Part 3 of a Precipice Magazine interview with Tony Jones, continued...
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Darren King: Now, when you consider matters like radical contextualization, open-source networks, etc, what do you think we have to be wary of? What are we most likely to slip into, that would be negative, as a result of these kinds of structures and organization?

Tony Jones: Well, I absolutely do not think we should be concerned that we’re going to have some kind of “anything goes”, “nothing matters” kind of radical relativism. That’s just not going to happen. That’s just not the way human beings operate. If we were moving that way we wouldn’t have moved the 400 some kids off the FLDS compound in West Texas. As a society there are still morays that we’re going to continue to live by.

I think that one concern I have is that because this network was founded by entrepreneurial guys - for the most part, people like me, who became more and more disenfranchised with the church and so started to branch out on our own and go without health insurance, and go without a pension, and go without a denomination or a mega-church under girding us - is that it then becomes a network of loud, Type-A, white guys. Now that would really be no good. And it’s already probably too much that way. We’re constantly working at tempering that, but, you know, the one thing that liberals have done fairly well – I wouldn’t give them an A, I’d give them about a B or a B minus - is diversify leadership in the Church. And with Emergent, because we’re throwing off the bureaucracy that has given space for the diversity, I think we need to be careful that we don’t just become a network of loud, white guys.

Darren King: So what you’re saying is that, ironically, because mainline circles have the bureaucracy in place, at least they can push through some good, worthwhile things, that might not happen otherwise.

Tony Jones: Well, in fact I’ve recently had a Presbyterian guy say that very thing to me. He said, “Tony, you’re too hard on us. The whole reason we use Robert’s Rules of Order is because, if we don’t, then its just loud, white guys like you that control, that have all the power. Robert’s Rules of Order actually affords marginalized voices a space."

Now, I’ve been in lots of churches with Robert’s Rules of Order and I asked him, you know, “How’s that working out for you?” And he said, “Yeah, not so great”. Because, as with any system like this, it just becomes the people in power are the people that really, really know Robert’s Rules of Order. So its some lawyer who’s mastered the parliamentary procedure who stands up and starts shouting “Point of order! Point of order!” And then its all points of order and its all about procedure and its not really about the issues at hand. Now, I get that this was the point of Robert’s Rues of Order. But, in reality, it just doesn’t work that way.

Darren King: Okay, back to the book, Dispatch #17: Emergents start new churches to save their own faith, not necessarily as an outreach strategy. In fact, many of the examples in the book seem to be about churches that attract previously disaffected evangelicals. Where do you see the emerging church really reaching previously unchurched people? And, secondly, how important to the future of the EC is such an outreach approach?

Tony Jones: Well, as I try and make clear from the very beginning of the book, there are very few unchurched people in the United States. Less than 15% of Americans have no church background. Now, that’s still several million people, but it’s a vast minority. Any time you start a church, going by statistics, 85% of the people who come to your church are going to be someone who’s like “Yeah, I was baptized and confirmed” as a bare minimum, if not, “I grew up going to church three times a week”, you know, “I went to Sunday school and VBS, and then I fell away” and this and that. So, I would say, that’s part of my response.

The other part is that, when I think about the four churches that were profiled in the book, only one of them, Journey in Dallas- which is a pretty small church, its only 45 or 50 people – has a lot of disaffected evangelicals there. But it is Dallas! So, that’s a population you’re going to get if you’re in Dallas. When I poke around Solomon’s Porch I don’t find a bunch of disaffected evangelicals. There are some. There are some, like me, who came out of a mainline background. There are quite a few Catholics. We have 3 or 4 people that have converted from Judaism. When I wrote that dispatch what I was trying to say is that this is not an outreach strategy. That’s not why people are putting couches in their churches. People are doing this because they, we, feel that the church is failing us and, so, we go start a new church.

Now, that brings up another fair criticism, which is, you know, that this just seems quintessentially American. “You don’t like it? Just go start another franchise.” I think we’re open to that criticism, but until we all rejoin the Catholic Church some day in the distant future, that’s what we’re bound to do, to go do something new. And we’re not doing it to put other churches out of business either. We’re doing it to save our own faith, basically. So we’ll have a place where we can go and hold out heads up high. Its not that different from what John Wesley did, or what John Calvin did. Darren King: Now, speaking of that, when you look at the future of Emergent, and specifically the emerging church, meaning on-the-ground communities of faith, how much of that do you see coming from existing churches - whether mainline of evangelical - becoming more emergent? Or do you feel like we have to jettison the old, and have all of these new communities of faith actually start afresh?

Tony Jones: Man, that’s a question that I kind of go back and forth on every day, because, there are days – depending on my experiences – when I am just almost completely hopeless about the existing church and its ability to make the kind of changes that I think need to be made.

Then there are other days when I think – and I’m challenged on this regularly, mainly by people within the system, people who have health insurance and a pension, they’re often the ones who are saying “No, no, the church can change from within.” I am skeptical of people who say that when they’re…

Darren King: When they have a vested interest in the bureaucracy continuing?

Tony Jones: Yeah, exactly. But listen, I wouldn’t be much of a Christian if I thought any institution was irredeemable by God’s grace and sovereignty. I surely think that if God chooses to resurrect those bureaucracies, that’s what God will do. It just doesn’t seem to me that that’s what God is in the business of doing; resurrecting bureaucracies. I think He’s in the business of new wines and new wineskins.

Darren King: I’m thinking of the churches that you did portray in the book. Each of those were basically new churches that began with an Emergent flavor from the beginning, right? None of those were transformed existing churches, right?

Tony Jones: That’s right. And there are very few transformed existing churches. I mean, the expert on that is Diana Butler Bass. And she wouldn’t make any claim that the churches that she portrays in Christianity for the Rest of Us are becoming Emergent. She would just say they’re mainline churches that have been able to resurrect themselves.

Darren King: So, to put you on the spot here, how do feel about movements like Presbymergent, Anglimergent, etc?

Tony Jones: I am 100% in support of them. I am a big advocate of theirs. And I give them anything I can, any resource I can, any support I can, at any time. I give them everything I possibly can. I’m also good enough friends with them that I tell them honestly that I think they may be rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Darren King: Right. And you and Diana Butler Bass have had your disagreements on that issue. You’ve had some pretty honest debates about that.

Tony Jones: Yeah. And I was just at Princeton last week with Adam Walker Cleveland, who’s the co-founder of Presbymergent, and I told him that. Karen Sloan as well, is also aware of that. And I’ve spent a lot of time with the people that are a part of Anglimergent and they know how I feel about that. That’s where I am today and I come out of that big church, mainline kind of system, so, I know of which I speak. But, I could be wrong and 10 years from now I could totally change my tune on that.

Darren King: Considering that the EC conversation is often accused of being a decidedly intellectual enterprise, I thought Andrew Jones posed an interesting question to Brian McLaren recently. Touching on African conceptions of reality, Andrew asked Brian whether or not he held to a naturalistic or a spiritual understanding of political powers. Brian responded by saying: “It’s really complex. I’ve had a couple of personal experiences with 'dark powers' so I certainly don’t write them off. But I also think that the language used in Africa (and in a lot of Pentecostalism elsewhere) thinks it grasps these unseen realities more than it actually does…”

Overall, this realm of inquiry seems under-discussed in emergent circles. What are your thoughts on the issue?

Tony Jones: Well, I rarely could say anything any more eloquently than Brian. And I think he does a fine job in that quote. I remember reading that and thinking that he handled that very well. Its tricky, because you don’t want to, I don’t want to, offend someone who has a really different conception of spiritual reality than I do. So all I can do is claim my own history and my own biases. I come from a very WASPy suburb in the Upper Midwest, very well-to-do background. You know, went to an Ivy League college, and now I’m getting my PhD in the Ivy League. People that have been on the intellectual trajectory that I have been on tend not to see the world as if there is an unseen array of spiritual forces that are doing battle; that we can’t see or understand.

Now, in saying all that, I’m not trying to rest on my laurels. I’m trying to be honest about the fact that my own history has given me particular proclivities towards understanding the way the Universe works, that other people surely disagree with, and think that I’m absolutely koo-koo on. I’m the first to admit that the way that I’ve been taught in school and the way that I was raised has impacted the way I understand the Bible and see the Universe today. And so that has led me to be highly skeptical of people who claim to find Satan under every rock.

You know, C.S. Lewis, I think in the Screwtape Letters, does a good job of handling this. When Satan says to Screwtape, or how ever it goes, “the two mistakes that people make with the Devil is that they give the Devil to much credit, or too little credit.” And I probably err on the side of giving the Devil too little credit. And I think a lot of people in Pentacostalism and in the Global South, and surely plenty of people in our country too, probably give the Devil more credit than the Devil deserves.