Doug Pagitt and the Way of the Master Interview Controversy

The blogosphere has recently come alive with talk about an interview that Doug Pagitt gave to Todd Friel on the Way of the Master radio program. The audio and written transcripts can be found on numerous sites online, so I won’t spend time describing what was said. Important for my essay is that Pagitt and Friel disagreed on a number of points. At some times during the interview, they couldn’t even make sense of what the other was trying to say.

How are we to understand the difference between Pagitt and Friel?

Many folks take the difference between Pagitt and Friel in terms of right and wrong. And on this account, most people seem to agree with Friel and disagree with Pagitt. They tend to think that, by and large, Pagitt is wrong and Friel is right.

Instead of joining the crowd, I’ll take a different tack that will, I think, help illuminate a problem that remains to be adequately dealt with for the emerging church movement.

That problem hinges on the tension between (1) the practical work of establishing a new way of describing and living in the way of Christ and between (2) the entrenched mode of describing and living in the way of Christ.

An emerging vocabulary can’t simply capitulate to the entrenched ways of relating to the way of Jesus and it can’t simply disconnect from the historical ways of relating to Jesus. An emerging vocabulary of worship and practice should sustain the tension by 1) sticking close to the written words of the scriptures and 2) imaginatively reading the scriptures in ways that push the boundaries of accepted interpretation in your local faith community.

From an emerging perspective, it is more valuable for us to see the conversation between Pagitt and Friel as taking place between two men speaking two different vocabularies from two different paradigms from within the same Christian cloth.

Friel, as the blog traffic confirms to me, was speaking from the dominant social position; he is speaking the vocabulary that most people already speak.

Pagitt, however, was drawing from a subordinate position, from an emerging perspective that is not fully formed into an institutionalized structure of belief and practice. Hardly anyone spoke Pagitt’s vocabulary.

Seeing the Pagitt and Friel radio controversy outside the right/wrong box that most want to stuff it in, is valuable for the emerging conversation because it can help us clarify the topics that divide and the topics that join. Seeing what topics inspire a zealous response is instructive, as it also points us toward avenues of restoration. We can see more concretely the internal contours of the name and community called “Christian” if we drop the right/wrong bit and think about this in terms of contending vocabularies and practices that are struggling to define what it means to be a “Christian.”