The First Emergent Nazarene

I’ve noticed that many who self-identify as emerging or emergent Christians emphasize following Jesus, pursuing Jesus’ way, or living a life that imitates Jesus. I like this emphasis.

Of course, there are other aspects of being a Christian too. Christianity is also a social movement, affirms various beliefs, pursues particular practices, and involves institutions and organizations. But there seems something profoundly true about being committed first to following Jesus’ way of loving God and others and second to Christian institutions, creeds, and rituals.

The emergent/emerging Church voices have their critics, of course. Some criticisms are justified, but many more are not. I’m especially unimpressed when critics blast emerging/emergent church leaders for seeking new language, strategies, and methods to present the Christian good news.

I ran across a reprinted newspaper report recently that caught my attention. The report was of a sermon preached by an early Church of the Nazarene leader.

As I read, I noticed similarities between the leader’s sermon and the emerging/emergent church’s emphasis upon following Jesus. Here’s what the early Nazarene preacher said:

Notice that Christ does not say: “Accept the creed which I frame; observe the church forms or rituals I devise; join the church which I have found.” He only said, “Follow Me.” It is as though he had said, “Come, live my life with me.”

What does it mean? It means that Christianity is not a creed, not an ecclesiasticism, not a ritual, but a life.

It is this simple Christ life, which the world hungers for, and which gives birth to the cry that goes up from all lands: “We are tired of forms and creeds. Let us go back to Christ.”

It is this Christ life that we are to take out with us and teach and live in this city mission work that is our chosen field.

Yet the present question has been asked, “Why not do this work under present church lines with their machinery, instead of forming a new organization?” The question contains its own answer. It is because of the machinery. The churches are steadily withdrawing from this field.

Folks in the Church of the Nazarene congregation wouldn’t – and couldn’t – embrace every statement or idea advocated by those self-identified as “emerging” or “emergent.” Diversity abounds. I reported in an earlier blog about a letter from a denominational general superintendent seeking to identify differences and similarities between the denomination and the emerging/emergent church.

But there is a strong connection between the spirit of the early Church of the Nazarene and the cry for transformation arising from the emerging/emergent movement. The denomination and the movement share common cause and similar desires.

I also see similarities between critics of the early Church of the Nazarene and critics of the present-day emergent/emerging church. I have a hunch contemporary critics of the emerging/emergent church would have been among those criticizing the newly formed holiness denomination more than 100 years ago!

By the way, the leader whose sermon I quoted (and pictured above) is the very person who coined the denomination’s name, “Church of the Nazarene.” He was Dr. J.P. Widney, second president of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and the founding dean of the USC School of Medicine.

Even more interesting is that the quotation above comes from the very first sermon preached at the newly organized Church of the Nazarene congregation. Widney’s words above were reported in the Los Angeles Times after the congregation’s 1895 formation.

It seems accurate to say that a central theme in the very first sermon of the first Church of the Nazarene congregation – following Jesus’ way – is a central theme in the emerging/emergent church. And although it’s anachronistic to say it, J. P. Widney may be rightly regarded as the first emergent/emerging member of the Church of the Nazarene!

At the end of the day, I think history is of secondary importance. It matters, of course. But what matters more is that we follow Jesus.

But I hope I have reminded those in my own tradition that our birth and roots are not so different from the emergent movement we see arising today.

May we all seek to follow Jesus!

By Thomas Jay Oord
From his blog, re-posted with permission

A Postmodern Prayer

God, as I read and talk with people in my generation, there seems to be this great ambivalence about you. It seems as if we’ve lost you on a walk through the forest in thick fog. Sometimes we are almost certain that you are there walking beside us or behind us - maybe even putting a gentle, affectionate hand on our backs. Other times, it seems as if you’ve never been there and the thick fog has been playing tricks on us all along.
Why is that? Why do we wander in and out of awareness of you? Why does faith come and go? Why do so many who grew up in the church and had clear experiences of you - or at least every opportunity to experience you - why do we later in life - as we grow up and enter adulthood - why do we doubt or lose faith or wander unanchored or feel overwhelmed and lost in the fog?
Are we casualties of postmodernism? Are the gears of centuries crunching our souls between the cracks of tectonic era shifts? That’s what I’m telling people. Is it true that so many of us are innocent casualties of some huge philosophical traffic accident?
What can be done? What should we do? Are we applying first-aid like EMS personnel? Are we working in a rehab hospital teaching people how to walk, to eat, to write again? Is there something we can do to keep people out of the way of the colliding trains? Must we all lose an arm or leg or eye? Is this a necessary part of an honest faith journey in these kaleidoscopic times?
Is there no vaccine, no preventative medicine, no way to lessen the pain or to lessen the fall? Must we be boggled by the complexity before we can search out a new simplicity?
Why are the answers so hard to find these days?
Why do the questions feel so much more ready on the lips, so much more true to the mind?
How long will this last?
Where will this end?
Where will we all go from here, and is that where you want to take us?

The Importance of Ritual in Transformational Community

At the core of our being we long for another or others to share our life with. Our first inclination as humans is bonded and intimate community which begins with our family. In our earliest moments we bond to our mother as we nurse, her hand caressing our head, cradling us to her. We recognize the smell of our father, the roughness of his face against ours. From the start we reach out and latch on with our hands when a finger is presented. Our instinctual desire is connection, intimacy, and belonging.

As we grow so does our community, starting with our parents and siblings, then our extended family, next our neighbors and community, and then school friends. As we live we throw an ever larger net that establishes our community. Some of course are closer, and others more distant. This net however is only one abstract layer in many layers that we establish. These are layers of affinity, of attraction, of like-minded and mutual story.

At the core of these communities lies ritual; our Sunday morning brunch of bagels and coffee, every June at the cabin, always turning our ball-cap backwards in the 9th inning when our team is behind. Ritual, in it's broadest sense, is any observance or practice that connects us deeper into our communities. Through our rituals we grow, we understand, we are.

Without rituals, or without understanding the ritual others are engaging in, we are missing out on what it means to be a member, a native, of a community or tribe. Followers of Christ were provided a ritual by our Lord, Jesus Christ. On the night of his betrayal Jesus celebrated the passover feast with his disciples, and in that time he established the ritual of Holy Communion, the Eucharist. Through observing this ritual we identify ourselves not just as a disciple of Jesus, but as part of the broader community of the Christian church.

When we are at a baseball game we expect certain things to happen. The seventh inning stretch, the singing of 'Take Me Out to the Ballgame'. Baseball isn't just a spectator sport, it is a community of baseball faithful observing and participating in the rhythm and ritual of the game.

What would happen if we removed the seventh inning stretch because our fast paced society has decided that ritual takes up too much time? What if we removed the traditional songs and chants because they made no sense to a person from another community or culture? We might have men out on the field hitting a ball with a bat; but it could be argued that they are not really playing baseball as there is no observance of ritual, of the narrative rhythm of the game that makes it unique and links it to tradition. In other words by bifurcating ritual from community we destroy them, destroying the tangible meaning they share when celebrated together.

Many Evangelical churches have lost sight of this simple truth; by removing ritual we destroy what makes our gathering a community. If you had never witnessed a baseball game before you might wonder why certain things are done, why certain words are said. Likewise if you were a protestant entering a Catholic mass you might be caught off guard by the ritual of the service. In a misguided attempt to turn sabbath, the celebration of the Eucharistic community, into an accessible and evangelical medium those of us in the evangelical world have actually done those outside a church a disservice, we have watered down the Good News in favor of pluralistic and secularized interests. Rather than making the community more open, we have gotten rid of anything that makes us uniquely the followers of Christ.

No doubt that John Wesley, a founder of my tribe (as Leonard Sweet might say), was evangelical in is Sunday sermons, but he realized that the mission of the church wasn't to be found in the pulpit, but in the streets. Wesley and the methodists were condemned by the Church of England because rather than catering to the genteel and domesticated patrons of the church he would descend into the work places of those far from faith. If they could not attend the church on Sunday he would follow God's mission into the world, to where people were at. Evangelism takes place out in creation, in the day-to-day places. Sabbath and it's rituals are meant for the faithful and those seriously exploring faith. Sabbath and Eucharist are peculiar, but also compelling.

Through the systematic removal of our peculiar rituals as followers of Jesus in favor of pluralistic appeal we have not expanded the body of Christ; rather we have stretched it thin, watered it down, domesticated it so that we are palatable in the mouths of those not yet part of the Jesus tribe. We have replaced the call to Eucharist (community) with something devoid of the calling cards that make Christian worship what it should be. Through our attempt to provide a seeker-sensitive approach we have altered Sabbath beyond it's original intent. As Alan Hirsch would say we have tried to be an extractional force; attempting, like a vacuum cleaner, to pull folks out of the world and into the church. We have asked them not only to do all of the work of entering the community, once they braved the waters we have nothing compelling to share.

I am concerened that we are failing as churches because we have become the exact thing we tried so hard to avoid. Through the removal of ritual we have created a community devoid of anything inspiring, challenging, and peculiar. What attracts people to baseball, more so than the act of a bat hitting a ball, is the community of the faithful, their peculiar ways of being baseball fans. In short baseball (and sport in general) offers a far more compelling narrative to be a part of than the average evangelical church, and it is largely rooted in the evangelical church's desire to be more like the world than like the Eucharistic Jesus Tribe of the New Testament.

I am not advocating an exclusiveness; rather a uniqueness of being that incarnates the gospel. If the evangelical church is to survive it must begin the act of reclaiming it's place as a peculiar community in which ritual; scripture reading, prayer, and Eucharist are a vibrant and visible part of their narrative. It is only by embracing our peculiarities as followers of Christ that we have anything compelling to offer the world. We can't water down our wine and expect anyone to drink it, let alone come back for more.

April Fools and the Cross

I have enjoyed April Fools that last few years on this blog. Last year I posted a parody of what would happen if the Concerned Nazarenes got their way and all those they had called heretics were kicked out of our denomination. Long lists of many Nazarene Pastors and leaders, many of them friends, were posted along with my own name as those who “had been excommunicated from Nazarene fellowship”. While it was of course pure fiction in the spirit of April first that we were kicked out, what wasn’t fiction was that the list of names came from Concerned Nazarene websites.

Needless to say, though we tried to laugh and not take ourselves too seriously in all this, there has been some real pain involved in places where real division has been caused by all of this. I am thankful however that there is hope, even if just a fools hope, that we can move past all things divisive in the body of Christ; especially within our particular tradition.

In recent posts, I have made an effort to change the tone of any possible disagreement we might have with those who consider themselves speaking for the “concerned”. I am thankful that the founding voice of “Concerned Nazarenes” has acknowledged that I just might be a real Christian after all. Though a small step, it is a step; and one I hope we can build on. I have made an appeal to him asking if we can work together to build on what we have in common based on our Christian beliefs we share as Nazarenes. I asked him for this on the blog and by personal email, but so far any further inquiry into this possibility has gone unanswered. Even still, I will hang on to a fools hope for reconciliation.

The Apostle Paul was no stranger to trying to discourage division in the body of Christ as he understood that through Christ’s broken body on the cross God found solidarity with humanity and reconciled what otherwise seemed utterly irreconcilable. Sin and injustice that we human beings commit against each other, and commit against the God whose image we were made in, just doesn’t seem compatible with God’s holy dreams and intentions for his creation and for us as humanity within it. Yet, God meets us in the middle of all this ugliness in order to win us back to his dream for humanity made in his image. Our own sin and injustice breaks us, and so God allowed it to break him. Our sin could not keep God away from us, as he was literally dying to be with us again. No wonder with all that God went through to reconcile us and unify us in his body, that Paul in his letter recorded in First Corinthians would be so alarmed that Christians could so easily divide over anything when there should be unity in the foundation of the cross.

Divisions over following different teachers such as the Apostle Paul or Apollos, Calvin or Wesley, MacArthur or McLaren are all pointless because at best they are “only servants, through whom we came to believe—as the Lord has assigned to each his task”. Regardless of what any of them may have to say, “no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ.” And how did Paul describe and proclaim such a foundation to the Corinthians? Paul said, “we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.”

Saying “Jews and Gentiles” is like saying Jews and everyone else; so in other words everyone who encounters the cross will in one way or the other stumble and trip on its foolishness. We can therefore either dismiss it as foolishness which represents one kind of stumbling or in faith wrestle with its foolishness like Jacob wrestled with God; seizing the victory but not without forever being changed by having a hip dislocated so that a once seemingly steady walk is forever reduced to stumbling along. This may sound like a foolish victory, but the gospel of the cross shows us that “God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are.”

So for centuries followers of Jesus have wrestled in faith with, and were transformed by, the foolishness of the cross. Along the way men have tried to describe it, but even the Apostle Paul, (whose writing in the Bible is as authoritative and inspired by God as any of Scripture), admitted to the Corinthians that his vision and understanding of all this was like trying to see through a dim mirror. He knew that at best he only “knew in part”; but that one day he would “know fully, even as he is fully known”. In the meantime Paul knew that wrestling with the cross meant embodying love; as Christ himself embodied his love for us on the cross. Failure to do this means that no matter how eloquent our descriptions of theology may be we are but noisy gongs without love. This is why Paul said, “For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified….my message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit's power, so that your faith might not rest on men's wisdom, but on God's power.”

You see the cross is not just some abstract theological idea, but rather it speaks to the very way of the Kingdom. And this way should be most evident in the body of Christ, as Jesus gave us “a new command” saying, “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another." The Apostle Paul embraces this idea as he calls us to be unified in the cross. It isn’t that he doesn’t encourage us also to hold each other accountable, but he instructs us to restore a brother caught in a sin “gently” and to “carry each other's burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ”. The community of Christ is about sharing in the way of the cross together. We might disagree about the best theological way to describe the foolishness of the cross that we stumble all over and wrestle with together, but more importantly through in this stumbling and wrestling we are to embody the way of the cross together as we follow Jesus in faith.

As this April Fools Day comes to a close let us be reminded of the foolishness of the cross that trumps conventional wisdom. Let us embrace this crazy foolish love that chose solidarity with us in our human condition despite our sin and injustice even when directed at God himself. The foolishness of the cross is winning by losing. Paul tells us that we were enemies of God. How did God respond? God met us on our turf and then let us win in the way that mankind most typically tries to “win” against our enemies; by trying to discredit, dominate, dehumanize, and kill. In the confrontation between man and God, man won and God lost; and he "lost" so we could be won to him; and to one another through him. In this also, the resurrection isn’t just the come from behind victory for God; it is the victory for us.

As we solemnly approach Good Friday with the hope that follows with Easter I want to bless those “Concerned Nazarenes” and seek solidarity with them even though they reject us. I want to embrace what should be solidarity in our understanding of biblical Christian orthodoxy that we share in the Nazarene Articles of Faith. I want to embrace the cross with them as God first embraced us all on the cross. I want embrace our solidarity with them in embracing that one and only foundation we have in Jesus Christ himself who said, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” I want to honor the cross by seeking solidarity with all those Christ died for, especially those fellow believers who have embraced the cross in return by faith and through him we can bear the fruit of God’s reconciliation together.