Forward Forum represents something a little new or different in the emergent circles because inevitably what happens is in some new movement or something a little different develops and then there’s just more division created. Something like the Faith Forward Forum I think strongly represented that emergent people are not going to do that. They don’t want to be the kinds of people who say ‘we figured it out and other people are wrong.’ But they really want to open a conversation and connect with people who are different and learn. To me, that’s a sign of hope that the emerging movement wants to be in dialogue with other expressions of Christianity, even with those people they may disagree with on theological grounds or in different practices of the church and so on. Honestly, I think it may be one of the great contributions that the emerging church serves if it can accomplish this – a true forum where we can agree or disagree perhaps find things as love and justice as a common center.
CP: Do you have any more comments?
My only comment about [my] book is I think there this sort of under-the-radar, off-the-grid sort of revolution going on in our world where God is birthing the Kingdom of God through marginal, ordinary, often overlooked people. They’re kind of realizing that the implications of their Christian theology may be more powerful than they had ever thought and God is completely capable of working through a world of nobody types to fulfill His mission and bring His Kingdom to earth.
