From Deconstruction to Kingdom Building

Drew Goodmanson has an interesting post that should give some perspective to emerging-type churches.

To make a Kingdom-impact on your local community and the world-at-large, you must move from Deconstruction to Kingdom Building.

[...]

If you are an emerging church, what is your identity? As I attend ‘postmodern’ or churches that would say they are ‘emerging’ they usually can tell me what they are not. We don’t have central leadership, we don’t sing old-school hymns, we don’t have traditional worship, we don’t…[fill in the blank]. In the long run, I don’t think you can rally too many people to this cause and anti-identity.

Comments

[Mike Stidham]

Goodmanson's got a point. The little "emergent" congregation I've attended for the last two years voted to disband last weekend, due to declining attendance.

It was brought up that part of the problem was that we were never quite able to define what we were, but we could be quite eloquent at saying what we weren't.

I suspect people are more comfortable with being "for" something than being solely "anti" or "post" something.

[James Paul]

"In the long run, I don’t think you can rally too many people to this cause and anti-identity...."

...UNLESS you put it to "Mad World" and use syncronized swimming to portray the church falling apart or something.

[Todd]

yeah, it is so much easier to be against something than for something. being against means you go against what someone else has created. being for something takes a little innovation and creativity.

i think deconstruction is a place where a lot of people start. but we CANNOT stay there. when i go to a church website that tells me more of what they are not than what htey are, it gives me warning signals.

i think most emergent types have been through that phase...but we must move beyond it.

[Account Deleted]

the problem for many southern baptists is they grew up in an environment, and continue to be informed by such, wherein we tend to identify oursevles more with what we are against (see the discussion on alcohol here and at joe thorns site). add to that a letter i received wherein a boycott stance was taken toward a Women of Faith conference for an extracted sentence atributed to would-be guest Kristen Chenowith about homosexuality. given the volume of the outcry she was "disinvited" or unable to attend. we still cannot get our minds around the idea of the loss of public symbols and prayer in schools. so, naturally, some young guys find it very difficult to move out of the context of critique which formed them in faith, educated them and taught them ministry.

heistand is right - it takes more than we are generally willing to give to move forward. it is easier to use the Scripture as whip to fire up the hearers about the end of times, the fires of hell and the immorality of the world rather than "be the people of God" after the fashion of Jesus.

check out the exchange between Bill Maher and Kurt Vonegut Jr. over at Ryan Bolger's blog - http://thebolgblog.typepad.com/thebolgblog/.

[Scott M]

I sense in this something of a disconnect. Now I'm not extensively familiar with the philosophy behind the term deconstruction or even fully it's usage with the emerging church. However, maybe I can provide a little bit of insight.

The constrast leads me to believe that the thought is that a group focuses on some big item and go through a period of deconstruction as they try to unpack the baggage they need to eject. Then they can proceed with kingdom building (or at least need to). In other words, things are divided into epochs.

And don't get me wrong. If someone is "emerging" from what I guess we're supposed to call modern culture, especially an aspect of it with as much baggage as the traditional SBC, that might be a valuable or even essential process.

But that looks odd to me. As someone who has never been anything but what I am, the elements involved in deconstruction seem to play out on a continual basis. As I hear anything, I almost unconsciously try to determine agenda, context, influence, goal, and the whole host as I process it, qualifying, discounting, discarding, and preserving. That's not something I start and stop doing. It's not something I can often recall doing for a specific period of time on a specific topic. Everything goes through that wringer and goes back through it every time I consider it or something pokes it.

None of that stops me from moving forward with whatever I understand today, though I have no expectation that it will match my understanding a year from now or even a week.

So I find the idea that you do deconstruction for a while and then you go do kingdom building a little odd.

[Lukas McKnight]

I think any movement begins by being against something bigger; think Luther and his theses.

Hopefully we can move past that and into kingdom building and action in our communities.

[rich]

I like the lines you quoted here. It is interesting that so many do define themselve by what they are not. Sound a lot like many modern churches I know of... :)

Lukas, good comments there on being against to start and then moving past... Good words.

[bob hyatt]

Haven't the Southern Baptists been going strong by being "against" for quite a while now??? And Dr. Mohler seems to be making a great career out of being against all kinds of stuff...

I kid, I kid... :)

But seriously- give it some time. I have definitely detected a sense of moving away from the angry young man/woman phase towards something more positive- including in myself. But it's a necessary phase... We move through it, and then we move on.

How long did it take the Reformers to stop being such angry young men and start laying out something more positive?