my personal...

The idea of church, its value and function, its life and processes, are formed within us as we learn about and experience it. Everything that I understood church to be was the result of being raised in one. I think this may be true of a lot of what we might call "the younger evangelicals" (book still on my shelf... summers coming!), who grew up in the albatross that is the evangelical church. Now, I must admit that I did not have a particularly negative experience in my 'home' church. In fact, I still have a lot of family friends there and speak with the youth pastor on a regular basis. The trouble was not with my church but more so with my understanding of it, which at some point contributed to my very elitist, personal church.

I was an idiot.

To be quite honest, I really had no time for churches from other denominations, let alone the Catholic church- dear goodness-we should drop off some tracts. I suppose I had no concept of church history, the universal body of Christ or the notion that my church might ever be (gulp) wrong. I'm not saying that it is, or was, only that I didn't understand the church as a group of people whose messy lives are connected in this thing called salvation, and that its not, and probably never will be a perfect community.

All of this to say, I think that the idea of personal church is what has caused so much anger when people dissect and critique the Emergent Church because it is different than what we have come to know as 'the church'. We think that if there is another way to 'do' or 'be' church, that our way is wrong and thus the Emergent Church is an attack on our 80 year old traditional church. We think that we have to defend our church and our church practice, that we must go on the offensive to prove that EC is wrong and thus be validated in our own experience of church. After all, if our church isn't wrong, our church doesn't need to change.

I don't think that right or wrong is the question I'm asking. I was speaking with Craig Carter the other day and he made this statement, "I'm more concerned about why 450 people are showing up on Saturday than whether Mclaren's understanding of the atonement is orthodox". Regardless of right or wrong, why is this happening?

I don't expect many answers soon, its probably hard to pinpoint and involves a lot of, shall we say...conversations. Nonetheless, I'm happy that its happening and am more excited about the future of the church than ever before.