The local church may call and ordain who it wills, whether or not they done their “Lutheran year” at an ELCA seminary or not even gone to seminary at all, as long as the pastor has been properly examined:

Neither Titus nor Timothy nor Paul ever instituted a priest without the congregation’s election and call. This is clearly proven by the sayings in Titus 1 [:7] and Timothy 3 [:10], “A bishop or priest should be blameless,” and, “Let the deacon be tested first.” Now Titus could not have known which ones were blameless; such a report must come from the congregation, which must name the man.

Again, we even read in Acts 4 [6:1-6] regarding an even lesser office, that the apostles were not permitted to institute persons as deacons without the knowledge and consent of the congregation. Rather, the congregation elected and called the seven deacons, and the apostles confirmed them. If, then, the apostles were not permitted to institute, on their own authority, an office having to do only with the distribution of temporal food, how could they have dared to impose the highest office of preaching on anyone by their own power without the knowledge, will, and call of the congregation? (LW 39, 312)

To ordain is not to consecrate. Therefore if we know a pious man, we bring him forward, and by the power of the Word which we have, we give him authority to preach the Word and to give the sacraments. This is to ordain. . .On the basis of ordination it is established as a result of election that, for the sake of order, not everyone should have the desire to preach. Thus they have the obligation to perform their ministry, but not perpetually. Today we can commit it to him, tomorrow we can take it away. (Sermon from 1524 in WA 15, 721 (3) Quoted in Werner Elert, The Structure of Lutheranism, p. 347, note 13)

Anyone may preside over communion, baptize, and administer pastoral care according to the will and call of the local congregation:

. . .whoever has the office of preaching imposed on him has the highest office in Christendom imposed on him. Afterward he may also baptize, celebrate mass, and exercise all pastoral care; or, if he does not wish to do so, he may confine himself to preaching and leave baptizing and other lower offices to others—as Christ and all the apostles in Acts 4 [6.4]. (LW, 39, 314)

On small groups, house churches, and cell churches:

a truly evangelical order [that] should not be held in a public place for all sorts of people. But those who want to be Christians in earnest and who profess the gospel with hand and mouth should sign their names and meet alone in a house somewhere to pray, to read, to baptize, to receive the sacrament, and to do other Christian works. According to this order, those who do not lead Christian lives could be known, reproved, corrected, cast out, or excommunicated, according to the rule of Christ, Matthew 18 [:15-17]. Here one could also solicit benevolent gifts to be willingly given. . .Here would be no need of much and elaborate singing. Here one could set up a neat and brief order for baptism and the sacrament and center everything on Word, prayer, and love. (LW 53, 63-64)

The local church may allow anyone to preach:

St. Paul gives every Christian the power to teach among Christians if there is a need, saying, `You can all prophesy one by one, so that all may learn and all be admonished’ [I Cor. 14:31]. Again, `You should earnestly desire to prophesy, and do not forbid speaking in tongues; but all things should be done decently and in order’ [I Cor. 14: 39-40].

Let this passage be your sure foundation, because it gives such an overwhelming power to the Christian congregation to preach, to permit preaching, and to call. (LW 39, 311)

And if the ELCA continues to require structures that are hindrances to the gospel, the quote below gives direction for churches:

[W]herever there is a Christian congregation in possession of the gospel, it not only has the right and power but also the duty—on pain of losing the salvation of its souls and in accordance with the promise made to Christ in baptism—to avoid, to flee, to depose and to withdraw from the authority that our bishops, abbots, monasteries, religious foundations, and the like are now exercising. For it is clearly evident that they teach and rule contrary to God and his word. (LW 39, 308)

Why do I think the above guidelines for congregations are helpful? Because I believe they will locate authority in local congregations, which will in turn make them more nimble, allow them to be more contextual, empower the laity, and free the church for mission. Many of the current structures hinder these things. It’s time to quit doing everything for the sake of order and to start doing things for the sake of the gospel.f you liked this, you’ll probably like:

• Craig Van Gelder on Word and Sacrament
• Academics vs. Practitioners
• Powers of the President

I find it helps to read all of his stuff in his Irish accent. It makes everything much more profound and dramatic.

So, do you deny the resurrection?f you liked this, you’ll probably like:

• The Blog Suffereth
• The Resurrection, Eschatology, and Youth Ministry
• The Changing Definition of "Cute"

But I think I totally agree.

Our current ecclesiology is simply unsustainable. In the ELCA the average church is under one hundred people and shrinking. Most churches have their own seminary-trained pastor, who set aside 8 years of his or her life (undergraduate and seminary) and pay tens of thousands of dollars in order to be equipped as a leader. When churches are shrinking and the cost of training pastors is increasing, eventually you reach a tipping point where churches simply cannot afford the old model of pastoral training. Once we do we will see a radical shift in what it means to lead a church.

At this point in our history, we have outsourced the training of pastors to a German research university model. Why are our churches not able to train people up as leaders and pastors? Surely a local body of only ten small-sized churches has the intellectual and financial capability to train their people locally in Christian leadership.

As someone who is enrolled in a seminary program that requires us to be working in a local church (most of us are full-time lay staff) as we complete our curriculum, I am seeing the immense value in connecting theological education to local church leadership. Much of the initial research that is being done on our program is pointing to the advantage of such a model of training and education.

Honestly, the shift to distance education is a fairly small one, because it is still tied to the institution and the “mother church.” But the direction it is moving, albeit slowly, is back towards contextual education within local congregations. A bigger step would be to remove the educational process from the seminary institution and move it towards the churches. Such a move requires would require us to rethink vocation, ordination, ecclesiology, and church polity, all discussions that need to be had if we are going to survive and flourish in this cultural climate.

As much as I love the big ideas that happen in our educational institutions, when I ask the question, Does this model best serve the church? I keep answering with a resounding No. We may still need institutions for people who want a Ph.D., but congregational leadership training could be located elsewhere. The church must learn (and quickly) how it will reclaim the training of its people from the distant institution and relocate it within the local congregation. Some attempts have already been made, with little success. What will be needed for this to work is people with the proper educational credentials leaving the established system to pursue an alternative method.

I’ve said before that we need a radical new ecclesiology. A critical piece of that will be a radical new way to train leaders in the church.

Any ideas how to get there?f you liked this, you’ll probably like:

• Why Seminaries are Irrelevant: A Postscript
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As a somewhat distant, though very interested, observer of the emerging church, I have read plenty of blogs and magazine articles about Solomon’s Porch and their lead pastor (not sure what his real title is) Doug Pagitt.  I thought this would be a cool opportunity to see in real life all that I had been reading and hearing about, and it was honestly pretty much what I expected: quite anticlimactic and ordinary.  And I mean that truly in the best way possible.

Obviously when I say ordinary I don’t mean mainstream.  When you walk into the Great Room (think sanctuary) and see it filled with tons of couches all arranged pointing towards a couple of stools sitting in the middle of the room you realize that the environment is anything but typical church fare.

When I say that the Sunday Gathering is ordinary and anticlimactic I mean that the community and leadership embrace a super-flat ecclesiology.  Lines between staff and laity seem blurred, and there is no such thing as a celebrity. You’ll see what I mean in a second.

So, here’s the play-by-play. There are about 12 or so of us from the seminary who decide to go to Solomon’s Porch, and of course we don’t want to be late, so we arrive obscenely early. We walk into the Great Room and walk right past Doug Pagitt, who is sitting on a couch chatting with someone. We all sit down together in a little corner, and are pretty much the only ones in the room besides those who are preparing for some part in the gathering. Yeah, we don’t stand out at all.

Doug finishes his conversation and comes over to us and introduces himself, “Hi, I’m Doug.” I think to myself, Wow, he is really big. He acts like your typical guy and does the whole small talk thing, asking us what brings us there, where we’re from, yada yada yada.  We give him the brief seminary shtick.  He welcomes us and tells us to make ourselves at home and feel free to participate as if this place were our own, but tells us we can’t all sit together.

So we all spread out around the room and meander as we try and kill some time before the gathering is supposed to start. Thankfully most of our group tries to maintain our level of inconspicuousness by whipping out their phones and cameras and taking pictures as they walk around. I wonder to myself what communities like Solomon’s Porch think about being a Christian tourist spot.  It seems so antithetical to their ecclesiology, but I’m not sure how you avoid it (especially when you write a book about your church).

According to the website, the Sunday Gathering Starts at 5:00 PM, but at 5:00 the room is still quite sparse.  Some music is playing and people are mingling, and the room starts to fill and get louder, but the Gathering proper doesn’t seem to start until sometime after 5:15.  Or does it? I know everything (okay, well maybe not everything, but almost) at Solomon’s Porch is done with theological intentionality behind it, so maybe the 15-25 minutes of mingling is an essential part of the worship experience. The start of the worship gathering is not initiated by a single person or a call to worship, but by the organic gathering of this Christian community.

Or maybe they are just undisciplined and can’t start anything on time.  Not quite sure, but I hope it’s all the theological mumbo-jumbo I just spouted.

A little after 5:15 someone gets up to initiate what seems to be a call to worship, although she doesn’t call it that (I forget what it was called), and a responsive reading is used to initiate what would typically be thought of as the worship service.  We sing a song, Doug gets up and says something about it being Epiphany, and the younger children (under 5 years old I think) are dismissed. We greet the people sitting around us and then sing some more songs.  All the songs, by the way, are unique and original to Solomon’s Porch.  Since I have no taste or expertise in music, I will not even try to describe the genre, other than I liked it.

As a regular part of their Gatherings a member of their community often shares from their own life how they are connecting their faith to what they do on a regular basis.  This week was unique in that Doug was the person-of-the-week, so we not only got to meet Doug and hear him “preach” but also heard a little bit about what makes him tick personally.  Really cool.

Then came the sermon (yes, he actually calls it a sermon), which covered Matthew 19:1-20:17.  Yup, that’s a lot!  And yes, it did seem kind of rushed, but he tried to tie together a lot of passages that often get isolated from their context, which was fresh.  I wish he would have closed a little bit better and tied up the implications of the ending of the passage with the beginning.  I don’t know if he was crunched for time or designed it that way, but it seemed to be missing a little bit.

After a song we had communion, which seemed almost like another short opportunity for fellowship.  People were walking around and mingling in the midst of communion, which had a surprisingly natural feel to it, which surprised me. Should communion look more like that? In many churches I’ve been to people tend to use the down time after they’ve taken communion to whisper and write notes anyways; maybe we should just make all that stuff explicit and a part of the liturgical act of communion rather than trying to hide it all and maintain a certain level of piety.

Another song later and it was all over. I wish I could observe some of the other things that go on during the week that are integral parts of the community. It’s hard to judge a church like that simply by a couple of hours on Sunday night, but it was a fairly profound experience.

As I stated earlier, it was very ordinary. You walk up to the church and there are no flashy signs saying “As Seen in Christianity Today!” or “A Church on the Cutting-Edge!” Instead, you get the feeling they don’t want to be the tourist destination that we had made it that evening. Though their pastor is a “big deal” in emerging (and anti-emerging) church circles, you get the feeling that most people in the church don’t know or care about that.  And Doug doesn’t project himself as someone more important than anyone else. In addition to Doug, Tony Jones was also there, again with no fanfare.  In the same room are two of the leading, most well-known, influential voices in the emerging church, but here they’re just Doug and Tony. This is so different from the cult of Christian celebrity that seems to be pandered about in most mainstream churches. We need more of this in the church today.

A few things were peculiar. There was very little female leadership. I assume that is not by design, but I just found it odd that a progressive church like that doesn’t intentionally try and get women up front. Maybe they don’t feel they have to push things one way or the other but simply allow people to serve as they feel called.  If that means that they are led mostly by men, so be it.

And, as youth ministers, at seminary studying youth ministry, most of us noticed there were very few in the middle and high school age range.  Maybe there were more present at the 7:00 PM Gathering. Youth ministry in the emerging church is a topic that would be interesting to explore.

If you ever get a chance to go to Solomon’s Porch, it’s obviously worth your time if you are familiar with the emerging church, if for no other reason that to realize that the heavens do not open when Doug sits on his stool. It’s amazing how anticlimactic innovation appears. Maybe the everyday and the extraordinary are anything but.

Maybe there’s hope for your church after all.f you liked this, you’ll probably like:

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[T]he emerging church conversation has been invigorated by the energy, life and creativity that has come from some significant advances in theology and biblical studies in the last 30 years. In part, emerging church writers are popularising and applying the work of hard-nosed theologians (the likes of N.T. Wright, Stanley Hauwerwas and Walter Brueggemann).

Interesting. The full post can be found here.f you liked this, you’ll probably like:

• Emerging Church: Bridging the Academy & Church?
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• Linkworthy – 6/14/09

However, it seems like emerging church leaders are reading books by Hauerwas, Wright, Brueggemann, Volf, McKnight, Moltmann, Franke, and Grenz: theologians and academics.

I have no statistics to back this up. It is just a cursory observation based mostly off of blogs I read and visiting the ever-exciting Christian bookstore. So, my observations may not reflect reality. But for the sake of this post, I will assume it holds true.

Is the emerging church the manifestation of the academy and the church coming together? Are the ivory towers finally being brought into our sanctuaries? It seems to me to be so. If it turns out to be true, I think there would be some pretty massive implications:

1. The emerging church is not a fad, but here to stay. It is a theologically-grounded way of being church that may evolve into something different, but will continue with its value of asking difficult questions.
2. The academy will be put to the test. To me, good theology is theology for the sake of the church. Academics will no longer be judged on how many obscure journal articles they publish or scholarly presentations they make, but on how well their books and articles (and blogs) “preach” and transform the lives of our congregations.
3. Congregations might begin to see the real weight of the biblical texts in our lives and be forced to reckon with them rather than being placated by trivialized devotional readings of the scriptures. In my expanded theological reading over the past few years the most striking thing is the realization that being a Christian is about more than 1950s morality but is a call upon our whole lives. I know that all churches say that, but it seems few catch the weight of what is being said. Being a Christian might actually involve things like suffering and getting serious about greed.
4. As a result of #3, churches might see the triviality of crap that hinders being a church and doing ministry (like egos, rote tradition, consumerism, selfishness, etc.)
5. As a result of #3 and #4, the church will grow.

Maybe the list is a little bit over the top. I’m pretty much saying that the emerging church might be able to turn the decades-long slide of people leaving the church just because they read some theology. Well, to me, it seems like a natural progression. I could be wrong; time will tell.

If someone were looking for a research project, I think this would be an interesting topic to pursue. If it turns out that emerging churches in general are paying attention to professional theologians more so than the average evangelical leader, that might quiet down some of those people who accuse the emerging church of being theologically void.

I know my personal interest in the emerging church has nothing really to do with trying to reach a postmodern generation, but with trying to simply be a proper church again, which has led me out of the realm of pop-Christianity and into the rich world of theology. I wonder how many others share my sentiments.f you liked this, you’ll probably like:

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I’ve been reading a few posts recently that try to pigeonhole the emerging church as gnostic. I forget some of the other places I’ve seen this recently, but this post is the latest. I am at quite a loss. I don’t feel like writing a whole lot on the subject right now, but if the emerging church is in danger of any heresy, gnosticism would not be it.

Here are some characteristics of gnosticism (I’m being generous and using theopedia’s definition of gnosticism here):

• The real world is not the world of the senses. I’ve read not a single “emergent” who remotely believes this. Postmodern emergents are wary of the captivity of our theology to Platonism, along with the thought that “the world” and the “flesh” are evil and that our only hope lies in being whisked away to some incorporeal spiritual state known as heaven. Instead, they believe that the gospel has to do with the redemption of this world because it was this world, this real world, which was created good by God (Genesis 1) and is the object of Christ’s redemption (Colossians 1:15-20).
• There is a world outside the world of our experience which is the realm of truth it is very distant from the Kosmos. The world of our experience is created by a lesser and flawed being, a demiurgos. No. I’ve never heard anyone remotely say that there is a lesser God that created the world. The God who redeems this world is the God who created the world.
• Christian Gnostics were gnostics who considered themselves part of the Christian faith. In their view there are really two Christian faiths a lower faith for the masses and a higher faith for the elite. This fails as well. Most emergents are very aware of the historic apostolic faith, holding firmly to the creeds of the Church and seeking to embody the one true faith in a way that is most fitting to our current cultural context.
• [T]here simply is no notion of Canon in the Orthodox Protestant sense. There is literature that contains revelation but there is simply no way to speak of “authoritative scripture”. Every emerging author I have read is deeply committed to the Bible. Perhaps it is not in the propositional, systematic sense of some of their detractors, but the Bible is still the rule and norm for faith and life.
  
• For docetic Christianity we can have either a complete rejection of the incarnation (Jesus is mythically in the same way that Zeus is mythical) or a rejection of the humanity of Jesus. Yet again, no, I repeat, no emergent author I have ever read has ever diminished the humanity of Jesus. No, not one. Ever. Every one I have read believes that Jesus died in a bodily, historical, this-world sense. Tony Jones considers the death of Jesus the “pivot point in the entire history of the cosmos.” No gnostic overtones there.

Now, this is not a comprehensive examination of gnostic thought. But I think it is a fair characterization of gnosticism’s major points. From my experience, the emerging church is not even in the same hemisphere as gnosticism. Come on folks, show some theological discernment. Don’t just throw heretical labels our direction so that your following will stay away from us. It’s slanderous. And sinful.

At least characterize us correctly, even if you disagree.f you liked this, you’ll probably like:

• Christian Smith and Young Adults: "No Regrets"
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But I was thinking the other day, “If I did want to increase my blog traffic, how could I do that?” Then I got a funny idea: I would write anti-emerging church rants. I would say things like this:

Brian McLaren believes in universalism. He denies the truth of the Gospel as the very Word of God. He is simply an unregenerate apostate. He uses Roman Catholic, mystic and eastern religions in order to help him “connect with God”. This is nothing less than blasphemy.

Tony Jones is a relativist. He denies absolute truth and makes postmodern relativism his choice hermeneutic. He advocates reading philosophy. Postmodernism is the God he bows down to. He also advocates lectio divina, centering prayer, the Jesus prayer, labyrinths, and other pagan practices.

Doug Pagitt does not rightly divide the Word of Truth. Rather than proper expository preaching, he would rather have a “dialogue” or “discussion“. He makes a mockery out of the preacher’s commitment to his pulpit. He denies the historic creeds of the church.

Great men of God like Whitefield, Edwards, Spurgeon, and Calvin would be appalled at the apostasy present in these emerging (or emergent) churches today.

I might also do things like link to Slice of Laodicea, Christian Research Network, or Apprising Ministries.

Now, truthfully, I enjoy listening to and reading Jones, McLaren, and Pagitt. I don’t have a beef with the emerging church as a whole. But I am interested in seeing if my blog traffic increases because of the pervasiveness of the above key terms. Time will tell.f you liked this, you’ll probably like:

• Brian McLaren Reflects
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Anyways, this post is mostly for my own personal record-keeping. As I read books and put them in my sidebar, I will also copy/paste that information here. Then I can look back on my year and see what all I’ve read and maybe offer some insights into the top books of the year. Or something neato like that.

f you liked this, you’ll probably like:

• Books Read in 2006
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