The Hsu’s Views

Preacher’s Magazine over at Nazarene Publishing House has published an article by Hal Knight called “John Wesley and the Emerging Church.” Knight does a good job at trying to tentatively define “emerging church” in an effort to make the case that the Wesleyan tradition would do well to embrace this emerging development in the church.

He make several observations about the emerging church and then comments on parallels with Wesley.

1. Emerging churches understand discipleship as “following closely and emulating the person and ministry of Jesus.” Knight comments that many of these emerging post-evangelicals “are actually very much in the spirit of an earlier evangelicalism that was rooted in Wesley’s vision of holiness of heart and life… This evangelicialism was committed to ministries with the poor, abolition of slavery, and women’s rights as well as fervently evangelistic.”
2. Emerging churches are pre-eminently missional. They seek to be communities who participate in the mission of God in the world. They understand church structures not as ends in themselves but as means to mission. Wesley believed God had raised the “people called Methodists” “to reform the nation, particularly the church, and to spread scriptural holiness over the land.”
3. Emerging churches are radically incarnational. They see all of life as being holy, rejecting the dualisms of sacred/secular, public/private, mind/body, faith/reason that are so central to Enlightenment thought.
4. Emerging churches are alternative communities. The church is seen as a people who do not “go to church,” because they “are the church.” They are frequently networks of small groups seeking mutual accountability as a central practice. “The parallels with Wesley are obvious: a network of small groups, mutual accountability, transformed lifestyles, relationship in community and living for mission.”
5. Proclamation and teaching in emerging chruhes finds truth more in bibilical narrative than a rational/propositional reading of scripture.

Knight also notes one other feature of emerging churches, namely their generous orthodoxy. Read the article. It is good stuff.

Missional, Movements, Order, Organizational Theory, Social Concern