Bonhoeffer / Emerging Church paper and AETE

[I have revised this post].

At the last minute I was asked to be ready to present my paper on Bonhoeffer and Emerging Church movement at the Academy for Evangelism in Theological Education meeting.  But as it turned out, they didn't need me as all four presenters showed up.  The AETE met this year in Ashland, Ohio at Ashland Seminary. 

The paper I was going to present was the one I wrote for my Duke Th.D. application.  It has been on my blog for six months and I have made the changes people suggested there.  You can see it at: Bonhoeffer and the Emerging Church: Ph.D. Application Paper

"Who is the Academy for Evangelism in Theological Education?", you might ask.  The professors on the board are United Methodist, Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, evangelical Anglican and Southern Baptist.  The theme of this annual meeting was "engaging the emerging church." (Download AETE publicity.pdf).

The presenters this year were:

Bob Whitesel - who is a church consultant, author, adjunct professor at Indiana Wesleyan University, and is finishing his Ph.D. at the School for Intercultural Studies at Fuller Seminary.  Bob tried to describe the way organic / emerging / missional church leaders think.  He tries to help older church leaders understand this mindset.      

Paul Chilcote - who is a visiting professor of evangelism at Duke Divinity School shared a paper comparing various positive aspects of the emerging church movement to the work of John Wesley. 

Bryan Stone - who is a E. Stanley Jones Professor of Evangelism at the School of Theology at Boston University, pointed out that though the emerging church may appear at first glance disgusted by the institutional church, it is deeply focused on seeing people connected into community. 

Len Sweet - who is E. Stanley Jones Professor of Evangelism at Drew University also presented comments about the emerging church movement.

There were also a couple of papers presented by Southern Baptist pastors, Adam Greenway and William Henard.  Henard is an adjunct professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY and Greenway is a Ph.D. student.  They both have concerns with Brian McLaren's view of Scripture, doctrine, atonement, evangelism, and ethics. 

The United Methodist E. Stanley Jones Professors of Evangelism from various United Methodist seminaries sometimes attend this meeting and then meet afterward together.  The Foundation For Evangelism which funds the E. Stanley Jones professors of evangelism are also funding my doctoral program.

Comments

[Nathan Herman]

Andy, Just drifted in here while doing some research on the Emerging/Emergent Church. My wife and I, who both attended TUFW (well, actually FWBC, Summit Christian College...and then Taylor-FW), have serious concerns about the orthodoxy of this movement. Perhaps you do, as well, but this was not clear to me from my "skimming" of your paper. I sincerely hope I read your paper incorrectly and misunderstood your central premise, but nowhere in it did I see a clear presentation of any outside critical view of the movement's orthodoxy (and when I use this word I mean "fidelity to The Word"). I realize DB was the partial basis of your paper but, as we both know, DB is not our guide nor our rule. Again, I hope I severely missed your point (I believe it was an effort to guide the movement by DB's reasons for innovation, etc.), but if a thought, idea or movement is not able to withstand the best arguments of its opponents...well, I sincerely doubt the veracity of the same. Perhaps you merely assume the acceptance of the movement as you seek to improve the movement. But, from my perspective, that would seem a dangerous presupposition. There are many valid critiques/concerns of the Emerging Church that have nothing to do with the points you bring to light in your paper. There are many Emerging Church practices I would contend are either specifically condemned in Scripture or are syncretistic, at best. There are many positive, encouraging innovations happening in "Christianity" today, but there are also many dangerous doctrines finding their way into churches owing to a flashy, fresh-sounding label. May God help us as we seek to teach and lead the next generation(s). Sincerely (and hopefully mistakenly) yours, Nathan Herman P.S. Congratulations on the birth of Jacob!

[Andy Rowell]

Nathan,

For people very concerned about the emerging church, I recommend Ed Stetzer's article:

Understanding the emerging church

http://www.sbcbaptistpress.org/bpnews.asp?ID=22406

He is a Southern Baptist (i.e. conservative) and sees a mix of good and bad in the emerging church. He is right to see a range of expressions of the emerging church with different theological bases.

I agree that there are great methodological difficulties trying to figure out what Bonhoeffer would have had to say about the emerging church. Hence, I spend quite a bit of time in the paper trying to describe the emerging church and its historical roots. I also try to describe various bad ways of interpreting what Bonhoeffer would have thought about present movements.

For me the Scriptures are ultimately authoritative and thus more authoritative than Bonhoeffer. Thus, the Scriptures are a better grid by which to measure and evaluate the emerging church movement. But, it is an interesting question to compare Bonhoeffer and the Emerging Church movement, right?

In the final appendix, I give some suggestions on how we should approach the emerging church. Feel free to read through the other things I have written about the emerging church at http://www.andyrowell.net/andy_rowell/emerging_church/index.html

I am listening carefully to the the critics of the emerging church movement. But on the whole I think the movement is positive because of its potential to reach unchurched young people and question some dead traditions that were at their height in 1980's American evangelical Christianity.