Last week Shannon gave me an article by Tim Baker which was in the September/October issue of Youthworker magazine and is entitled “Building a Bridge: The Frustration between Theory and Practice.”
Here’s the gist of the article:
I’m struggling with trying to stay current (and look toward the future) of my youth ministry, while at the same time honoring the needs of my current student population and church culture. While I love the current thoughts and trends happening within the emergent church conversation, I struggle with taking the current trend toward postmodernism into my wonderfully clueless church. I’m finding that it’s nearly impossible to reconcile the new era of the church with where I am in local ministry. I love the trend, but the trend doesn’t fit me.
This struggle gets worse. When I go to the bookstore, surf the Net, and read through the current ministry magazines, there’s nothing available to me that helps bridge this gap. There’s nothing that helps me take current emergent thoughts and trends into my ministry situation. Yeah, there’s loads of philosophy by some pretty important, well-spoken people. They’re all philosophy, no praxis; approach leaves me and my ministry cold and stuck in what many would consider the ministry past.
This article was posted on the emergent board, but didn’t get much of a response.
As a staff we’ve been talking quite a bit about bridging the postmodern/emerging-modern/residual gap at our church. As a staff, we’re being shaped more and more by the emerging church literature, but we are working with a church that would definitely be considered residual/modern. We’re here because this is where we believe we’re supposed to be. We’re “tweeners.” We’ve grown up in modern churches, we’ve been trained by modern professors, but are discovering and in many ways have already bought into emerging church models. We’re trying to bridge the gap. Why? Because it needs to be bridged. That last thing we need in the church is another chasm separating people.
I have no quarrel with those who set out to plant emerging churches in an emerging culture. I have no problem with modern missionairies reaching modern people. I do have a problem with anybody who says the two populations can’t exist together in the same church. If the gospel can tear down the dividing wall between Jews and Gentiles in the first century, then I believe it can tear down the newly erected walls separating moderns/postmoderns/post-postmoderns/boomers/busters/blamers and whatever other categories we come up with.
No, it won’t be easy, but it’s worth the effort.
