Oregon State’s Borg offers his view on new churches

By Wendy S. McDowell

HDS Communications

According to leading biblical and Jesus scholar Marcus Borg, American Christianity is in the midst of a paradigm shift “from convention to intention.”

Borg, who holds the Hundere Chair in Religion and Culture in the Philosophy Department at Oregon State University, delivered this formulation as part of “Finding Our Way,” a conference on the progressive church organized by the Office of Ministry Studies at Harvard Divinity School (HDS) at First Church in Cambridge, Dec. 6-7. The conference drew 500 people from the Boston area and throughout the United States and Canada, including students, pastors, and church laypeople.

Borg said that before the 1960s, the motive for being a mainline Protestant Christian was more conventional than it is today. In many communities, there was “a cultural expectation” that people would attend mainline Christian churches where “no one would ask you to do anything too weird.”

In the ’60s, this cultural expectation began to disappear, so that, more and more, people in the pews of churches are not there for conventional reasons but because they have joined a church community “with intentionality.” What’s more, Borg offered, “the form of Christianity has changed from being one that accommodates to the conventional culture to a form that challenges cultural conventions.” Borg calls these “challenging” churches “churches of the emerging paradigm,” and he described what these “communities of transformation” look like at the congregational level.

One key characteristic of these churches is that they are “communities of adult Christian theological re-education,” Borg said. “If Christianity is to make persuasive and compelling sense to Christians,” he contended, adult education is “one of the most important tasks for the revitalization of the church in our time.”

Borg stressed that this education “needs to be about big topics, such as what we mean by the word ‘God,’ … the interpretation and meaning of the Bible, … the community’s understanding of the figure of Jesus, … and the importance of prayer.”

Borg also noted that adult education that engages new and old church members alike does not necessarily need a “theologically trained expert,” but can be accomplished through reading groups. Such an interactive education counters some of the stereotypes people might have from what they hear in the media about Christian conceptions of God, the Bible, and Jesus, and allows people to enter into a deeper conversation about “the Christian life itself.”

A second key feature of these “new paradigm” churches, according to Borg, is that they are “communities of Christian formation,” which means they engage in a “re-socialization” process that reorients people. He said one way this can be accomplished is through spiritual journey groups, which are separate from educational groups.

Being “communities of practice” is Borg’s third feature, which means these churches encourage the development of spiritual practices such as worship and prayer, and help people to understand the purpose of such practices. “The purpose of congregational singing and prayer is to draw us out of ourselves and open us up,” Borg said, and ultimately, “the purpose of worship is subversion.”

His fourth and final feature of these local congregations is that they are “communities of participation in God’s passion for the world.” This is “the political dimension of the life of a denomination,” he said, and involves a commitment to economic justice in the world that, he believes, is “the primary meaning of justice in the Bible.” In order to achieve this kind of participation, Borg averred, churches need to become “communities of consciousness raising” about “the systems we live in and how they impact the lives of people.”

Borg said he sees an irony in that fact that the United States is, as he put it, the “most individualistic country in the world” while also being “the most Christian country in the world.” He had strong words on this point, saying that “many Christians in this country seem almost oblivious to the history of Christian teaching about war, nonviolence, and peace.” There are “only two legitimate Christian stances” on these issues, he asserted: “pacifism and just war theory, both of which absolutely prohibit pre-emptive war.

“This is the way forward, the ‘market niche,’” but most important, “the vocation of the mainlines as I see it,” Borg concluded. “For mainline congregations to become more conservative,” for reasons, Borg claims, of political expediency, “is to lose our vocation, to abandon our very reason for existence.” For Borg, the path forward is “the path of human liberation,” which requires that we share God’s passion to “change the world.”

Other featured speakers at the conference were Diana Butler Bass, currently a senior fellow at the Cathedral College of the Washington National Cathedral, and Brian McClaren, a popular author, speaker, and pastor who was listed in Time magazine as one of America’s 25 most influential evangelicals.

According to Dudley Rose, associate dean of Ministry Studies at Harvard Divinity School, a colloquium was held the week following the conference, so that students could discuss issues raised in the conference. Within the next year, Rose said, his department intends to hold a follow-up conference.