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1 Meditations on the Emerging Church from Richard Rohr's Center On Meditations on the Emerging Church From Richard Rohr’s Center on Action and Contemplation The Great Emergence Sunday, November 26, 2017 I have come to set fire upon the earth, and how I wish it were already blazing. —Luke 12:49 Protestants and Catholics recently honored the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. In 1517, when Martin Luther posted his “95 Theses” or complaints to the church door in Germany, Western Christianity had become too focused on meritocracy and hierarchy, losing sight of the Gospel. The Roman Catholic Church itself admits it is always in need of reformation. Reformation is the perpetual process of conversion that is needed by all individuals and institutions. We appear to be in the midst of another period of significant turmoil and rebirth, thus my focus on rebuilding Christianity “from the bottom up” in this year’s Daily Meditations. In North America and much of Europe, we are witnessing a dramatic increase in “Nones,” people who don’t identify with a particular faith tradition. While I ache for those who have been wounded by religion and no longer feel at home in church, the dissatisfaction within Christianity has sparked some necessary and healthy changes. Episcopal Bishop Mark Dyer (1930-2014) aptly called these recurring periods of upheaval giant “rummage sales” in which the church rids itself of what is no longer needed and rediscovers treasures it had forgotten. As Phyllis Tickle (1934-2015) reflected, in the process of building necessary structure in institutions, we eventually “elaborate, encrust, and finally embalm them with the accretion of both our fervor and our silliness. At that point there is no hope for either religion or society, save only to knock the whole carapace off ourselves and start over again.” [1] With each reformation, we don’t need to start from scratch but return to the foundations of our Tradition. We don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater, but reclaim the essential truths. And remember that truth anywhere is truth everywhere. With each rebirth, Christianity becomes more inclusive and universal, as it was always meant to be. Tickle continues, describing how we might participate in shaping our history and present: Called the Great Emergence, this time of radical shift is, like its predecessors, one of total and all- encompassing change. It is effecting and being effected as much by shifting cultural, economic, political, and intellectual circumstances as by religious ones. Yet it is the religious shifts that ultimately will inform and interpret all the others. [It] is sufficient to say that this thing is a-borning, and it is we who must faithfully and prayerfully attend to its birthing. [2] This emergence is not something we create or invent so much as name and join. “Two or three” gathered in deep truth create a whole new level of energy, collaboration, and interdependent life. Gateway to Silence: Rooted and growing in Love References: 1 [1] Phyllis Tickle, “The Great Emergence,” Radical Grace, vol. 21, no. 4 (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2008), 4-5. [2] Ibid. Adapted from Richard Rohr, “500th Anniversary of the Beginnings of the Reformation,” October 31, 2017, cac.org/reformation-500th-anniversary/ A New Reformation Monday, November 27, 2017 I believe that what some refer to as the “emerging church” is a movement of the Holy Spirit. Movements are the energy-building stages of things, before they become monuments, museums, or machines. In the last sixty years, several significant events have taken place, both within and alongside the various Christian churches, to foster this movement. Spiritual globalization is allowing churches worldwide to profit from these breakthroughs at approximately the same time, which of itself is a new kind of reformation! No one is directing, controlling, or limiting this movement. We are all just trying to listen together. It is happening almost in spite of all of us—which tells me the Spirit must be guiding it. I will identify briefly some of the historical developments that I see propelling this movement: 1. Our awareness is broadening, recognizing that Jesus was clearly teaching nonviolence, simplicity of lifestyle, peacemaking, love of creation, and letting go of ego, both for individuals and groups. More and more Christians are now acknowledging Jesus’ radical social critique to the systems of domination, money, and power. In the past, most of Jesus’ practical teaching was ignored by Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christians. The establishment chose instead to concentrate on private sinfulness and personal salvation and, as Brian McLaren says, an “evacuation plan” into the next world. 2. There is a common-sense and growing recognition that Jesus was clearly concerned about the specific healing and transformation of real persons and human society “on earth as it is in heaven.” The Church, more than Jesus, historically focused on doctrinal belief and moral stances, which ask almost nothing of us in terms of real change. They just define groups—often in an oppositional way. 3. We are recovering the older and essential contemplative tradition, starting with Thomas Merton in the 1950s, now spreading to numerous denominations, like a “treasure hidden in the field” (Matthew 13:44). Some Emerging Church leaders have yet to grasp the centrality of contemplative and inner wisdom. 4. Critical biblical scholarship is occurring on a broad ecumenical level, especially honest historical and anthropological scholarship about Jesus as a Jew in the culture of his time. This leads us far beyond the liberal reductionism and the conservative fundamentalism that divide so many churches. We now see the liberal/conservative divide as a bogus and finally unhelpful framing of the issues. Gateway to Silence: Rooted and growing in Love Reference: Adapted from Richard Rohr, “The Emerging Church: Beyond Fight or Flight,” Radical Grace, vol. 21, no. 4 (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2008), 3. 2 A Great Convergence Tuesday, November 28, 2017 The emerging church, a convergence of hopeful and liberating Christian themes, is happening on all continents, in all denominations, at all levels—and at a rather quick pace. I want to name this movement so that you can first of all recognize how it has already happened in you on some level and so that you can offer this wonderful Gospel emergence your time, your prayer, your love, and your energy. If you do that, there will be no time left to oppose, hate, or deny anything or anybody. There is no need to reject or deny any one’s present or past experience. God will lead us from here, including and transcending the past, as Ken Wilber says. Continuing where we left off yesterday, here are some more of the historical developments propelling the emerging church movement: 1. A global sense of Christianity frames the denominational divisions in a larger context. Many of the things we historically fought about are resolved, boring, or non-essential. We have all been both victims and beneficiaries of these very specific histories and cultures, and we can find unity in that. 2. There is a growing recognition of the unnecessary limits that church protocols and historical idiosyncrasies have put on reading and living the Gospels for each of our denominations. This is a new ability to distinguish the essentials from the incidentals in church practice and teaching. 3. The Pentecostal/Charismatic movement tells us that experiential Christianity is actually possible, desirable, and has the potential to lead us to a more Trinitarian theology—opening up the mystical and the prayer levels of Christianity. So many who have had “baptism in the Spirit” experiences find themselves naturally Trinitarian, even if they lack formal theology to understand it. 4. A developing spirituality and theology of nonviolence allows us to pursue things in a “third way” beyond the old fight-or-flight dualism. 5. We see new structures of community and solidarity, including groups for recovery, study, contemplation, lectio divina, service and mission (for example, New Monasticism, Catholic Worker houses, JustFaith). Many of these are led by lay people. The emphasis is on “mediating institutions” instead of just parish churches, yet these are normally not anti or against the local or official church. 6. There is a new appreciation for “many gifts and ministries” (1 Corinthians 12), “together making a unity in the work of service” (Ephesians 4), instead of concentrating on a top tier of ordained leadership where gender and power issues dominate. With many gifts and many ministries, legitimacy comes from ability, solidarity with suffering, and willingness to serve, rather than from top-down authorization. With this new kind of reformation happening, we are happy to stay at the exciting movement level as long as we can—and God allows—and if possible, avoid becoming rigid and stagnant as “monuments, museums, or machines.” Remember, “The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better” (a CAC core principle). Gateway to Silence: Rooted and growing in Love 3 Reference: Adapted from Richard Rohr, “The Emerging Church: Beyond Fight or Flight,” Radical Grace, vol. 21, no. 4 (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2008), 3, 22. A Change of Consciousness Wednesday, November 29, 2017 I have learned to prize holy ignorance more highly than religious certainty and to seek companions who have arrived at the same place. We are a motley crew, distinguished not only by our inability to explain ourselves to those who are more certain of their beliefs than we are but in many cases by our distance from the centers of our faith communities as well. Like campers who have bonded over cook fires far from home, we remain grateful for the provisions that we have brought with us from those cupboards, but we also find them more delicious when we share them with one another under the stars.
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