I was on my knees in the sanctuary of the church where I am currently serving as Associate Pastor (the only pastor as of now, since the senior pastor departed), and I probably should have been praying. Instead, I was muttering a few choice words at the iron that was smoking in my hands. Nothing I learned in seminary prepared me for the horror that comes with “candle wax removal.” It seems quite simple at the outset. To remove candle wax from the carpet you simply heat an iron, take some rather thick, absorbent paper and then iron the wax until it melts and sticks to the paper—thereby removing it.

It’s not that simple.

The iron was too hot on that fateful day and I lifted a rather large chunk of the carpet along with the huge wax spill that had occurred the night before during our emergent worship gathering. Try as I might, I could not hide the blemish. It remains there still—a reminder of my inability to properly Martha Stewart my wax issue, and as a warning on where not to place candles that you don’t want tipped on to the floor.
Lately, though, I have come to see the burn in the sanctuary carpet as a symbol for something else: The tenuous, tumultuous relationship between the existing and the emerging church…

For the past two years I have led a small “emergent” worship gathering that meets in an existing church, namely the very same church where I serve as the Associate Pastor. Because I am the only pastor on staff at the moment, I also lead and preach at all of the other worship services my church holds. So, on Sunday morning I begin my day by presiding over a “contemporary/casual” worship service with its own constiuency of coffee drinking, jean wearing, contemporary-music lovers. Then I don my clerical robe and preside over our “traditional” worship service that is dominated by grey haired, formal, Sunday-best-wearing Christian “lifers.” Then on Sunday evenings I prepare for our emergent, experiential worship gathering “Song in the Night” by donning jeans, a “Ramones” t-shirt and my battered Chuck Taylor “All Stars.” We then transform our church’s sanctuary from a 1960’s-era, stuffy Presbyterian worship space into something a bit more use-able. The corners of the space are filled with experiential, hands-on worship/prayer stations. Candles and insence are lit. The crowd is decidedly younger than the morning worship services, but is still dotted by grey hairs here and there. As you walk into the space, you might hear a “prelude” by Jimmy Eat World, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash or Amy Winehouse. Insted of hymns or “contemporary” praise songs, you might sing worship music from Charlie Hall, Robbie Seay, David Crowder or The Cure.

At Song in the Night I preach the same sermon that I preach at the Sunday morning worship services…but the delivery and a great deal of the commentary are decidedly different. The emergent gathering hears a more “missional,” raw, prophetic version of my sermons, and then they are given the opportunity to respond to what they have heard in a variety of ways. During our time of response–entitled “Free Worship”–participants can do hands-on worship, journal, pray, sing, talk to one another, or sit quietly.
At some point wax from one of our many candles invariably gets spilled on the floor.

I hear about the candle wax once in a while from a small, but noisy contingent of older church members, who believe that the wax represents a fundamental disrespect of everything they love about church. I think that on a deeper level, these well-meaning people are struggling with their own relevance in an increasingly changing world, and their lack of understanding about our little emergent gathering touches on their innate fear of becoming anachronistic. Fear of irrelevance is a by-product that is created when we begin to more fully realize our own mortality. But here’s the thing… When one of my little, old ladies begins to complain profusely about how “the kids” don’t respect the sanctuary and the amount of money that went into rennovating it back in 1967, she is almost certainly not in touch with any of the aforementioned psycho-babble. She sees something that makes her feel uncomfortable and angry, and she reacts.

I have to say that this reaction is not entirely typical among our older church members. For the most part (as long as they don’t have to listen to the music or see people attending church in jeans and flip-flops), the “traditionalists” in my church tend to live and let live.

But the conversations about the difference between the communities within the larger community of our church always tends to devolve to a conversation about worship style. I am well aware that even my own words have leaned in that direction over the past few paragraphs.

Sadly, our first dreams and excited meetings about the emergent gathering that we began over two years ago had less to do with worship style and more to do with who we were as a community of faith. We were far more interested in how we were going to impact the world than we were about the sort of music we were going to play, or what experiential worship station we were going to create. It all really changed for us one evening when we were visited by an autistic, African-American teenager, who stood up during our “God-Sightings” (a time of sharing and testimonies at our worship gathering) and told us that all he ever wanted to do was to make a difference in his neighborhood (ours) to give kids hope, keep them away from drugs and introduce them to Jesus. We felt at the time that this was a word from God. That Jesus himself had entered the building, delivered a message and left. The young man never came back, which made seem even more Spirit-led. That moment inspired us to leave our sanctuary and go out into our neighborhood… just loving people, feeding people, caring for the poor, the least of these. Over time, though, we got sucked into living a life less ordinary as a group. Serving others is hard and thankless. It’s easier to just keep things in-house, to begin hoping that the world will come to your doorstep. It’s easier to worry about what sort of music will attract the coolest, hippest Christians. It’s easier to sit around and have really deep conversations about church trends and how the latest theological movement will impact the Busters and the Mosaics, and why that is important…

We’re waking up again, though. And this time the existing church is waking up with us. Come to think of it… that was probably our problem in the first place. The members of our existing church were spectators to our emerging missional activities and we liked it that way, to be honest. All of the reasons why we felt the need to move toward “emergence” and away from “existence” were still there. The existing church was still, well, the existing church. Within the existing church you were always free to exhibit creativity, innovation and whatnot—as long as it didn’t cost too much, change the time of choir practice, or the color of the carpet in the Parlor. Generally speaking, even the missional activities that the existing church deemed worthy of engagement were sort of existing in nature. Many of us had found them to be far too pre-approved, pre-ordained, pre-shrunk to fit budgetary requirements and pre-fabbed… as if the Spirit had been sucked right out of them. Our idea of what was missional was a bit more dangerous. And we liked that.

We have a strange bunch that gathers for Song in the Night—our emergent gathering. The majority of the formerly “un-churched” members of our faith community attend Song in the Night. We have more than our fair share of “church-hurt” participants. Our participants also include ex-alcoholics and drug addicts, homosexuals, agnostics, single moms, single dads, abused kids and a few other categories that I am sure that I am failing to mention. We have ex-Baptists, ex-Catholics, current Unitarians, ex-Episcopals, agnostics, evangelicals, liberals, conservatives, ex-Marines, neo-hippies… you name it. Our oldest members are in their mid-sixties and our youngest are barely crawling across the floor. It is the most diverse of all of our communities within the community.

Like I said, we are waking up again. The visions for neighborhood missions are returning to our Song in the Night participants and they are beginning to remember who they were when they were at their best. The spirit of openness that now exists in our entire community of faith—a spirit that I believe had its origins with the Song in the Night gathering—has sparked a movement to being a Holistic Health Ministry that will reach out to people of ages both within and without our church. There is a group that has found our “emergent” ideas about Creation Preservation to be right in line with their own understanding of what it means to practice Stewardship over all God’s gifts. We are now on the verge of launching a church-wide Environmental Stewardship campaign. I could go on… there’s definitely more. Once a month we offer child care to busy working families to give parents the time to get to know one another again, or for single parents to go on a date or have a night of rest. None of these programs would have had a chance two years ago. They would have been scoffed at in favor of more conservative, “traditional” church programs that did more to add members to the church than they did to further the kingdom of God.

So, I guess this brings me full circle—back to the wax stain on the carpet. Something there is that doesn’t love a wax stain… Yet there is something about this one that helps me remember who I am and who I am called to be. Those of us with an “emergent” spirit, who are called to serve the existing church find ourselves living in two worlds more often than not. This is the space to which we are called, though. To deny it, or rail against it would be to deny or rail agains the will of God who placed us here. I can try desperately to iron up the wax from the carpet, but no matter how skilled I am a bit of the wax will always remain.

It’s time that as leaders in the existing Church we, who feel the burgeoning preseence of the Church that is emerging, begin to stop trying to separate, to cover up, to mask or hide its coming. We must help our congregations (existing or no) embrace the hope that is found in Isaiah 43:19 a hope that is meant for all—”See, I am about to do a NEW thing…”