Thoughts on Emerging Church: Part I

This weekend I read an article on cross-cultural ministry and some of the issues involved. Very interesting stuff. Got me thinking on why the emerging church seems to be mostly a white Western thing, and it’s leaving other nations (third world etc) largely untouched. I'm by no means a professional on the subject, these are just my thoughts.

Bear with me as I get to the point here. This may be a long one and I’m not moveable-type endowed!

Just after high school a group of us went to Lesotho to renovate a mission that was in bad disrepair. We spent 3 weeks there and got to know many of the locals. We lived with them, ate with them, worked with them and worshipped with them. To some, their services would seem outdated. They had hymns, a sermon with fire and brimstone, and all the usual traditional elements. Nothing of today’s contemporary music or bands or overheads/video projectors. Not even a written hymnbook in sight! But the volume of singing, the depth of response blew us (almost literally) away.

On the campus where I work there is a predominantly-black church, also very “old-fashioned”. They have your well-known order of service, stuck to religiously every week. Pop in anytime and you’ll know how much of the service is left. Hymns abound. Preachers are loud and work up a sweat. Services go on way past lunch-time. And you can hear them from anywhere on campus when they sing.

When I lived in Zimbabwe the black folk would walk for miles to attend church, sometimes arriving after the service was over (as many hours as it lasted), but hanging around the church under the trees with their families and food, there to worship.

Contrast that with many Western contemporary churches. We’ve got the sound system, the lights, the band, the video effects. We turn up in our fancy cars and give our cash (such a small percentage of what we possess). We pray and we sing. But somehow it doesn’t seem as deep as those black folk who arrive on foot and sing from memory. We’re not as committed – we sometimes don’t even bother getting up in time to go to church. And when we do go, we go through the motions.

Western Christianity has become a consumer religion. We treat God like we do anything else in our lives – if we don’t get our money’s worth we leave. We moan and groan at the pastor’s message or the worship leader’s singing, or the hardness of the pews. We fall asleep during the sermon. We do our thing once a week and leave. We give offering relevant to the blessing we received – the less blessing the less goes in the plate. Mass evangelistic meeting? Not for us thanks. Mass baptisms? Nah… A call to be persecuted for our faith? WHAT faith? What could anyone possible find on us to persecute us about?

Is it any wonder there’s a drive for more than church as we know it among us white Western folk? We’ve lost our first love, we’ve lost the depth of devotion that bids us walk till our feet are sore to meet with God and others. We've lost our hunger for God. We’ve become shallow and wishy-washy. We don’t practice what’s preached – who of us can honestly remember what the pastor said this weekend, and who of us really put it into practice or even gave it a passing thought once we left.

The third-world and similar culture groups don’t need to emerge. They’ve got what we’re seeking. They’ve got that real stuff we’re trying to find. And it’s not about bells (or whistles), incense or candles, it isn’t about worship spaces or connecting with today’s culture. It’s about God and God alone.

Cross-cultural emerging? I don’t think so. Unless it’s us learning from them, learning to recapture our First Love, and not the other way round.