“Emergence Christianity” – Part 3 – Work of Diana Butler Bass
I. From the Book, “Christianity After Religion” – Diana Butler Bass
A. Bass sees that religiously we are historically in the 4th Great Awakening. Awakenings imply new awareness, inner transformation, a change of heart and mind, and a reordering of priorities, commitments, and behavior.
Ancient Christians defined metanoia as "the great understanding or the practice of discernment through which human beings moving from darkness toward the light. It involves recognizing our estrangement from God and neighbor and a turning of the heart and mind toward love.. metanoia is a "Great Turning" or a "Great (Re)Turning" toward the divine intention of harmony, unity, peace, dignity, and joy for all creation
Awakenings are the hard work of people who have undergone metanoia and who seek to change their lives, communities, and the world around them in accordance with a renewed experience of God’s love and justice.
Awakening is a deeply personal realization. The new spiritual awakening rehearses paradise, the awareness of love’s liberating and healing power. God is with us in this world. Awakening is, of course, something transcendent. But awakening is also something that individuals can choose to participate in, can ask others to join in, can ignore, can reject, or can stop. When enough people experience metanoia, our sense of whose we are, what we are to do, and how we understand God changes.
Awakenings begin when old systems break down, in "periods of cultural distortion and grave personal stress, when we lose faith in the legitimacy of our norms, the viability of our institutions, and the authority of our leaders in church and state."6 A "critical disjunction" in how we perceive ourselves, God, and the world arises from the stress. The end of the old opens the way for the new.
Historians of American religion generally recognize three significant awakenings in the United States and Canada: the First Great Awakening, 1730-60; the Second Great Awakening, 1800-1830; and the Third Great Awakening, 1890—1920. During each period, old patterns of religious life gave way to new ones and, eventually, spawned new forms of organizations and institutions that interwove with social, economic, and political change and revitalized national life.
The first (ca. 1730—60) occurred in the years right before the American Revolution; The First Great Awakening marked the end of European styles of church organization and created an experiential, democratic, pan-Protestant community of faith called evangelicalism
The second (ca. 1800—1830), in the early decades of the America republic; The Second Great Awakening ended Calvinist theological dominance and initiated new understandings of free will that resulted in a voluntary system for church membership and benevolent worship
The third (ca. 1890—1920), as the United States became an industrial world power. And the Third Great Awakening had two distinctive manifestations: the social gospel movement, with its progressive politics, and the Pentecostal movement, with an emphasis on miraculous transformation.
During each one of these periods, religious, political, social, and cultural mores and institutions underwent profound change, as people searched for deeper understandings of selfhood, meaning, and purpose in the world
Despite the theological differences between the movements, each emphasized the shift away from personal sin toward the idea of communal transformation of the social order through an experience of God active in history. The Third Great Awakening inspired new forms of mission work, possessed a keen passion for lifting the poor and oppressed, and was broadly ecumenical in vision and practice. In each of these three awakenings, older forms of Christian faith— European, Calvinist, or Protestant evangelical—were revitalized, reoriented, remade, and sometimes replaced by more culturally resonant conceptions of the self, God, community, and service to the world. In the process, new forms of Christianity came into being, with profound spiritual and political consequences.
4th Great Awakening
In 1962 22 percent of Americans claimed to have had a "mystical experience" of God. In 1976, that number had risen to 31 percent of the population. By 2009, 48 percent of Americans confessed that they had had a mystical encounter with the divine. This was not merely some sort of short-lived emotional outburst of renewed faith. Americans see themselves as religious and spiritual
B. Relational community (Belonging), intentional practice (Behavior), and experiential belief (Belief) are forming a new vision for what it means to be Christian in the twenty-first century, a pattern of spiritual awakening that is growing around the world.
Basics of Religious Faith=Belief, behavior, and belonging are three intertwined strands of religious faith
Questions of faith prompt a reexamination of behavior. Actions change—like ignoring church teaching, standing silent during the creed, or avoiding the yearly revival meeting. Eventually, if a person ceases to act like a Roman Catholic, mainline Protestant, or evangelical, he or she will probably cease to belong to that church and no longer identify as a "good" member. Belief, behavior, and belonging are three intertwined strands of religious faith and have traditionally occurred in that order
1. Belief – is the intellectual content of faith. Typically, belief entails some sort of list—a rehearsal of ideas about God, Jesus, salvation, and the church. What to believe
Belief of God is still strong but not nearly as robust as some commentators present.. Of adults, 60 percent claim that God is a person "with whom people can have a relationship," while 25 percent define God as an impersonal force. About 7 percent say that God exists, but it is impossible to know anything about that God. Broken down this way, somewhat more than half of Americans view God as "personal," and slightly less than half view God as a spirit, a vague entity, or nonexistent.
American beliefs about the Bible, the book from which many people draw their conceptions of God, faith, and salvation, have changed considerably in recent decades. Ninety percent of Americans who came of age in the 1960s consider the Bible to be sacred; while only 67 percent of America’s youngest adults (those who are now eighteen to twenty-five) revere the Bible as holy
Christianity itself is changing—shifting away from being a belief-centered religion toward an experiential faith (enter into ideas about God through our hearts).
For many centuries, Christians have equated faith with belief. Being faithful meant that one accepted certain ideas about God and Jesus, especially as articulated in creedal statements
As religion gives way to spirituality the question of belief shifts from what to how.
In his 1962 book The Meaning and End of Religion, Wilfred Smith drew a distinction between the modern word "religion" and its Latin root, religio. He showed that the contemporary concept of "religion" was a relatively recent invention in European history. Christian writers began using the word "religion" more frequently during the seventeenth century to signify a system of ideas or beliefs about God. Throughout the following centuries, Smith says, "in pamphlet after pamphlet, treatise after treatise, decade after decade, the notion was driven home that religion is something that one believes or does not believe, something whose propositions are true or are not true, something whose locus is in the realm of the intelligible, is up for inspection before the speculative mind." In modern times, religion became indistinguishable from systematizing ideas about God, religious institutions, and human beings; it categorized, organized, objectified, and divided people into exclusive worlds of right versus wrong, true versus false, "us" versus "them
But the modern definition of "religion," according to Smith, is not close to the original meaning of religio. Unlike religion as system of belief, religio meant faith—living, subjective experience including love, veneration, devotion, awe, worship, transcendence, trust, a way of life, an attitude toward the divine or nature, or, as Smith describes, "particular way of seeing and feeling the world
For a generation or more, many people in the West have been reaching toward religio—only they call it "spirituality," because no other English word communicates their longings—as a replacement for what needs to change. Modern scholars argue that the word itself comes to us from ligare, meaning "to bind or connect." Hence, religio, means to "reconnect."
Christianity was never intended to be a system or structure of belief in the modern sense; it originated as a disposition of the heart. A surprising thing has happened, however. In those same forty years, in some quarters at least, there has been a return to the older understanding of belief-as-trust.
In the past reason and heart were seen as distant. However, Bass sees reason as a pathway toward belief and a pathway back to our hearts. It is a means of transformation – not just something happened in head but could change you and world.
Summary -We believe with our entire being, trusting, beloving, and devoted to the God whom we have encountered through one another and in the world. We are; we act; we know.
2. Belong –
a. Identity. Belonging is an important aspect of religion. To which family of faith do you belong? What community will you join? What is your religious tribe? Do your people have a name? Where is your spiritual home?
In the United States, conventional Protestant, Roman Catholic and Jewish identities are eroding and they are abandoning their churches. Religious decline means countless numbers of people in the world today a suffering a sense of loss.
Indeed, some Christians are very comfortable defining themselves as adherents to a way of life modeled by Jesus, rather than adherents to a particular doctrine or creed
One of the most prominent trends is religious switching. Roughly 44 percent of Americans have left their childhood faith in favor of another denomination or religion or by dropping any religious affiliation at all, with the biggest gain of "adherents" in the "unaffiliated" category.
Fifty years ago, people were born into a religion—a faith often passed down through many generations—and tended to stay with their childhood church. Inherited faith was an important dimension of personal identity
Churches and synagogues, parents and relatives enforced strict rules about marrying inside one’s faith. About a century ago, almost three-quarters of Americans believed that shared religious beliefs were "very important" in making a successful marriage, and only 12 percent of American couples were in an interfaith marriage. Through the last century, attitudes toward shared religious beliefs softened and the number of interfaith marriages rose in every decade, reaching highs in the 30 to 33 percent range as the twentieth century closed, and "a bit fewer than one-third of all marriages remain mixed today
Questions of belonging and identity have not always been as pointed as they are today. In medieval Europe, for example, there had developed a relatively stable sense of identity—you were who you were by accepting your place in a great chain of being, God’s ordering of the universe from pope and king down through the ranks, and obeying those God had placed in authority over you. In the late Middle Ages, however, this began to change. Economic changes undermined the idea that God assigned people to a particular station as a new middle class experienced social mobility. In the 18th century, doubt crept into the picture
In the 1960s and 1970s, scores of people moved in similar ways. People saw self as seeker, searcher, nomad, traveler, pilgrim, or tourist—identities of discovery and fluidity. “Who am I?” has become the question Where am I? I know that I am because that is where I was, this is where I am, and I am going somewhere else.
b. Bass considers the concept of salvation as part of the process of finding identity “ If sin was once seen as a twisted, self-centered quest to become God, then salvation was deliverance from the self in order to become other-centered. If the self is a problem, then the church’s job was to help people diminish the self and make room for God. Thus, salvation was freedom from ourselves, our humanity, and our ambitions.”
Catholics emphasized confession, penance, and sacraments as the way out of the human dilemma; Protestants (depending on the sort of Protestant) emphasized right belief, reordering priorities, and moral action as the paths away from sin.
Bass sees a different concept – “Salvation is not being saved from ourselves from dreadful fate of judgment, damnation, and hellfire at the hands of a wrathful God; rather, it is being saved to ourselves, finding what was lost and the joy of discovery in the hands of a loving Creator “
“Although the word "salvation" has come to mean "eternal life" in most religious circles, it is helpful to return to the word’s Latin root “salvus”, meaning "whole," "sound," "healed," "safe," "well," or "unharmed," as a way to understand the spirituality of salvation. Salvation and spirituality and self are related—spirituality connects us to the whole, allows us a glimpse into our place within God and God’s "world, giving a new sense of health and well-being in our situations and identities. The idea of salvation need not be rejected; rather, it needs to be brought back to a truer rendering of its root meaning. We need to come to an authentic sense of personhood, stitching together what was unraveled into a new whole.”
c. “Who am I in God?” needs to be part of this search for identity – “Over the next several generations, however, God slipped farther and farther into the background. Most people did not take God out of the question, but the question moved away from God and more toward human experience. Eventually, as this shift occurred, it increasingly emerged as a human question, a question about "me" distant or disconnected from God, asked with little or no reference to a transcendent Being. As we moved through time, the once assumed phrase "in God" was forgotten. And we answered the question "Who am I?" in solely ethical, biological, psychological, social, and material ways with diminished capacity for the mystery and wonder of personhood.”
Who am I in God?" This is one of the classical questions of Christian spirituality, one rooted in the person of Jesus, the Gospels, and the experience of early Christian community. Why do Christians pray? Christians do not pray to have wishes granted; rather, Christians pray to find themselves in God and that they might be more aware of their motives and actions. Why do Christians worship?
Finding one’s self in God is also to find God in one’s self. Although Christian spirituality has often better understood the first half of the equation, the second half is the powerful—and even radical—substratum of experiential faith
And the reverse question is equally helpful: "Who is God through me?" What does God actually look like to others when I enact God’s love and justice in the world? What vision of God is moving through me? Christian spirituality of the self enjoins that God is not only located in us, but that God acts, speaks, heals, loves, touches, and celebrates through us.
The idea of journeying to find a deeper sense of identity is not new to Christian spirituality. Community is about relationships and making connections. For Christians, spiritual community, a living, renewed church, begins with being in Christ, the first and primary relationship of a vibrant faith life. The church is, therefore, not an institution, an organization, or a building, but a community of relationships where people’s selves are with God and with one another, bound by love
“Belonging is the risk to move beyond the world we know, to venture out on pilgrimage, to accept exile. And it is the risk of being with companions on that journey, God, a spouse, friends, children, mentors, teachers, people who came from the same place we did, people who came from entirely different places, saints and sinners of all sorts, those known to us and those unknown, our secret longings, questions, and fears. “Whose am I?” “O God, I am thine”
The problem – Faith increasingly became a commodity and membership roles and money the measures of success. The business of the church replaced the mission of the church. If the old mainline churches were unresponsive to their spiritual needs, the faithful would go elsewhere.
Summary -We belong to God and to one another, connected to all in a web of relationships, and there we find our truest selves. This is creating community, belonging to God and to each other so we can see we belong to the world. Congregational life should nurture this.
3 Behave – Shift how (“rules, order, program” to what do you do (“meaning”)
People attend religious services less often and when they do attend public worship, a significant number of people attend the service of a faith other than their own. There is a steady decline of actual religious service attendance from 1975 to 2008, falling from 32 to 24 percent; at the same time, conventional surveys report stable church attendance in the mid-40s
And, in the case of prayer, the most widely held spiritual practice, blending, borrowing, and mixing forms are far more common than maintaining a single, church-approved rite, ritual, and style
Alternate forms of behavior have come about –practices
Practices weave together a way of life, they shape character, create connections between people, order our choices, to encounter God and deepen our wisdom about living in the world
American Catholics have borrowed practices like the Pentecostal speaking in tongues. The reverse is true
a. Prayer – These practices include prayers of all varieties: fixed-hour prayer, intercessory prayer, contemplative prayer, repetitive pray. (like the Jesus prayer or rosary prayers), prayers of praise, and extemporaneous prayer. In addition, American Protestants borrowed from the practice of praying with icons from the Eastern Orthodox and re-created prayer practices out of ancient Celtic, Nordic, and Native American traditions. Both Catholics and Protestants borrow from other religions as well— especially true when it comes to meditation and bodily prayers such as yoga.
b. Devotional practices also include reading and reflecting on holy texts, Bible study, scripture memorization, learning the lives of the saints, and concentrated study of and reflecting upon theology and history.
c. Fasting on special days (such as Ash Wednesday and Good Friday)
d. Ritual around calendar- a calendar of feasts and holy days that stretch through the year to mark "holy time";
e. Meditation and silence
f. keeping the Sabbath, primarily through public worship on Sunday
And the biggest change of all—people now pray with one another across denominational walls and religious barriers. Catholics pray with Protestants; evangelical Protestants pray with Jews; mainline Protestants pray with Muslims; Buddhists with Unitarians. Faith mixing signals a decline of the old ways. It simultaneously signifies a renewal of spiritual imagination and creativity
Although Western Christianity would eventually be defined as a belief system about God, throughout its first five centuries people understood it primarily as spiritual practices that offered a meaningful way of life in this world—not as a neat set of doctrines, an esoteric belief, or the promise of heaven. By practicing Jesus’s teaching, followers of the way discovered that their lives were made better on a practical spiritual path. Indeed, early Christianity was not called "Christianity" at all. Rather, it was called "the Way," and its followers were called "the People of the Way." Members of the community were not held accountable for their opinions about God or Jesus; rather, the community measured faithfulness by how well its members practiced loving God and neighbor. Not offering hospitality was a much greater failure than not believing that Jesus was "truly God and truly human."
Why of behavior – The New Testament is rife with stories of imitating Jesus—from welcoming strangers to how one prays, from forgiving one another to accepting those who are different, from feeding hungry people laying down one’s life for one’s friends. Indeed, Jesus’s refrain to followers is insistent: "Go and do likewise." Christian spirituality grounded in the principle of imitation,
What of behavior –Christianity actually has a discipline that enables people to choose among practices answer the what question. It is called discernment, the wise choosing of a spiritual path. As the early Christians believed, although many practices may be permitted, not all practices are necessarily helpful in building character, knowing God, or serving one’s neighbor
Christians do certain things seeking to imitate Jesus and Jesus’s followers who went before. This is not a set of rules, a prescribed piety, a list of dos and don’ts, or convention.
Ultimately, the what and why of behavior, of practice, leads back to the how. Spiritual practices – Spiritual practices are more like crafts than programs. They are activities you discern, choose, and learn, actions in which you develop skill and mastery to help you become a different sort of person
Spiritual practices actually pick up an ancient thread in our understanding of the reign God. The dominant narrative of God’s reign has been the one mentioned above: the first Christians believed that Jesus would restore the kingdom; medieval Christians believed that the church was ( kingdom; Reformed Christians believed that true Christians embodied the kingdom in word and sacrament; and modern Christians believed that they could create the kingdom through their work. But there has also been another story about the reign of God—the notion that God’s people anticipate and participate in the kingdom through spiritual practices.
->Summary -We behave in imitation of Jesus, practicing our faith with deliberation as we anticipate God’s reign of justice and love. It is now shifting from “how we do it” to “what do we do.” What does God want us to do?” This involves practices to encounter God for the sake of the world – practices of soul and those of ethics.
Instead of believing, behaving, and belonging, we need to reverse the order to belonging, behaving, and believing. And therein lie; the difference between religion- as-institution and religion as a spiritually vital faith.
It is also the path found in the New Testament; the Way of Jesus that leads to God. Long ago, before the last half millennium, Christians understood that faith was a matter of community first, practices second, and belief as a result of the first two. Our immediate ancestors reversed the order. Now, it is up to us to restore the original order
Belonging, behaving, and believing—shifted back to their proper and ancient order. This is the shape of awakened Christianity, a faith that is a deeply spiritual religion. No longer merely religion, but “religio”. The Great Reversal is the Great Returning of Christianity back toward what Jesus preached: a beloved and beloving community, a way of life practiced in the world, a profound trust in God that eagerly anticipates God’s reign of mercy and justice
The awakening going on around us is not an evangelical revival; it is not returning to the faith of our fathers or re-creating our grandparents’ church. Instead, it is a Great Returning to ancient understandings of the human quest for the divine.
Christianity of the Great Returning is the oldest-time religion—reclaiming a faith where belief is not quite the same thing as an answer, where behavior is not following a list of dos and don’ts, and where belonging to Christian community is less like joining an exclusive club and more of a relationship with God and others.
Religio is never satisfied with old answers, codified dogmas, institutionalized practices, or invested power. Religio invites every generation to experience God—to return to the basic questions of believing, behaving, and belonging—and explore each anew with an open heart
Prayer, discernment, hospitality, service to others, forgiveness, testimony, conversation, and friendship—all function to create new connections between neighbors and revitalize public discourse. Renewed spiritual practice gives the anxious an ability to reach out to those who are different, to experience friendship and community, to reconcile, heal, and serve. In an awakening, we actually wake up and see ourselves, our neighbors, and our world from a different perspective. Awakening opens the imagination toward what might be, instead of only what was.
The Fourth Great Awakening is not a quest to escape the world. Instead, it moves into the heart of the world, facing the challenges head-on to take what is old—failed institutions, scarred landscapes, wearied religions, a wounded planet—and make them workable and humane in the service of global community. No miracles here. God does not heal without human hands. The hard work is the possibility
Romantic realism is strengthened through spiritual practices that shape devotion, character, and ethics. These practices require attention, time, and teaching; they need to be formed and nurtured in a guildlike community of beginners, novices, craftspeople, masters, and innovators. Through the self, community, and practice, the awakened romantics experience God, discovering new possibilities of trust, devotion, and love directed toward their neighbors and dedicated to anticipating the future of God’s peace, goodness, and justice at work in the world now. The goal is not to bring about a Utopian kingdom; rather, the goal is to perform the reign of God in and for the life of the world.
We are slowly, painfully, patiently learning what it means to live in particular faiths, honoring the wisdom of others in a mutual, spiritual quest toward "full human existence."
During each spiritual awakening, people have asked the same questions: What do we do to bring about renewal? How do we experience new light? Can we participate in God’s work? As a result, in each successive period of awakening, Christian folk—pastors and lay leaders alike—wrote volumes on these concerns, all explaining how to promote the spiritual work of revitalization.
Prayer, preaching, Pentecostal gifts, and progressive theology and politics—these were the pathways of past awakenings. What is the way today? How can people participate in the spiritual renewal that is reshaping the world now? What can we do about it?
The key today – Performance has always been important to awakening
Performing faith involves four important actions: prepare, practice, play, and participate. Preparing by learning the story, rehearsing a new way of life, having fun, and joining with others are key to acting out spiritual awakening.
1. You must prepare by learning the overall religious story of our time. And that story is deceptively simple. Conventional religion is failing and a new form of faith, which some call "spirituality" and can also be called religio, is being born.
Challenge yourself by listening to sermons from other traditions, read holy texts from other faiths, pick up books from controversial authors. Preparing to take part in a performance is not a matter of imitating other actors, but of delving into the material and discovering from within a fresh interpretation of ancient stories. But these stories cannot be read in isolation from the culture.
2. Practice –In order to embody the story and help others experience it, we need to practice our faith intentionally in ways that anticipate compassion and justice.
One should be an inner practice, such as prayer, yoga, or meditation, and the other, an outward practice, such as offering hospitality to the homeless or learning to be a storyteller. Join with a community of people who already engage the practice at a congregation, at a community center, or through a nonprofit group. Explore dimensions of the practice by going to a workshop, listening to a teacher, reading a book
When Jesus said, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven," he was directing his followers to do something. God’s reign does not fall from heaven to those who wait. The people of God must live the kingdom by purposefully doing actions that rehearse love, charity, kindness, goodness, mercy, peace, forgiveness, and justice.
3. Performance involves the hard work of practice, but it also entails play. Sometimes movements of change bog down, because those involved become so serious about the work that they forget about the basic human need for fun, delight, and joy. Awakening cannot occur without laughter and lightness
4. Finally, performance requires that we participate It may seem self-evident, but every person has to make the choice to act. Spiritual transformation does not happen by watching a self-help guru on a DVD, studying about prayer, or listening to a great speech. No one can do it for us. Spiritual transformation happens only as we jump in and make a difference.
II. Ten Signposts of Renewal from “Christianity for the Rest of Us” – Diana Butler Bass
Bass researched 50 congregations for study. The 50 congregations were chosen “in which new things appeared to be happening, and where people were growing deeper and experiencing a new sense of identity by intentionally engaging Christian practices”
10 congregations served as “in-depth” sites where researchers devoted several weeks or months to the churches. The sizes of the congregations ranged from 35 to 2,500 members.
Churches represented the following six denominations: United Church of Christ (UCC), Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA), Episcopal Church (ECUSA), United Methodist Church (UMC), Presbyterian Church (PCUSA), and Disciples of Christ (DoC).
Rev. Lillian Daniel, the minister of Church of the Redeemer in New Haven, CT, embodies what Bass sees as third way for churches today: “…a blended sort of Christian theology and spirituality that draws from the deep wells of tradition and yet is generously open to change and the remaking of those very traditions. Congregations need to become “comprehensive churches” that emphasize “life in this world” by offering practices “that enable people to live better and more faithfully in God” (36). A comprehensive church does not make “grand claims” about eternity and salvation.
New Village church taking over from the older
The primary mission of a church should be as a spiritual community that “forms people of faith.” Bass argues that mainline churches decline when they neglect scripture and prayer, discernment and hospitality, contemplation and justice”. Bass emphasizes more than once that mainline churches must be careful not to simply become a kind of Christian Rotary Club. Instead, churches should form a “trinity of vitality.” This trinity is:
A. Tradition, Not Traditionalism
B. Practice, Not Purity
C. Wisdom, Not Certainty
Ten Signpost of renewal
1. Hospitality
“Hospitality is the ‘creation of free space’ where strangers become friends. ‘Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place’” (79).
“True Christian hospitality is not a recruitment strategy designed to manipulate strangers into church membership. Rather, it is a central practice of the Christian faith – something Christians are called to do for the sake of that thing itself” (81).
“God’s hospitality demands…that all are welcome” (83).
“Hospitality is not tame practice, an option to offer only to those who are likable” (83).
“Hospitality changes both the host and the guest” (85).
“One of the oldest themes in Christian literature about hospitality is the deliberate confusion of the roles of host and guest” (86).
2. Discernment
Discernment is “a genuine sensing of truth and beauty through which we know God and know God’s will….But Christian tradition points toward…discernment as a practice that can be developed through participation in reflection, questions, prayer, and community” (91).
The danger of relativism: “if the old village and all the old answers have vanished, then how do seekers determine goodness, truthfulness, and beauty?” (93).
The third way: Asking ‘God-questions’ instead of ‘I-questions.’ “God-questions shift our focus from what we do to what God is doing, by helping us understand where we fit in the larger economy of God’s hope for the world” (94).
“Discernment does not simply confirm our hunches or intuitions. Instead it is a perilous practice that involves self-criticism, questions, and risk – and often it redirects our lives” (95).
Five phases of discernment: “faith, distinguishing between good and evil, practical wisdom, sensitivity to pursue God’s will, and finally, contemplation of wisdom” (96).
In emerging Christianity, discernment is the spiritual process through which metanoia, being “born again” in God’s truth, beauty, and love, occurs. Thus, discernment points the way, guides the way, and becomes the way – the way that begins with God-questions, that winds through wisdom, and ends in the healing of the world” (97).
3. Healing
“Harmony is a kind of healing or making whole, the creation of what is disordered into what is ordered. In short, harmony is a kind of healing or making whole, the creation of what is disordered into what is ordered” “God’s salvation is a process of healing whereby they are transformed—and, in turn, they open themselves to transforming the world” (106).
“For mainline pilgrims, salvation entails several levels of healing: emotions and psyche, physical wellness, human reconciliation, and cosmic restoration.” (108).
4. Contemplation
Saint Bernard of Clairvaux: “‘Continual silence, and removal from the noise of the things in this world and forgetfulness of them, lifts the heart and asks us to think of the things of heave and sets our heart upon them’” (117).
The contrast: “Some church-growth specialists think that more successful churches entertain people during worship – the more activity, the more noise, the more loud music, the better. From that perspective, silence is boring and an evangelism turnoff” (119).
“Human desire for fulfillment cannot be satisfied by the world. True knowledge of the self, of love and meaning comes only in silence” (121).
“Restraint is not a word that most people associate with contemporary Christianity. But Holy Communion [Church] has opened up a pathway of contemplation that entails reflection, attention, and restraint” (122).
5. Testimony
“At most of the congregations I visited, I heard people speak of faith—offering their testimonies to the power of God in changing their lives and their communities” (133).
“In many ways, testimony is the most democratic – and empowering of all Christian practices. The entire New Testament is a testimony, a record of experiences that early Christians had with the transformative power of God” (134).
“Our stories no longer tell tales of spiritual acquiescence and conformity. Rather, they tell of finding meaning, finding unique selves, and finding God in a confusing and chaotic world” (138).
“Testimony is not about God fixing people. Rather, it speaks of God making wholeness out of human woundedness, human incompleteness” (141).
6. Diversity
“Some Protestant pastors look at…diversity as a problem, bemoaning the decline of denominational identity and the rise of theological chaos….[But] ‘the loss in homogeneity leads to a richer diversity’ [that] is a source of ‘complex wisdom’” (145).
“Unlike evangelical churches – where doctrinal uniformity is considered nonnegotiable—theological diversity shapes the daily life of most mainline churches” (146).
Cherishing diversity of every kind: political, theological, cultural, and racial (148).
“A Christian practice of diversity is not secular relativism. Rather, it is the active construction of a boundary-crossing community, a family bound not by blood but by love, that witnesses to the power of God’s healing in the world. Throughout the scriptures, God is a God who delights in diversity” (148).
7. Justice
“Doing justice is much more than supporting a particular party and its policy agenda. Doing justice goes beyond fixing unfair and oppressive structures. Doing justice means engaging the powers – transforming the ‘inner spirit’ of all systems of injustice, violence and exclusion” (161).
“Throughout my journey with emerging mainline congregations, I encountered people doing justice that involved hands-on service, linking social concerns and spirituality in local mission and activism” (164).
8. Worship
Alternative worship’s influence on traditional worship: Scottsdale Congregational “takes the material of everyday life – art, music, film, and reflection – and assumes that it is the entryway to the sacred. Combining elements of jazz, performance art, film clips and video, multimedia reflection, live-camera feed, testimony, readings, silence, contemplative prayer, and journaling, they christened this service The Studio” Eventually, they moved elements of that alternative service to the traditional service: “…instead of jettisoning traditional worship, [they] applied the principles of experiential worship from The Studio to the other service. (174).
“In the congregations in my study, mainline worship had moved eighteen inches: from the head to the heart.”
“Worship is much more than something Christians attend on Sunday morning – it is something pilgrims make together” (178).
“For too long, mainline Protestants equated worship with thinking about God. Now, in at least some places, their hearts—the whole capacity of being human—are learning to experience God” (178).
“I realized that the kind of music and art did not matter in worship. Rather, innovation and experimentation mattered” (182).
9. Reflection
“At its core, theological reflection is a way of seeing the world, of being able to imagine life in a relationship to God’s story, of linking the intellectual content of faith to its everyday practice” (187).
“At Redeemer [Church], teaching and Bible study are not concerned with dogma and doctrinal facts; rather, they immerse themselves in the biblical stories, attempting to connect their lives with the text’s ancient wisdom” (188).
“Everywhere, mainline pilgrims insisted upon the importance of intellectual openness to spiritual vitality” (191)
“These mainline pilgrims linked intellectual curiosity with humility, however. For the people I met, thinking theologically did not mean arriving at certain conclusions” (191).
“Christian reflection is not done in an ivory tower; it is not the quiet contemplation of the monastery garden. Rather, reflection is the pathway to a life of awe-filled action” (195).
10. Beauty
“[A]t Redeemer [Church] music, liturgy, and word were completely one, as were the choir, minister, and congregation. Indeed, the congregation appeared to be inside the music, not just watching a performance” (204).
“In every congregation I visited, there was a growing emphasis on beauty, on knowing God through art, music, and drama, on engaging more than just the mind” (208).
“Some people refer to this turn of intellectual events as ‘postmodern,’ a shift away from Enlightenment reason toward more experiential forms of knowing” (209).
“Christianity is changing – from being the Truth of rational speculation to being an exploration of the exquisite truthfulness of beauty” (210).