Gabe, I said I'd give you a good reply, and so I've got a few hours, so I'll give it a try. Cute, I know. Didn't mean that to be so corny.
Your concerns are very interesting to hear since my connections have most often been with people either finding themselves connected with emergent thought or even further past that, so to hear an "in-the-church", traditional view is good. I can only speak for myself on these things, but you probably wouldn't be suprised to find how many people pop up and say the same things. That's how I felt when I read Miller and McLaren. What I had been thinking about for years, completely unable to solidify and verbalize, they wrote down and went even further. I was part of the same church all four years of school, and as far as emergent existed back then, the River was at least on the edge of Canaan. It had the most basic direction and interest as I would later discover in Miller and McLaren, but even so, I spent my last years at Crown very... unsatisified. Much of that had and still has to do with me. That's fine. But there were too many things in our culture, in the basic social and religious culture I grew up in, that really bothered me to just shrug and go along with quietly.
By the time I was quitting grad school, I was on the verge of quitting church, for good as far as I could see. I wasn't okay with the systems, the norms, the necessities and the surface treatments that I encountered in a lot of churches. Nobody seemed interested in the whole thing, either in terms of fixing or even just questioning. It was like people knew there were leaks in the ship, but we were almost told to just stand on a leak if we saw it and then just stay there rather than ask the question if the ship was more important than the voyage. I'm being purposefully vague. But, amid my preparations to part with the formal church structures that I knew about, I happened to hear about a book from Kyle that he said I would love.
Kyle was one of the few reasons I kept with things as long as I did. You know him as well as I do, and the kid has no streak of perfection or some undeniable, superhuman ability that should push him across the universe ahead of the rest of us. But there he was, in a little church plant, with a bunch of people that didn't know about how to get dressed up for church or how to argue about music or how to set mission trip fundraising goals. Or at least, that's how I imagined it from the stories he told. And so we'd talk about church, about the Bible, and about how these people were actually getting to know Jesus, most of them emerging from AA meetings and still not prepared for a Sunday morning gathering so formal and rigid. And so I still had a glimmer of hope in me concerning the Church.
I read BLJ. I felt like I was writing it as I was reading it. Then my girlfriend gave me A New Kind of Christian, and it went deeper. Then we broke up, but that didn't change anything, not in this realm. I actually got to watch her from a distance, to see how these ideas affected her life (she had grown up in a very conservative, southern Baptist church, and to hear the biases and traditions given to her by this very specific culture were frightening). Then I left Montana and only just recently came to a place where I could talk with her again, and not yet about things so personal as this.
I showed up here in Washington over a year ago, and for six months I attended a church, bustling and bright, thousands of people strong, polished and shiny new in their recently errected church building out on the edge of town. The lead pastor was young enough, encouraging and real. But... it wasn't my church. Not in six months, and I'm pretty sure not ever. Now, the emergent conversation says that I'm supposed to be fine with this, that each church has its purpose, some being more active and living than others, but I am not supposed to be troubled by the ones I can't understand or agree with. So, I won't detail my real troubles with this former church I attended. Let's just say, I tried the programs, the small groups (one for the entire six months with not a single relationship to show from it), the Saturday seminars, and I was back to square one. I was a face in the crowd, and this church couldn't get together without having a crowd.
I went to one last young adult outing, only having a conversation with the leader of the group who was leaving for California, otherwise I spent the night by myself, and I realized that, despite a real effort on my part, I hadn't made a single friend in six months of weekly seeing these same people. They said the right things, they prayed very zealously, and they talked about the Bible a lot, but they couldn't break away from their picture of their little group enough to let in a stranger. I never went back.
I did some church hopping. I've never been the sort that can do it successfully. Actually, it was easier now because I was ready to put up with very little glossy crap in order to find a real fit. I walked in and out over several services, usually before the sermon was over. Everybody was standing on the holes and talking about their kids soccer games and new evangelism classes and the sound mix. I was glad to slip in and out.
One Sunday morning in the beginning of December, I caught sight of a sign on an elementary school about a church with a really weird name: "Renovatus". I told myself I had to try it, but I was scared these people were going to be so corny I wouldn't be able to breathe. I mean, who came up with that name. It was almost like Imago, but just weird. And it looked tiny. I drove into the parking lot, took several deep breaths, and walked in the doorway. There were weird paintings up, Christmas lights on draperies, and a guy wearing a Vote for Pedro shirt. I really did feel at home instantly. The first person that walked up to me used the phrase, "a church for people who don't like church", and he was right. It was awkward. The pastor wasn't smooth, he wasn't unbelievably deep or even someone I could completely relate with, but he certainly was there out of love. I met nearly the whole church that day. I also encountered one of our norms, that being, nothing. Our weeks don't look very similar at all. I can only remember one real sermon in style and length. There are constant glitches and troubles, and nobody cares that things aren't neat and perfectly timed. That night, the first night I went, I was invited to a white elephant gift party. I went with some dollar DVD's from Target, left with candy canes and a pezz dispenser, and a group of people that I knew, and that acted like they wanted to know me. They've faked it this long.
Now that was a really long introduction to my experience reconnecting with the Church through an emergent community. I figure I can go from there and try to reply to Gabe's worries.
BLJ doesn't have a thesis because life doesn't have a thesis. It's an academic idea that has infiltrated Christian thought to a point that the two cannot be distinguished: by that I mean rationalism and Christianity. I think our education pushed us towards finding things that weren't necessarily there a lot of the time, and this thesis search is one of them. Just think of the title (it comes from this passage, page 100): "There is something quite beautiful about the Grand Canyon at night. There is something beautiful about a billion stars held steady by a God who knows what He is doing. (They hang there, the stars, like notes on a page of music, free-form verse, silent mysteries swirling in the blue like jazz)..." Find a thesis in jazz, or in the sky, or in humanity, or God. Not very possible. Not very necessary.
Reaction against the present state of most American evangelical churches could be a resistence to authority, a failure to submit. Luther had a reaction against the church of his day. Was he failing to submit? Or was his questioning necessary, the outcomes troublesome, but our place in the world maybe better off because of it? I'm not saying we're on the verge of some great movement. I'm saying that just because any part of the church has been around for a while doesn't give it the right to claim itself as a necessary route to God. A great deal of churches act like the buildings they reside in - once build, maybe added onto once, but unable to grow and change, and unable to die and give room for the next generation to grow up, free from their burden, unable to pass on wisdom and insight without shackling the young with their tendencies, tastes and shortsightedness. We think of the Church as we think of God, and our failure to let the church be a body, where cells die and new ones grow to take their place has given us great cancers that are much worse than young, immature organs.
I think Miller intentionally shows that the Bible by itself is not why he knows Jesus or is part of the Christian Church. Cults actually seem very connected with certain parts of the Bible. Think of Mormonism. I think McLaren gives a very clear exposition of biblical authority in A Generous Orthodoxy.
"The Bible, (Paul) says, is good for equipping people to do good works... Interestingly, when Scripture talks about itself, it doesn't use the language we often use in our explanations of its value. For modern Western Christians, words like authority, inerrancy, infallibility, revelation, objective, absolute, and literal are crucial (his emphasis, not mine). Many churches or denominations won't allow people to become members unless they use these words in tehir description of Scripture. Hardly anyone realizes why these words are important. Hardly anyone knows about the stories of Sir Isaac Newton, Rene Descartes, the Enlightenment, David Hume, and Foundationalism- which provide the context in which these words are so important. Hardly anyone notices the irony of resorting to the authority of extrabiblical words and concepts to justify one's belief in the Bible's ultimate authority." (p.164)
Miller is also writing to a more general audience than just evangelicals, and so when we reference the Bible as an authority, it is meaningless to most other people. Experience is something everyone can relate to, and that's a good place to start.
I'm really excited that people are ready to ask serious questions about the whys and hows of church in our culture. If some people break away from a Sunday-morning, steeple and tie-wearing crowd to find a group of Christians who know them and spur them on, I'm up for it. I think it's been time for some change for a while. Do I think the average church out there is wrong or evil? Nope. But the assumption that the old way is the right way cannot help us when it seems quite clear that a whole lot of us have lost the way. Maybe that's not the case. I just see an incongruity between the Church (in the Bible, in history, thinking long term and pulling together many different forms and heritages) and your average American church, and the solution can't be staying the same.
And that was really long. I've got to get ready for work. Hope this gives you the other side, Gabe. We'll see if I stepped out of bounds (but there isn't any for us emergent people, right?). I'm funny. Where's Bob when I need him? Montana, right. I remember.