I found the following article extremely interesting. I found it on Jonathan Norman’s blog, whom I just met today when our family visted the Church where he serves as youth pastor.

THEOOZE – Articles: Viewing Article

I’m with the program and in deep sympathy with the vision that’s been sketched by folks like Brian McLaren and Robert Webber. But I have this nagging question: “What’s the median income of a ‘new kind of Christian?’”

Not that I’m feeling antagonistic toward Jamie at all (I’m not) but this just jumps out at me: so, what about theologicans of the RO persusasion?

Well, I was impressed with what followed, and somewhat humbled for asking the previous question. I was like, “Oh, OK. That’s good. Good answer” (While it didn’t answer the question of “median income”, I like the posture. I really do. It makes me look even more forward to Smith’s upcoming Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?

If one of the key tenets of the emerging church is the centrality of embodied, incarnational witness, then one of the places we need to embody the redemption purchased by Christ on the cross is in the disempowered neighborhoods in our cities. Thus the first part of my suggested program is to merge the concerns of the postmodern church with the concerns of “new urbanism;” in other words, new kinds of Christians should be passionately concerned with building new kinds of cities—which will mean that they should be passionately concerned with impacting the socio-economic structures that systematically disempower parts of town like south Division. Our cities are largely the production of very modern forces, and their decay is a testimony to the underside of modernity. What could be more postmodern than redeeming these urban spaces and city-dwellers, informed by a vision of the kingdom whose telos is a city (Rev. 21:2)? This project for a new urbanism also resonates with another central tenet of the emerging church: its opposition to “Constantinian” Christianity as civil religion. The economic structures which have created the south Divisions of our country are largely the product of classic American liberal polity which the church as civic cult has been all to eager to defend. The postmodern, counter-cultural church as witness will find no better space for exercising its alternative vision than in our cities’ neighborhoods.

The “church as civic cult” is a particularly instructive phrase, for it seems to properly classify how the church follows false gods, and thus idolatrous. False religion IS cultic. Beyond what the worshippers of capitalism do, there is the matter of what alternative structures are meant to be. What is the “City of God” in the context that Smith describes? What he describes of his church and their work sounds extremely faithful. (Reminds me a lot of how they talk at the Church of the Saviour—-and also DO to demonstrate their talk.)