When I read about the emerging church movement, it feels like someone is saying something new about something old. New buildings, liturgy, and techniques like so many”assessories,” makes my head spin.

        People who attend this type of worship find themselves caught up by how different it is, yet there is this deju vu, all over again feeling.  Emerging, sounds right in reference of St Paul’s emphasis on the all ready and not yet, sense of not fully emerged. But the implication of an emerging theology and practical theology is that it has arrived.

        Books about the “missional theology” or the emerging church, imply that if you “do” this, they will come. Please don’t email me. I’ve read the caveat’s in the movement which state the intellectual premise that this is not a magic bullet to main line losses. But everyone is treating it as such.

        I believe it is not the method but the practitioner who does it, that makes the difference. Translated, if you are good at what you do, people will come.  And no one likes the corollary, if you are not good at what you do, they will not come.  Or, you will have a dead church, empty building, and have to change jobs.

        The mirage of the emerging church is that if you are a crummy pastor, preacher, administrator, church grower, all you have to do is buy a couch, a stool, hire a DJ for music and open shop in an empty store front and the folks who are 20 and 30 something will come as long as you don’t tell them it’s church.

        The problem I have with the heart of the Missional movement + Emerging Church movement, especially attempted in the Presbyterian Church (USA) is that it remains the same old church.

        I had hoped for a dynamically different body of Christ. Something pointed toward those old ideas from The Mustard Seed Conspiracy, by Tom Sine or The Empowerment of the Poor, by Robert Linthicum. But this pretense at something new is still an advocacy of  the status quo with an upgrade of style.

        I’m all for change when somethings broken and the main line’s been broken for over 20 years. But I’m not for shallow. When the missional movement plus the emerging church movement offer a more robust theology which addresses the  crevasse between rich and poor, then I’ll take another look.

A robust interpretation of this important holy day could free up all churches to reclaim the power God unleased after Christ’s ascension. Then again, we don’t celebrate Ascension Day either.  sigh. And that’s our problem. We are so “Word” centered, we cave when it comes to inc luding the other feast days within Christendom.

We are afraid of being too “Catholic,” in many quarters. Yet our catholophobia is deeply enmeshed with our hate-filled years of long ago. We are also mindful of not wanting to be like “those” pentecostals. Our academic credentials make us arrogant about “feeling” our faith when we “feel” like our minds should control our religious comportment.

The pentecostal act of Acts is not about a controlled experiment by God. This Act of God was the radical change in the relationship between God and creation. The two would henceforth  commune within the framework of a new relationship, the third person of the Trinity. Michael Welker’s, The Holy Spirit, an essay in, The Christian Century, deftly asks, “How can we talk about the Holy Spirit on a personal level while speaking of the Spirit as Being as well ?”

All I know is that I preach on this scripture in less than 24 hours. I know, good luck with that. Thanks.

What confronts us is the preposterous idea that preachers speak God’s Word in preaching, while preaching about the action of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost.  This seems preposterous precisely because we preach a human word about the divine Presence. The word becomes Word, we pray. Yet Protestants are suspicious of  the Host becoming the Host in the sacrament.

Could it be that the doctrine of the Holy Spirit can release the Christian community from its capitivity? That is, can this third person of the Trinity be the key to relaxing the Catholic-Protestant tension in favor of true repprochement? Perhaps. Presbyterians and Roman Catholics are talking about, talking about our shared understandings of baptism. So there is hope because here too, is the activity of the uncontrollable God among, across, and beyond our attempts to explain Being.

Will