Theology, Methodology, Ecclesiology, Oh my!

As I was preparing to write more about J.D. Payne's article on ecclesiology and church planting, I decided to check out an article he refers to in the first few paragraphs. In the April 1998 edition of Evangelical Missions Quarterly, Tom Julien, of Grace Brethren International Ministries, addressed the question, "what is a local church?" Going further, he distinguished between the essence of the church as revealed in the New Testament and the expression of the church in cultures. The gist of his argument is that church planters must distill the essence of the church in order to plant a culturally appropriate expression of the church. Dr. Payne agrees, saying that ecclesiology, our theology of the church, is the "most critical issue in church planting today."

As I was thinking about all this, I was also involved in an online discussion for one of my doctoral seminars on the emerging church movement. We were talking about whether the "conversation" is more about theology or methodology (maybe I can tell you more about that discussion and its origins in the future). I suggested an article that I found through Joe Thorn's blog: Mark DeVine's discussion of the emerging church movement and Southern Baptists. In that article, DeVine says that leader "Scot McKnight insists that the movement is about ecclesiology, not theology."

But what is ecclesiology if not theology? My classmate Lloyd caught that contradiction immediately. Certainly, our ecclesiology plays itself out in our methodology, and our methodology reveals our theology. Can those be separated? If you add our emphasis on strategy to the mix, things really get interesting. Does our strategy, which includes our methodology, line up with our theology, especially our ecclesiology? Maybe it does, but I'm not sure.

I want to work on these questions, though maybe with fewer words ending in "-gy." We'll see where it goes.