An Interview with Tony Jones: Part 2

According to his website, "Tony is the national coordinator of Emergent Village (www.emergentvillage.org), and a doctoral fellow in practical theology at Princeton Theological Seminary." We spoke with him recently about some of the topics in his recent book The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier—as well as his understanding of ministering to others through our daily work.

When most people think of church, they think of the buildings where we meet on Sunday morning. What do you mean when you say church?

I use that term "church" as broadly as I use the term "ministry." By church I don't mean bricks and mortar. I mean those of us who have submitted ourselves to some kind of communal form of Christianity. Christians need to get together deliberately and do stuff in tandem with one another. I don't think one is probably really a Christian if one is not somehow involved in communal life.

The whole Bible is written to people in community. The letters were written to communities and meant to be read publicly and talked about. And the Old Testament was meant for the entire nation of Israel. It was never addressed to a single person. So, I think we need to take that as the precedent.

How is technology changing the way we perceive church?

People have stolen this idea from mathematics that the church is a bound set. A bound set has a discreet boundary on it. So you might say you're either Presbyterian or not. I think of church as a relational set, more like the Internet. It's this relationship between multiple cells or multiple hubs. So you might say Roman Catholicism is a hub, Presbyterianism is a hub, and you might say Laity Lodge is a hub. All these different websites are hubs, and all these things together make for this massive web of relationship that is Christianity.

Technology is the primary force that drives us. It is driving the entire communications industry and transportation industry and all other industries that are dependent on communication and transportation. Everything we do about our lives, how we talk to our loved ones, how we vacation, how we work, where we work, all that is driven by information technology, and the Church is too.

I've talked to some pretty naive people who say, "Well, the Church is different. It isn't like a business. The Church isn't affected by culture." Well, come on. Of course it is. So, the future of the Church is going to be driven by the technological innovations that are happening so rapidly right now.

Did I just hear you reject the sacred/secular divide?

I totally reject it! 100%. I think it is Platonic philosophy for someone to say there is a sacred/secular divide, that there are some things in creation that are holy and some things are profane. I think that is the philosophy of Plato; it is not biblical.

The Platonic image of God is an immaterial transcended mind that hovers somewhere off in the cosmos, untouched by human fingerprints. The biblical image of God has dirt under his fingernails. He walks with Adam in the cool of the day. He leads Israel as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. He wrestles with Jacob and whispers in prophets' ears. He literally gets dirt under his fingernails in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. This is the uniqueness of Christianity, that God came in the form of a human being.

That is unheard of in other religions. In fact, it's blasphemous in other religions.

So do you believe God is involved in every aspect of life and work?

Absolutely. People talk about bridging the Sunday/Monday divide. But that kind of language exacerbates the problem. I've heard pastors talk about life "Between Sundays." As if we don't know how to get from one Sunday to the next or something. Talk like that from Christian leaders is deeply problematic. I'm not saying that the people who are listening to this don't struggle in their daily lives with living out God's calling to ministry in every aspect of life, right? But, it's no different if you work in a church. Working for IBM, Best Buy, or Target is not any more or less profane than working on a church staff. Every one of these things to which we are called as a vocation has the opportunity to be a place where we are open to the movement of God's Spirit—or where we think it's all about us and our achievement.

We're just coming out of an election season, so let's talk about politics. What does it look like when a politician's work is ministry?

It's like the cop we talked about before. How could politics not be ministry? Politicians and elected officials have a great responsibility to care for people, to talk in ways that help people feel like their concerns are being heard.

I do worry when politicians say, "We need to water down the distinctives of Christianity or Islam or Judaism in a pluralistic environment." I don't know that you can do that. Talking about Jesus may be a little offensive to Jews and Muslims, but you can't just talk about love or something like that. Christianity hinges on Jesus Christ. We're just really in a time of deep cultural conversation about how we pull this off in a pluralistic environment. And we don't know exactly how it's going to happen.