Erwin Raphael McManus is an author and pastor of Mosaic church in Los Angeles. this church meets three times a week at three different locations in the LA area, with the main meeting occuring Sunday nights at the Los Angeles Entertainment Center, a place that McManus describes vividly at the beginning of his chapter. it is a club whose walls “rumble from the sounds of rap, salsa, disco, and techno” and whose regular clientele includes sports stars, entertainers, musicians, and actors. all this changes when the church meets on Sunday evenings, however, as the building comes alive with the Mosaic “gathering.” McManus represents Sweet’s “park” clearing which relies on the message handed down from generation to generation, while seeking to find new ways of expressing that message. in other words, they fit into the “preserving message/evolving methods” paradigm.

unlike many of the other authors in this book, McManus decides to begin his discussion of the Emergent movement by defining culture and how he believes the church is to interact with that culture. he states that “culture is generally about how people socialize, how we group together, or more accurately, what holds us together.” how a culture holds people together is found in the particular beliefs and values of that culture. these beliefs and values can manifest themselves in a myriad of ways ranging from music to art to literature to worship services. culture changes with the wind and, because of this, “the emergence of new strains and endless variations of human understanding make the distinction between the church and the culture difficult to ignore.” he considers it a tragedy for the church to strive to protect its congregants from the outside culture because he believes that the church is to always put herself in the midst of the culture as she is “at her best in the midst of the white waters” of the turbulent river that is the ever-changing culture. he states that those who seek safety in buckets drawn from the river (those churches who withdraw themselves and their constituents from the culture) soon become “stagnant, stale, and bitter.”

he then discusses his conception of relevance and notes that the fourth core value of Mosaic is “Relevance to culture is not optional.” he believes that churches are too often an expressions of the 1970s and 1980s, expressions which fail to be “fresh and life-giving,” and are, instead, antiquated and out of touch. to head his those who would question relevance off at the pass, he states, “relevance is not about conformity; it is about clarity and connectedness.” in being relevant to the wider culture the church can speak authentically and with a “resonance of reality.” he also preemptively shakes off further criticism in claiming that his view of relevance “isn’t about what works best or gets the job done fastest,” but “embracing the principle that we are to value the one lost sheep even more than the 99 that are found.” he goes on to say that relevance “is waking up to the realization that the church isn’t here for we who believe, but rather that we in fact are the church, and we are here for a world drowning in disbelief.” so it is due to the fact that most people who reject Christianity are actually rejecting the attitude and approach of the evangelizer, rather than the message and Gospel of Jesus, that the church needs to find new methods of expressing the age-old message.

even though he advocates evolving methods, he states that “whatever the culture, era, or generation, it is essential that we examine our practices, rituals, dogmas, and traditions and measure them against God’s intent as communicated through the Scriptures.” like many who favor the Emergent Church Movement, McManus dislikes “modern” (as in the philosophical ideology) notions of the church and seeks “to find a better place in the future for the ancient church” rather than finding a place in the past for the future church. this occurs through informing the the culture with Eastern overtones (as these are the overtones the church originally came out of) rather than Western overtones, and seeking to express faith in light of those Eastern overtones. McManus describes that doing this “leads us not to a European church and its sacramental essence but to a primal church with an elemental essence.” he goes on to say that the church exists to reflect God’s glory and to “bring the world to its Creator,” a task which necessitates getting back to the authentic worship of the ancient church instead of stagnating in the methods of the “modern” era.

McManus grieves a church that has become so theologically passive that it has “slipped into the view that the world creates culture and that the church reacts to it,” rather than following the original, ancient church which created culture for the world to follow. he cites Jesus of commissioning an active role for the church in culture as He sent His disciples out to make other disciples of all nations. “with this broad stroke,” describes McManus, “He sent them out to change the contour of human history and left the details for them to work out.” using Scripture as the “portal into the presence of God,” instead of just a textbook on how to believe and live, the church is to continue the cultural revolution that Christ began with His ministry, coming to know His mind and heart more fully and being more fully transformed into His likeness. McManus believes that if Christians are truly defined by the presence of Christ, “then our mission must be to bring to humanity life that is borne out of an intimate relationship to God through Jesus Christ.” he believes that the power of the Gospel of Christ is the result of the person of Christ and is “an event to be proclaimed,” rather than the power of the Gospel residing in merely the message of Christ or the preserving of doctrine.

in believing the latter, McManus states, “in modern times the Scriptures have been demeaned into God’s comprehensive encyclopedia. we have developed the discipline of theology to study God and His ideas. we have moved from a missiological hermeneutic to a theological hermeneutic and have lost the power of the Scriptures in transition.” he continues that we cannot know God through the Scriptures alone as the information in Scripture does not procure salvation or transformation in the individual. McManus believes the Scriptures, when approached with humility, to be the very presence of God. Scripture is not closed off from God as if Scripture is all God has to say in the world. instead, it opens up those who would see that God continues to speak today through the Word. God’s message never changes as it is a message that “never loses its edge” and is “always sharp, precise, and relevant.”

McManus then engages many postmoderns stating that there are some who “propose that all truth is subjective,” a position that leads to relativism and makes the individual the ultimate authority on all matters. however, he also responds to the other view and states that God’s Word, the Scriptures, are neither relative nor objective. “the biblical view is that truth is personal, relational, and subjective” with God, rather than the individual as the subject as God is the source of all Truth. he concludes his article by reaffirming that the “modern” Christian culture “places far too much confidence in the power of knowledge to transform,” a practice which leads to legalism and dogmatism. without personal relationship and experience with God, “all of our words are empty and will fall silent in the end.” if God continues to reveal Himself today, then it must be the mission of Christians to share the love and life “that comes only in relationship to the living God” with those who are in desperate need of that love and life. Jesus “resonated with His culture and spoke in a language that was easily understood,” giving us an example of how the intersection of God’s people and the wider culture are to interact. Through the church, Christ continues to speak freshly to ever-changing cultures through an incarnational ministry that seeks to reside at the intersection of culture and communication, searching for the one lost sheep.

of the five views outlined in this book, McManus’ was the most personally challenging for me and if his view of “missional” is what most Emergents hold to (as opposed to McLaren’s EXTREME view), then i feel somewhat better about the Emergent Church Movement. although not that much better. in his discussion on being missional, i greatly admire his zeal for wanting to bring the message of the Gospel to the lost and definitely encourage him to do so. especially in a place like Los Angeles, a city which, at least from the outside, seems to be in such desperate need of Jesus Christ. other pastors and laypeople should aspire to that same sort of zeal no matter what their personal theological beliefs are. we are all called to proclaim the message of Christ, making disciples of all nations, and running the race that God has set before us with endurance. i am confident that this attitude towards being “missional” combined with continued open discussion and dialogue, will not only help to ease the fears of many in regards to where the church is going, but can also help to heal the wounds of those in the Emergent movement who are reacting to what they see in the contemporary church.

there are some issues, though, in his article that i think are worthy of mentioning and questioning. the first place i found McManus contradicting himself or not being clear came right after he had said “whatever the culture, era or generation, it is essential that we examine our practices, rituals, dogmas, and traditions and measure them against God’s intent as communicated through the Scriptures.” after reading this statement, i almost leapt out of my seat and shouted “YES!” in fact, i even wrote that out in the margin. however, McManus says a few lines later, “we use art, sculpture, and dance not as entertainmetn but as primal expressions of our faith.” i stared at that line for a good five minutes trying to reconcile it with its surrounding context. i don’t know what translation of the Scriptures McManus uses, but i do not ever recall art or sculpture (dance is arguable) being used in worship of the Lord and thus i do not see these “primal expressions of faith” (whatever that means) as being included in “God’s intent as communicated through the Scriptures.”

my first major question mark, however, was the alarming number of false antitheses in both McLaren and McManus’ articles. as i’ve read selections from writers, pastors, and thinkers within the ECM, it seems that they often force their readers or listeners to make false choices, usually between, in their minds, a seemingly bland conception of the modern era and a sexy new way of doing things in the postmodern era. two of these false choices come back to back of each other as McManus is describing his idea of evolving methods. he states “the power of the gospel is the result of a person–Jesus Christ–not a message. the gospel is an event to be proclaimed, not a doctrine to be preserved.” the first time i read those two sentences, my only response was, “huh?”

in regards to the first sentence, i don’t understand the difference between Christ the person and Christ the message as presented in Scripture. of course there would be differences between Christ the person and Christ as presented in the Gospel accounts if Christ were still living on this earth today. we would have a personality to go along with His words, characteristic mannerisms, etc. but since Christ has ascended and not returned yet, the Gospel accounts are all we have to go on in discovering who Jesus is. there is simply no way to know Christ today except through the message of Christ as contained in the whole counsel of God. St. Paul even says, “‘everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’ But how are they to call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?” (Romans 10:13-14) one cannot remove Christ, in our contemporary times, from His message or the message about His life and ministry. to suggest that one can do so or to present such a false antithesis is ignorance at best and vague mysticism at worst.

the same can be said of the second sentence in the above quote. i would put forth that preserving (biblically sound) doctrine is VITALLY important to Christianity. without such practices, one could believe anything at all about Jesus and God with no recourse. one would be able to be a practicing Buddhist yet still cry “Lord, Lord” and that would be ok. McManus’ words are not even biblically defensible. Michael Horton, in his comments on this article, points out several passages of Scripture (2 Timothy 3:14-15; 2 Timothy 4:3, 5; Jude 3) where it is specifically commanded to the saints to preserve the doctrines handed down to them or to “continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.” McManus’ words sound nice and sincere in his plea for a “Jesus only” approach to Christianity, but this plea will inevitably result in throwing the baby out with the bathwater. if one searches for Jesus Christ apart from His message and apart from the doctrines of “the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints,” then that search will be in vain and will produce nothing but a Jesus made in the image of the seeker.

my biggest problem with McManus’ argument was his confusing of the church militant and the church as an institution. the former is the collective body of believers, or Christ’s church, who are to engage in active “warfare” against the enemies of God through evangelism. this collective body is tasked with the Great Commission given by Christ to go into the world and make disciples of all nations. this is done by individual believers, pastors and laypeople, through foreign missions, domestic missions, and general relationships with those outside the fold. this is done primarily outside the church meetings as the meetings are, biblically, to be specifically geared towards the building up of the saints which is addressed in the next paragraph.

the latter is the institution installed by Christ, who is the head and cornerstone of that institution. the purpose of this institution, according to Scripture, is “to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes” (Ephesians 4:12-14). however, McManus seems to disagree with this biblical definition of the church in saying, “the church isn’t here for we who believe” but is here “for a world drowing in unbelief.”

he does not qualify this statement, but he definitely seems to assert, especially since he (and the Emergent movement at large) places such a large emphasis on being “missional,” that the church institution’s primary responsibility is outreach at the expense of the believers. what i would like to know is, if the church “isn’t here for we who believe,” then what do we do with those people who convert due to our “missional” activities? do we immediately turn them around and throw them to the wolves to find other lost sheep? is it not biblically clear, at least from the sole passage that i cited, that the church’s main responsibility is “to equip the saints for the work of ministry” and for “building up the body of Christ” in the pursuit of unity, knowledge, and worship of Christ? if that is not the church’s primary responsibility then the church will lose those newly found sheep to the world again for failing to continue to minister to them, build them up, and see them into maturity. they will be lost to “every wind of doctrine” and human cunningness because they will be unable to contend for their faith and will become the seed that falls on the rocky ground. as i said in the beginning of my critique, i admire McManus’ strong pull towards evangelism and i am encouraged by his definition of “missional.” but if he believes that this idea of a “missional” church should be at the expense of the saints, then i think that is a very grave problem and a position that has absolutely no ground in Scripture.