CHURCH & THE CULTURE
(Posted 2011-06-02 18:25:55 by ArchPaladin)

It never fails.  Spend a fair amount of time away from the blog, and then
when one topic comes in you suddenly get swamped with things to say.

The emerging church [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerging_church ]
[wikipedia.org] is an interesting idea.  If you want a real-life example,
you can look at Moot [ http://www.moot.uk.net/ ] [moot.uk.net]  It's too
broad an idea to describe in a post, but perhaps the most salient point
that I took away from the concept is the idea that the church's appearance
(and to a point, its language) is going to be directed by the culture from
which its members come.  This is in contrast to a point of view I often
hear - namely that the church is largely to transcend the culture from
which it comes because the church is a community whose culture is provided
by God in Scripture.  Of course, in practice this often works out to a
community attempting to adopt the cultural practices of the denomination
that they are a part of - meaning that they are picking up practices that
were most relevant at a certain point in time for a particular culture of
people.

I admit I find this a very challenging issue.  The tradition that I come
from falls into the camp that church should be separate from the
surrounding culture.  As a whole I agree with this view, but in practice
the things that I would adopt or see implemented are very contextual.  I
also acknowledge that the things that speak to my generation (at this point
in our lives) also require a lot of cultural involvement.  Obscure or
traditional practices done for their own sake, or for the sake of
tradition, are likely to be met with apathy if not outright ignored or
dismissed out-of-hand.  Furthermore, I acknowledge that the actions of the
actual first-century churches in Rome, Greece, and Asia often also had
contextual elements to them (consider the Corinthian dispute on head
coverings, and Paul's discussions on liberty) - an oft overlooked point by
those who want to transcend culture.

The problem I find in resolving this question is that I have great
difficulty seeing how to work this in a modern era without leading to all
sorts of interpersonal conflict and shattering the church, and this
presents me with a number of questions:

* Is it wrong to have discussions over heretical teachings?  Christianity
should be able to stand for itself.

* Am I unable to come up with a reconciliation because of my traditions or
in spite of them?

* Do I perceive this conflict because of my tendency to hold to traditional
doctrine too strongly?

* Do I not have a broad enough perspective of God or Christian community to
see how this could work?

* Is this all just a moot question because it would instead result in
small, tight-knit communities?



My following of this topic derails at this point.  I tend to think that a
more thorough historical understanding of how the church has dealt with
heresy and fracture would be a good way to address these questions, but I
currently lack this knowledge.

Overall I think that these ideas have a lot of merit to them, but are
easily open to abuse.  And as a whole, I have seen too few examples of the
emerging church to see how this would work peacefully.

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