Some words from Phyllis Tickle, one of my favorite people to read. It gets a little weighty at times, but if you can trudge through it I think you'll find it meaningful. For the New Year, then...
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Apparently and for some not-very-clear reason, it is incumbent upon the faithful in every new epoch or changing era of Christian history to re-define what we mean when we use the words "church" and/or "Church." But even if some strenuous re-thinking and re-stating had not been required during history's previous turning points, it none the less would be required for emergence Christianity. There is no question about the fact that this time around everything-whether sacred or secular and with no holds barred-is up for scrutiny and that most of everything, once scrutinized, is up for re-defining, including "church" and/or "Church."
For quite some time now, analysts and pastors and observant Christian laity alike have known and said that church is not a place, nor is it a thing. Historically, church was probably conceived of in the popular imagination as a thing several centuries before that same shared imagination began to think of it as a place. Of those two, the notion of place as definition is probably the more debilitating, but unquestionably it had also come to be the more dominant of the two during the last century. But as a conceptual definition, neither place nor thing alone is strong enough to support much vitality beyond loyalty to itself.
For that reason and within fairly recent years, others among us have offered a different conceptualizing. Some have even suggested that church and/or Church is best defined as an event. I like this one. In fact, I liked it a lot for a while. It comforted me, if for no other reason than that it was less static. While still a noun and therefore a bit of a thing itself, it had buried in it the ghost of a predicate, the cachet of an action. But then, the more I embraced it, the more it seemed to be just that ... a ghost, a cachet, a rhetorical fix.
So this New Year, I seek—hope for—am eager to overhear—a sustained and prayerful conversation about exactly what we who are Christian in this time of emergence, hold as a working definition of emergence church/Church. And lest I be accused of doing no more here than passing along some kind of theological hot potato for the fun of it, I will begin the sacred game. I will begin the first round by saying that, as of right now, I believe both church and Church are "a body of people delighting in God, the Father, God, the Son, and God, the Holy Spirit."
Such a definition can arguably be seen as more of a variant or adaptation than as a highly original thought. So be it. Either way, the truth is that whether variant or new, this one has predication and therefore relieves my yearning for action and dynamism, motion and fluidity. More to the point, it is broad enough to assume many ways and customs and enculturations as being exercises of delight and therefore of church/Church; yet it is specific enough to exclude with a surgical precision those who, turning about face toward the world, would use both church and Church as means of temporal governance. More even than these, though, I like the notion of "a body of people delighting" because as an action it can not be pinned down. Grasp it, and it simply laughs and moves on to the next thing, like a will-o'-the-wisp seducing us farther and farther into the mystery. I really like that ... at least for now I like it. But then, we have a whole new year in front of us in which to have this conversation, meaning that the only thing I am completely sure of right now is the absolute necessity of our having it.
