The Emergent Church

The other day I was at jittery joes and the guy behind the counter set down his book to make my coffee. I looked down and saw that he was reading a book on the emergent church and that got me thinking. I wanted to ask him about it but I felt like I wasn't well read enough on the emergent church to tell him what I think. I know that it makes me uneasy, but I need to study up on it more to really be able to respond to areas where the emergent church is misldeading.

It's fascinating to me how much the emergent church is so clearly a result of our post-modernistic culture. The literature, music, videos, and ideas that have resulted from the emergent church are a direct result of our questioning, "feel good" culture. It's so interesting how popular the emergent church has become in the past few years.

I read a review on Rob Bell's NOOMA videos by Greg Gilbert. In this review he says that he think one of the biggest reasons why the emergent church has grown in popularity so quickly is because the "offensive" elements of the gospel have been taken out.

Gilbert quotes a (scary) passage from Bell's book Velvet Elvis:

The fact that we are loved and accepted and forgiven in spite of everything we have done is simply too good to be true. Our choice becomes this: We can trust his [God’s] retelling of the story, or we can trust our telling of our story. It is a choice we make every day about the reality we are going to live in.

And this reality extends beyond life.

Heaven is full of forgiven people.

Hell is full of forgiven people.

Heaven is full of people God loves, whom Jesus died for.

Hell is full of forgiven people God loves, whom Jesus died for.

The difference is how we choose to live, which story we choose to live in, which version of reality we trust.

Ours or God’s.

Excuse me, wait a second, did Rob Bell really say the difference is how we choose to live? Is that the gospel? Is it really about how we live? Can we really make the choice, in our own strength, to live in "God's story" (whatever that means)?

In response to this Gilbert says, "I don’t know how else to understand this: What Bell is asserting here is a bizarre kind of universalism in which every human being is forgiven and yet some forgiven people end up in hell anyway. The NOOMA might be slippery, but this passage from Velvet Elvis isn’t at all, and that may offer some insight on what he’s actually saying in NOOMA. The only way I can see to understand it is that Bell is telling lost people that they are forgiven, that they are in relationship with God, even that the Spirit of God lives in them and is waiting to guide them and sanctify them if only they’d wake up and realize it.

That kind of thinking though is devastatingly misleading to lost people. To be lost is not merely to be ignorant about the fact that you are already in relationship with God, forgiven, free, and full of his Spirit. To be lost is to be separated from God and under his judgment. That’s a crucial part of the gospel, not just because Bell’s alternative involves the absurdity of forgiven people suffering in hell; it’s crucial because, unless you understand that God hates sin and judges it, the cross doesn’t make any sense. In fact, it becomes kind of superfluous. The fact is, somebody could hear Rob Bell’s version of the gospel in NOOMA and walk away feeling forgiven and Spirit-filled without a single thought about Jesus’ death. And at that point, what you have is something quite other than Christianity."

The rest of Gilbert's review is pretty long but it's definitely worth the read. Click here if you're interested!