Conference examines the emerging church

By Tammi Reed Ledbetter

Baptist Press

WAKE FOREST - The emerging church movement has arisen to fill a void created by the ineffectiveness of most conventional churches in spreading the gospel, researcher-missiologist Ed Stetzer said at a Sept. 21-22 "Convergent" conference at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Stetzer and Mark Driscoll, pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle and president of the Acts 29 Network for church planting, were among the conference's featured speakers at the Wake Forest campus.

Before comparing the orthodoxy of conventional churches and emerging churches, Stetzer challenged the crowd of 500-plus pastors, church planters and seminarians to ask what has prompted the need for alternative churches.

As director of LifeWay Research and missiologist-in-residence at LifeWay Christian Resources of the Southern Baptist Convention, Stetzer said Southern Baptist churches are not evidencing healthy growth. While many churches note increases, very little of that growth comes from evangelistic conversion, he said.

"If we're not growing through seeing men and women come to faith in Christ, then something's wrong," Stetzer said.

From Luke ' he identified three things churches must recover to stay on mission: the centrality of the cross, the message of repentance for forgiveness of sins, and the importance of the witness.

Stetzer spoke of some pastors who seem to convey, "This is my Bible and I'll never refer to it again," lacking confidence in the gospel's power to change lives. Without the gospel front and center, Christians give up on the church, he said, challenging such disengagement by declaring, "I know the bride of Christ is not pretty, but you cannot love Jesus and hate His wife."

Stetzer said God is at work in biblically faithful churches transforming lives through repentance and forgiveness.

"If our desire is to create a denomination where everyone looks alike, everyone worships in the same way, everyone does all the cultural, traditional trappings and we call that biblically faithful, we will never reach beyond the narrow, cultural confines that have defined us," Stetzer said. "If we are going to reach men and women from every tongue, tribe and nation, it is going to take all kinds of scripturally sound churches to reach all kinds of people."

Instead of being upset about emerging churches or the influence of "first, second and third John," referring to three famous Reformed theology preachers named John - Calvin, Piper and MacArthur - Stetzer called on Southern Baptists to affirm their faith statement and share their witness for Christ.

"Whether conventional, traditional, emerging, Calvinist or a little less so, just get on mission and be faithful to the gospel."

Driscoll previewed some of the research he compiled on the increasingly liberal views of the left-leaning Emergent Village, to be published first in the Christian Research Journal and subsequently as a book by Crossway.

Although Driscoll's church, which is not affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, has held a New Year's Eve service with champagne, he said Emergents are rewriting what it means to be a Christian by abandoning substitutionary atonement when they avoid speaking of the cross in reference to sin.

"There is nothing that we have to offer apart from the person of Jesus and His work on the cross," Driscoll said. "So if the cross is lost, Christianity is lost, and hope is lost and Christ is lost. That means that, ultimately, we are lost. So this issue of the atonement is incredibly important."

Driscoll said some of those he analyzed also support controversial doctrines such as open theism and process theology; they hold to a "trajectory hermeneutic" that allows doctrine to evolve; they shift from a complementarian to an egalitarian view of male leadership in biblical matters; and some even deny the virgin birth.

Alvin Reid, an evangelism professor at Southeastern Seminary, told the conference that too many Southern Baptists think there is a direct correspondence between "how we look and how we believe" - and both are unchanging.

"If the 1950s come back, a lot of our churches will be ready," said Reid, urging contextualization of the gospel without compromising doctrine. "One does not have to sacrifice orthodoxy for orthopraxy or vice versa," he said.

Instead of expecting people to come to church and act like those who are already there, churches need to go into the community serving as Jesus did, Reid said. "We've turned church from a movement we advance to an institution we maintain," he said.

Reid praised the emerging church movement for recognizing the extent of lostness and engaging the culture but warned of the lack of doctrinal teaching. They often are missional without being intentional in sharing their faith, he said, and they often disrespect the modern church.

J.D. Greear, pastor of Summit Church in Durham, encouraged conference participants to follow the Apostle Paul's approach to ministry in Macedonia as described in Acts 16 to reach people in different contexts. He urged churches to develop a ministry of mercy while keeping the gospel central, then following Jesus to share that message through cross-cultural contextualization.

Greear told young pastors to draw a line in the sand to challenge traditional congregations to reach the lost. "If they won't follow you, let them fire you and then just go plant a church," he said. "It's easier to give birth to babies than raise the dead."

(EDITOR'S NOTE - Tammi Reed Ledbetter is a freelance writer based in Grand Prairie, Texas. Lauren Crane, a writer for Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, contributed to this article. The entire messages by "Convergent" conference speakers are available at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary's website via the chapel link at www.sebts.edu.)