The “emergent church” is a loosely defined and even less
organized force of postmodern evangelicals who emphasize
community over Christian doctrine. Having mostly arisen a decade
or more ago, and appealing primarily to twenty and
thirtysomethings, emerging church types reject the traditional
moralism of older conservative evangelicals.
In its place, they sometimes erect a new moralism built
around environmentalism, diet, exercise, or social justice. They
also react against the perceived liturgical sterility of Baby
Boomer evangelicalism, with its shopping center style
mega-churches, sometimes sacramental indifference, and
hyper-Protestant rejection of traditional Christian symbolism and
mysticism.
Rejecting much of “modernity,” emergents often emphasize
ancient Christian symbols and practices involving candles, icons,
a frequent Eucharist, Gregorian chants, and stained glass. They
also shy away from culturally confrontational issues like
abortion and homosexuality and stress community and dialogue over
dogma. While still loosely evangelical and often emphasizing
Trinitarians, emergents are inclined towards a “generous”
orthodoxy that more straight-laced Christians discern as
permissive if not heretical. Emergents are stereotypically
associated with soul patches, body piercings, black clothing, and
coffee houses. Though too young to remember Beatniks, or Jack
Kerouac, they stylistically often aspire to be their more
spiritual descendants.
Unsurprisingly, emergents are typically left-wing in their
political voice, though they almost uniformly insist they are
non-ideological. Former suburban Maryland pastor Brian McLaren,
author of A Generous Orthodoxy, and leader of the
“Emergent Village,” is a prominent emergent voice and close ally
of Evangelical Left chieftain Jim Wallis. Wallis’s
Sojourners magazine recently provocatively asked: “Is
the Emerging Church for Whites Only?”
Sojourners’ writers critically noted that the
public face of emergents is primarily young white males with
“trendy clothing, sporting cool hairstyles and eyewear.” But one
writer despaired that despite its ostensible coolness, the
emerging “postmodern church was simply the pierced and tattooed
offspring of its older, modern parents.”
Perhaps the emerging church has already fully emerged and
will now submerge back into postmodern obscurity.
Sojourners quotes a sarcastic “obituary” earlier this
year for emergents that eulogized their “many advances in the
Christian church, including facial hair, tattoos, fair trade
coffee, candles, couches in sanctuaries, distortion pedals, Rated
R movie discussions, clove cigarettes and cigars, beer, and use
of Macs.”
Is, or was, the emerging church merely a passing fad
primarily for bored yuppies smugly unhappy with their
conventional suburban churches and pining for a spiritual theater
more hip and supposedly more relevant? One Sojourners
writer, quoting a blogger, credited emergents for their
contributions to “women’s issues, conversations about sexuality,
environmentalism, anti-foundationalism, [and] social justice.”
But those “conversations” have been mainly only that. Not for
nothing do emergents usually insist they are not a movement but a
“community” or an ongoing “conversation.”
Brian McLaren himself, in his own short piece for
Sojourners, readily agreed with the need to “shift away
from white, Western, male hegemony and homogeneity.” He also
wants to emphasize that while the “the postmodern conversation”
occurs in the West, the global South is more interestingly having
its “postcolonial conversation.” It’s not clear exactly what
McLaren means by “postcolonial.” Now a frequent speaker to
liberal Episcopal Church audiences, he almost certainly does not
sympathize with global South Christians rebelling against liberal
Western church sexual and theological trends.
More revealingly, McLaren noted that “theological
conversations about the shape and purpose of the gospel, along
with issues of justice — racial, environmental, and economic —
are far more urgent and important than arguments about what goes
on in church services, as valuable as church services are.”
Himself a Baby Boomer guru for mostly much younger emergents,
McLaren has become increasingly a Jim Wallis-type Social Gospel
proponent who prefers activism to doctrine. Championing
Palestinian liberation and Obamacare have been two of his most
recent causes.
Far more biting is a subsequent Sojourners
commentary from “urban-monastic” Shane Claiborne, a young author
and lecturer popular among college age evangelicals who heads a
Philadelphia, almost Quaker-like spiritual center called “The
Simple Way.” He is an Anabaptist enthusiast who urges his
listeners to reject the world through anti-materialism and
aggressive pacifism.
Claiborne regretted that the emergent church became
“narcissistic, and often became little more than theological
masturbation: feels good but doesn’t give birth to much.” He
surmised that overly loquacious emergents like to “talk about
talking about theology” and have “repeated some of the mistakes
of fundamentalism (only with more tattoos).” Claiborne aptly
observed that emergentism seemingly “has no real life or DNA of
its own,” but is primarily an endless circle of spiritual self
reflection. He wonders why so much ink and talk is spilled on so
wide an emptiness.
Possibly much of the emerging church phenomenon has been
the hyped creation of Christian publishing, anxious to reach a
younger audience. Or at least the publishers wanted to persuade
older readers they could reach a younger audience by adopting
emergent techniques. Old Sojourners
activists almost certainly welcomed the liberal tendencies
of most emergents even while frustrated by their continued
adherence, however unconscious, to suburban
evangelicalism.
Lacking its own firm DNA, the emerging church seems likely
to collapse into what Jim Wallis and Sojourners
almost certainly will welcome: heterodox religionists with
a sense of liturgical style who define themselves more by their
adherence to liberal social and political causes than by their
doctrines. As perhaps hinted by Brian McLaren’s recent speaking
engagements, aging emergents may simply end their spiritual
journey as Episcopalians.
