[Ian Cameron McLaren]

Thanks to my brother-in-law [who has graciously let me borrow his laptop until I can get mine fixed up], I am back to the blog. Here, then, are my notes from McLaren’s main session at the conference last Saturday.

McLaren began by listing the characteristics of the Emergent Missional Church. They are as follows:
- Recentering the gospel on Christ and the Kingdom of God.
- Engaging culture without sacred-secular dualism.
- Life in community.
- Listening with openness, inclusive.
- Serving those in need without ulterior motives.
- Involving participants in worship.
- Valuing creativity in the image of the Creator.
- Leading through networks, not hierarchies.
- Integrating ancient and avant-garde in spiritual formation.

He explained that churches that are emerging exist in the middle of a shift from the church we know to the church of tomorrow. In order to move forward constructively, we must avoid all the us/them rhetoric. McLaren described what is known as ‘deep ecclesiology’. This is the range of churches that have existed from the beginning until now; it is a concept that acknowledges and honors the church in all its forms. Thus, everything from the Roman Catholic church to meeting with a group of friends in a basement can fit into the spectrum of that which is the Church, and all have merit. He compared the Church to a tree, which adds new rings as it ages. As the Church develops and evolves, it adds new rings to it, each one building on the Church in its previous forms in an attempt to engage the world by embracing the values that are important for today as we seek to understand the true message of Jesus.

That was McLaren’s afternoon session. I didn’t really know too much about what it meant to speak of the ‘emerging church’, but I think I got a better idea through this session. I think there are a lot of misconceptions and a propensity to get one’s back up when they hear the term, but I for sure think there’s something to it. Craig Carter later would say that we are to dwell in the tension between the old and the new - that we are never to feel as though we have it all figured out. McLaren said that the Church is to be a group of people that gather to concern themselves with the affairs of the Kingdom. Jesus stepped into a world that was dug deep into the status quo and called those who would follow him the rethink everything. I am there right now, caught in between the old and the new - not satisfied with the status quo, but just now beginning to ask the right questions. It’s good.