Anyone who has ever gone to multiple churches before has seen how different churches can be. It could be simply the music to what people wear or deeper like who people really worship to the traditions they practice based on their beliefs. I experience this all the time as I compare my home church to other churches I visit. Why is it that churches have to worship so differently? I think the answer to this questions rests on how people interpret the Bible and who the Bible calls us to worship. And today, lots of people have lots of different opinions on this issue and so they create lots of different kinds of churches based on these beliefs.
The one kind of church I want to discuss today is the "Emergent Church." For those of you who don't know what this is I will give you a brief descriptions to what kind of church they are and then go into more detail throughout the post. This new emerging church is described as a post-modern church. It is based on the idea that you can reach more people through a more "modern" way of having a service. Now let me set you a picture of this new church...
Imagine a group of people coming together in casual clothing, to a room full of couches and seats with one chair in the middle. The room is dark and music is playing via a DJ in the back. As people come in they can sing and have a discussion about the different things that bother them in a laid back situation. At first this sounds pretty good, comfy clothes, relaxed, everyone is equal kinda feel. It really sounds like a small group with Christians meeting together to talk about their problems together. Sounds pretty nice to me. Then I started to really focus and dive into what the church is really about, and that's when I realized what a trap this can be.
This really all starts back to when the Bible was first put together. In those days, the Bible was the supreme authority and everyone was judged according to the Bible. Then in the middle ages, it became the Bible and the Church together. So the church had the same authority as the Bible. This started to lead people to think, well is it really necessary to have the Bible if we can reach "truth" without it? That's when people started to wonder away from biblical teachings and started to teach what they thought.
Think about how with that mentality, you could come up with a church like that. If someone is not in the word and preaching out of the word, you can come up with thousands of interpretations of what they believe is the truth. This leads to theological chaos. The emergent church is responding to this by making it feel real to people in their own way. They make teachings 3D and mystical so you can touch and feel your faith. One man said that to these churches, "...it is more important to feel like we are representing a beautiful expression of our relationship with God then to be right about everything." He is sort of right about one thing, we don't need to know or be right about everything, but we have to be right about the truth in the Bible and knowing the truth embedded in the scriptures. Because of this, the emerging church does not believe a minister is necessary to preach the gospels because you can just discuss it. Disagreeing with this kind of preaching, a man stated, "The gospel is something to be taught and to believe, not just to experience." This explains why the emergents don't like the regular church, because it teaches about what to believe and how to apply it, instead of how to experience it. Someone else said, "Many of them want to ask good questions, but for things to follow the beliefs of Christians means there are answers and there are limits to what those answers can be." He is saying, you can't just discuss things. You have to have someone preaching from the Word because that's what the gospel is all about. With all of their beliefs so different too, their can be no judgment or absolute truth.
This type of church is not what Jesus wanted for us. He wants a church founded and rooted in his word because that is where the real truth is found. Because of this we as Christians have to be on guard and really study the foundations of the churches we go to.
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