ReImagine

CONTRA COSTA TIMES: ‘Emerging church’ seeks the justice Jesus sought
Adherents explore a faith of service, find fulfillment in action

By Rebecca Rosen Lum
Contra Costa Times
Article Launched: 06/05/2008

Lyle Birkey of the emerging church movement picks up trash in the Mission district with others…

In an apartment a few steps below street level in San Francisco’s
Mission District, several people — most in their 20s — sat in a
horseshoe of couches to consider the meaning of service.

In black high-tops, Crocs, hoodies and jeans, they looked much like
the hipsters who wait in line Sunday mornings for a table at Boogaloo’s
a few blocks away on Valencia Street.

This group of Christians gathers each week to grapple with seven
intangibles: service, simplicity, creativity, obedience, prayer,
community, and love. A young man in a cap reads Colossians I aloud
while some look down, others into the distance. Midway into the
evening, all take to the streets, battling an icy wind to pick up
trash, scrub graffiti and post signs in shop windows exhorting people
to honor their neighborhood with cleanliness.

From left, Emerging church movement members Caroline Pappajohn and
Sarah Montoya put up a sign that reads “Our Neighborhood, What We Do
Matters” at a doughnut shop in the Mission district of San Francisco,
Calif. on Tuesday June 3, 2008. People in the movement aim to live like
Jesus, but say they have no use for church as an institution. (Photo by
Nader Khouri)

The group is part of the decade-old emerging church movement, an
eclectic wave of change propelled by the Internet and peopled globally
mainly by the young.

Their Jesus is a radical. They have little use for the institutional
church, with its buildings, budgets and boards. They meet in homes.
Their aim is to live like Jesus, compelled to service among the poor.
They eschew congregations for communities. Their faith is not a
doctrine but a conversation — fluid and evolving.

“Experiment is a word we use a lot,” said Adam Klein, who helps lead
the loosely organized San Francisco community that calls itself
reIMAGINE.

“Nobody has lived in 2008 before and lived the way of Jesus, so you have to figure out what it means to you.”

Their expression of faith harkens back to the early days of Christianity, he said.

“Part of Paul’s job was to encourage people to continue on but
without the dogma. When Constantine came around and nationalized the
church it became a place where power and control were brokered.”

Estimates place the number of emerging church communities at several
hundred and growing. The Internet has figured hugely into the
movement’s growth, “not only in connecting, linking, promoting,
recording and communicating, but also in the new media mind-set that it
is creating,” said Andrew Jones, a New Zealand emergent who blogs from
Czechoslovakia under the name tallskinnykiwi.

“The net affects the way we think and relate and store knowledge. It
is creating a new set of values and a new hierarchy of leaders. We
haven’t seen the half of it yet.”

They know they are not the first believers compelled by faith to
give to the needy. Their difference is that traditional Christian
charity may involve compassion but not always a commitment to justice,
said Brian McLaren, one of the early emergent thinkers and the author
of several books, including “Adventures in Missing the Point,” which he
wrote with Tony Campolo. “Eventually, we have to deal with the people
causing injustice,” McLaren said…The emergent church emphasizes
Christ’s message of social justice, seeks the kind of spirituality that
flows from that and creates a community that supports that
spirituality, he said.

Members of the emerging church movement participate in an exercise with
one another in the Mission district of San Francisco, Calif. on Tuesday
June 3, 2008. People in the movement aim to live like Jesus, but say
they have no use for church as an institution. (Photo by Nader Khouri)

Some emergents embrace ancient ritual, including the Eucharist, and
they evangelize, although in social action they may not necessarily
talk about their faith at all.

“St. Francis of Assisi said it best: Go preach the gospel and if
necessary use words,” said Darin Petersen of Oakland, who travels
frequently to Philadelphia for community projects. “The best evangelism
is living a contagious life.”

“The problem with (traditional) evangelizing is that it is
delivering answers to people who are not seeking them,” he said. “We
need to be a peculiar people. Jesus gives the order of what that looks
like and what that means….”

“Jesus was political,” said Klein, whose community helped pay for
his recent trip to Africa to build mobile medical clinics. “If it was
all about the life after, he wouldn’t have been killed the way he was.”

Some ReIMAGINE participants just bought a duplex on an East Oakland
street that has been rocked by sideshows and three murders over the
past few weeks. They want their new Shalom community to love, serve,
and engage the troubled neighborhood, said Nate Milheim.

“What I’ve been excited about is taking Jesus more seriously as a
teacher as well as a savior,” Milheim, 30, who is cleaning up the house
with his wife, their two daughters and a couple who will share it.
“Let’s learn from this master, Jesus, this revolutionary, radical guy.
I want to explore what it would be to live like him.”

“I realize we have a lot to learn,” he said. “If the things happen that I dream of happening, it will take a while.”

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