Ten years of Next-Wave

I was only half-kidding last week when I talked with Next-Wave editor, Scott Bane, about this month’s tenth anniversary issue of Next-Wave. The cover story for the issue is a Ten Year Retrospective on the Emerging Church by Stephen Shields. If you have read Stephen’s writing in the past, you know that he is an excellent journalist, fair and comprehensive with the material he is covering. His articles is based on interviews with several people who have been writing and speaking about the emerging church for nearly all of the ten years that Next-Wave has been publishing.

Anyway, I remember saying something like this to Scott: “Maybe this should be the last issue of Next-Wave. It’s been ten years, and maybe it is time to call it a day.” In reading some of the comments on the internet about Stephen’s article I ran across some who wondered if there would be a ten-year retrospective on the “missional” church one of these days?

I must confess. To me, “emerging,” and “missional,” when applied to church all seem like the same thing. You see we started out writing about postmodern, then emerging became a word of choice. It wasn’t long before there were other words showing up, like missional, transformational and incarnational. Every once in a while more ancient terms like monastic or liturgical would sneak in.

For me, the whole Next-Wave enterprise has been about evangelizing rising generations. It has not been about deconstruction, or relativism. These were terms I knew nothing about when I first talked to Rogier Bos about starting Next-Wave. At the time I was talking about something called Gen-X, you know the folks who are now mostly heading rapidly into their 40s?

A little anecdote about the term missional. When I first began hearing the term used by practitioners (that is, people who were assembling groups of people into churches), I made the mistake of asking, “What is missional?” After about 5 paragraphs of explanation, I still don’t think I understood what he was talking about. (Sorry it wasn’t a woman that I was asking, but you can be darn sure that I am aware that there are plenty of women out there who could give me a better explanation today.) I asked “What is the mission?” Another 5 paragraphs.

I am trying to get simpler in my old age. I use the terms emerging, missional, and sometimes emergent, to try and communicate something. But what I am really talking about, in every context, is all about “following Jesus.” Learning how to do this in my own life and learning how to help others, including my children and grandchildren, seems pretty important to me.

My main mentor used to describe himself as a “fat man trying to get to heaven.” He also used to say “I want to grow up before I grow old.” I might modify his sentiments slightly, but it is still all about following Jesus isn’t it?