Ryan Bell makes his home with his wife and two daughters in Hollywood, California and is the Senior Pastor of the Hollywood Seventh-day Adventist Church. He writes a blog called intersections, at www.ryanjbell.net
[This article was pulled from Ryan Bell’s review in the July issue of Spectrum Magazine (www.spectrummagazine.org).]
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Emergent Village has always been about friendship, and if the recent book An Emergent Manifesto of Hope is any indication, this friendship is growing and bearing fruit in remarkable ways.
Though this book is the first volume of a publishing partnership between Emergent Village (also known as simply Emergent) and Baker Books, Emergent is far from new. This friendship has been evolving since the mid-1990s and is just now hitting its stride. Emergent self-describes as “a growing, generative friendship among missional Christians seeking to love our world in the Spirit of Jesus Christ.” Through the years, this loose and amorphous network of Christians has defied categorization, but it seems fair to say that the glue that holds this broad friendship together is a shared vision for a theology and practice of Christian life that both blesses the world and gives witness to God’s kingdom, now present and yet to come. I and others have also observed that Emergent is a kind of “third place” for post-Evangelicals and post-Liberals to fellowship and engage in serious conversation about how Christian faith is “emerging” in our increasingly post-Christian world.1
Though this book is organized around the theme of hope, the reader will quickly realize that the diversity of topics and perspectives defy categorization. At times I struggled to understand how the individual essays related to the section themes. Part 5, “Hopeful Activism,” is the most thematically consistent section, while Part 1, “People of Hope,” is the most general, but never mind. Each essay reflects deep theological thought, feet-on-the ground experience of living in God’s kingdom, and unwavering commitment to the gospel of the kingdom and the way this good news takes shape in diverse places.
A pleasant surprise for readers of this journal will be chapter 16, “The Sweet Problem of Inclusiveness: Finding Our God in the Other.” The author of this chapter, Samir Selmanovic, is both a Seventh-day Adventist pastor and a long-time participant and contributor to the Emergent conversation. I first met Samir when we were both pastors on the East Coast and the content of his essay is true my experience of him as a person and as a leader.2
With his characteristic insight, he wonders “whether Christ can be more than Christianity”3 and whether Christianity has become an idol—something greater than God. He reminds us that “Christ never proclaimed, ‘Christianity is here. Join it.’ But Christ did insist, ‘The kingdom of God is here. Enter it.’”4 In short, Samir, like all the authors in this volume, rather than railing against a faith and a church that somehow let them down, is calling the church to her better self. While the topics range from “postmodern parenting” to sexual ethics and from leadership to ecclesiology, each essay is, in its own way, faithfully reappropriating our various traditions for a vastly different world.
The other thing to say about this book, from my own personal experience with Emergent Village and from knowing a number of these authors personally from years of meeting together at conferences and other gatherings, is that it is above all honest and real. There are no airs, no pretenses, in these essays. These authors have no burden to make claims for things that are, as yet, unknown. But if you listen carefully to this choir of authors there is a melody that emerges amidst the harmony: a deep conviction that God is at work, here and now, in our world in surprising ways. In the words of Mark Scandrette, “We are recovering from a legacy in which religious experience and devotion have been significantly separated from the domain of everyday life…. Embracing the reality of the kingdom means that everything matters and that all of life is spiritual.”
If there is an organizing principle to this book, it is the word “Hope.” Some have been critical of the word “Manifesto” in the title. I like the evocative nature of these two words colliding: “Manifesto of Hope.” It rings in my ears and enlivens my imagination, like “Waging Peace” or “Loving Babylon.” It is hard to speak into the “noise” of contemporary culture. Hope is a value that has difficulty getting traction in a world full of pain, suffering, and injustice. It sounds like little more than wishful thinking. This book launches a volley into this fray—but it doesn’t incite violence. To the contrary it is a manifestation of hope, inciting goodness, mercy, and justice in communities all over the country and around the world.
This is vintage Emergent Village—creative, forward-looking, messy, exploratory, intelligent, passionate, and missional.
1 For more information about Emergent Village, visit their website at www.emergentvillage.com.
2 Samir blogs at www.faithhousemanhattan.org. At this website you can find both audio and video of Samir speaking on the same topic, “Finding Our God in the Other.”
3 Emergent Manifesto, 192.
4 Ibid.
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