Summary of Session 3

I think we had a really strong discussion for our last session with a lot of group presentation. We started off the night be discussing the Emerging Church movement, the principles of which seem very much behind our study book, Christianity for the Rest of Us. About half of our group was familiar with this movement.

The consensus of many of our group -- after having read and discussed the definition of emerging church -- was that we've been doing many of these things in our church already. One useful thing I think we discussed about emerging churches was the need to put the "mystery" back into Christianity. To illustrate the distinction between theological mystery vs. absolute truth, we discussed the anecdote in Bass's book of the young man who said that the Virgin birth is so beautiful that it has to be true, whether it happened or not (page 209 in the book).

One article that helped me to better understand the emerging church movement comes from Christianity Today: "Five Streams of the Emerging Church," from the February 2007 issue. This article, by an evangelical professor (Scot McKnight), is skeptical of some of the hallmarks of the emerging church movement, but it's also complimentary as well. It provides a short, basic overview of the movement.

Brian McLaren, one of the central people connected with the emerging church movement, was in Kansas City last week, and Bill Tammeus, who was part of our study group, has an entry on McLaren's visit in his Faith Matters blog. Bill will also be on the panel at the Diana Butler Bass event on May 3, and his May 1 weblog entry summarizes his personal reaction to her book as well as presenting readers with a brief preview of the focus of the panel on Saturday.

In addition to discussing the emerging church movement, we also discussed some of the highlights from the last three chapters in Christianity for the Rest of Us. Specifically, we discussed our reaction to the Bernard and Catherine story that opened Chapter 15. As Christians we need to be open to all people as Jesus was in the New Testament. But we also discussed how it is important to maintain the principles of our faith as we accept other people who may not have the same values, belief system, etc. that our church as a body might have. Bass's book mentions a few times how becoming a more secular church is not the answer to appealing to more people. In fact, some of the vibrant church examples have very involved new member classes, some lasting up to a year. These member classes are not hoops for people to jump through; rather they help a person grow in the church. Stories in the book describe how people were transformed through these classes.

We concluded our discussion on Wednesday by discussing which "signposts of renewal" we as a congregation might work on some more. The testimony signpost was one that was mentioned by a few people as something that could be a larger part of worship than it is now.