Toward an Emergent Church Values Set VI

Authenticity: A Community of Truth

"I would rather be with someone who is real than someone who is good."
--attributed to Philip Yancey

Postmoderns value authenticity. Our memory of the last century is strewn with artifacts of inauthenticity -- Teflon facades, Max Headroomesque televangelists, million-dollar smiles. Most emergent folk have what Hemingway once called a "built-in crap detector". Heroes have become scarce. We'd all just settle for someone without an agenda. Chuch Smith, Jr. writes "....information has become cheap and not altogether reliable. People who are true are now regarded more highly than people who are knowlegeable. We can hire knowledgeable people, but we love true people."

Amidst this landscape, confessional, emergent Christians realize we must earn a right to be heard in this post-modern world. We earn the right through authenticity. As power and plausibility structures crumble, as the myth of the "expert" erodes, access and permissions are guarded. The search is on for authenticity. We should welcome the scrutiny. If we knew what was good for us.

More than a decade ago, Keith Miller wrote in The Taste of New Wine:

"Our modern church is filled with many people who look pure, sound pure, and are inwardly sick of themselves, their weaknesses, their frustration and the lack of reality around them in the church. Our non-Christian friends either feel, `That bunch of nice untroubled people would never understand my problems'; or the more perceptive pagans, who know us socially or professionally, feel that we Christians are either grossly protected and ignorant about the human situation, or are out-and-out hypocrites ... who will not confess the sins and weaknesses [they intuitively know] to be universal."

Pastor Cliff Knighten recently described congregations full of people whose outer and inner worlds are not in sync -- this lack of genuine authenticity is both "toxic to the Christian life" and a complete roadblock to reaching postmoderns. He said that we must remind ourselves -- "do we truly live out that which we claim to believe? If we talk about humility, are we humble? If we talk about forgiveness, do we forgive? If we talk about love, do we really love?"

This next set of Emergent Church Values simply repackages the key points made by Knighten:

1. We seek an approach to spiritual growth that values inward transformation over external appearances.

2. We value a spirituality seeks not to conform and nor limit our God-given humanity, creativity, or individuality. (We value diversity and difference over conformity and uniformity.)

3. We value heart-level honest dialogues over realationships marked by superficiality and hidden agendas.

4. We strive to be completely honest with God and appropriately transparent with others about our inmost thoughts, hopes, dreams, emotions, shortcomings, failings, transgressions, struggles.

6. We seek to welcome back mystery and paradox over easy explanations; we seek to live with with questions that have no easy answers.

Lesslie Newbigin has said that the local congregation is the hermeneutic -- the interpretation -- of the gospel:

The primary reality of which we have to take account in seeking for a Christian impact on public life is the Christian congregation. The only hermeneutic of the gospel is a congregation of men and women who believe it and live by it...This community will have, I think, the following six characteristics:
It will be a community of praise.
It will be a community of truth.
It will be a community that does not live for itself.
It will be a community... sustained in the exercise of the priesthood in the world.
It will be a community of mutual responsibility.
It will be a community of hope.

I'll leave you with Brian McLaren's warning: "I tend to notice that when people use the words “authenticity” and “community” a lot, both tend to leave the premises. It’s easy to use authenticity and community as new marketing tools to win customers to our product; as soon as that happens, we violate authenticity and community."

Comments

[erik]

I notice, though, that in my own life I tend to use "authenticity" about my spiritual struggles as a means of deflecting people's attention from my lack of progress in a given area. As if talking about my doubts/failings were somehow more spiritual than doing the prayer and study to expel them. I actually catch myself becoming prideful about how "authentic" my faith(?) is compared to other believers' who just gloss over all the theological incoherencies in what they believe. My capacity to pervert anything good is really boggling. Is this a problem in the larger "emergent church" as well?

[soupiset]

Is which a problem in the larger, so-called emergent church?
--the capacity to prevert something good?
--spiritual pride?
--comparing one's self?
--glossing over incoherencies?
--talkiung about one's doubts/failings?

[erik]

using "authenticity" as an excuse for lack of spiritual growth...sorry for my rambling ambiguous antecedents.

[soupiset]

i'm massive-tired-boy, so i rambled below.
this barely makes sense to me. but here tis.
---------
erik, i'd be interested in a clearer illustration or example of that. maybe i'm confused. the way i see it is:

spiritual growth or decay are states (organisms don't have a static growth state, right?): if one is decaying (all the while thinking of herself as static), she would either be content or discontent (or ignorant) about her state. authenticity would be shedding light on her state so that others could agree with the status. (and even agreeing with herself, if she's playing mind games internally)...if she is content with her state, she might also be transparent enough to share that status with others. (no excuse in that model). if she is discontent with her state, and happens to be transparent enough to share her "decaying" status with others, i could see how others' reactions might prompt a maintenance of status quo, but don't see how that's an excuse for staying in that state.

[Durb]

I find it interesting that you use the phrase "earn the right to be heard", which as far as I know was coined by Jim Rayburn in Young Life some 50+ years ago. It was as true then as it is now, but has now expanded from a truth for relevant student ministry to a more complicated truth in ministry as a whole. Earning the right to be heard can mean many different things: being willing to attend a kid's baseball game, appealing to someone's aesthetic preferences, engaging someone in conversation on a topic they care about, or meeting real, tangible needs in the community.
However, just doing these types of things does not necessarily translate to authenticity, especially if they are done with a particular agenda. I think that is expressed in Brian McLaren's warning quoted above.
I have already seen "authenticity" overhyped as a church marketing tool. Not quite to the "Xtreme" levels, but close.

[soupiset]

Sounds about right.

Strange. I just got back from a lunch where me and a friend said more negative things about parachurch things than we did positive (which was really more a critique of the church proper than the parachurches who stepped in during the last century), but Rayburn, willing to go out and have a smoke with the kids that he might reach some... (assuming smoking was already authentically Rayburnesque)...well, there you go...

It makes sense that what once worked for student ministry now is incorporated into culture at large.

[Durb]

A big problem with para-church orgs (and I've seen them from the inside and outside) is when they are no longer functioning as truly "para" church in working alongside the church(es) towards a common goal. Many become "Extra"-church, functioning apart from the church, but trying to act AS a church. In some situations this is the problem of a church (too narrowly focused to want to participate with another organization), and in others cases the problem of the organization (we're doing it better than the church, so we'll stay on our own).
Question for further thought and discussion: How do para-church organizations fit in with the emerging church?

[soupagain]

I tend to agree that the Church abdicated much in the 20th century; a lot of emergent thinkers have little place for the parachurch in their new models -- they (we?) all seem to feel that the time has arrived to bring these back into the fold. They don't discount the work that's been/being done, of course.

This article, linked here (not an emergent voice) takes another view, which seems to reject the disctinction, and calls for a larger imagination (it appropriates Paul Hiebert's 'centered set' thinking and applies it to the Church.) It refocuses us on the Head of the Church.... a good thing.

I feel ambivalent...Whether they get reigned back into the church or we re-think our terminology, the key is that the kingdom work continues, unfettered....

i'll have to think more about this. thanks durb
-psoup

[erik]

OK, let me re-attempt to describe my love-hate struggle with authenticity. By authenticity I mostly refer to your points three and four above (BTW, point two is a little confusing; can you re-word it?): heart-level dialogue and appropriate transparency. In my life these two aspects have most recently worked themselves out around spiritual and theological struggles, which I tried to work out transparently in front of my (former) church mates.

At first, this was good and helpful for me and for them--they appreciated the honesty and I appreciated an opportunity to vent. After awhile though, I found that being transparent all the time seemed to become my spiritual personality--I was always the guy who questioned everything and couldn't seem to fully believe anything. However, while I was transparent about my doubts and struggles, I was NOT transparent about the fact I wasn't really doing anything creative and disciplined to try to work through them. So in a sense I was using "authenticity" as a selective spotlight; by flooding one area of spiritual struggle with lots of light, I was able to distract people from deeper stuff that was a more significant problem. I didn't realize I was doing this for some time, but in effect I became so comfortable with doubt that I wasn't willing to move past it.

SO, to return to the topic at hand, which is not about me but about Emergent Values: do you see a potential or actual danger in using "authenticity" in this manner on a congregational level, to bring attention to areas of the Christian walk where a particular emergent congregation is actually making progress, all the while sweeping other areas under the rug? For example, are there emergent churches that are characterized by a deep authenticity about race relations, but absolute silence about sexual struggles?

I guess what I'm saying is that authenticity has the potential to be selective and self-initiated, and as such can turn into a Pharisaical self-congratulation. This isn't in any way intended to denigrate it as a significant value and ideal.