Cultural mystique
Is the emerging church thing passe yet? I am only just getting my head around it and I am fascinated and disturbed in equal parts. I really enjoy learning about it and talking with people about it, but I am wondering if it is a dated issue by now. I am in the process of slowly compiling some thoughts on this, provoked by our time spent in staff meetings reading Dan Kimball’s The Emerging Church: Vintage Christianity for New Generations (2003), but here are some preliminary thoughts.
Firstly, the emerging church defies description. I have read several attempts to define and capture the emerging church movement(s?), though none that have really gained any credence. It seems that there are different degrees of ‘emergence’, and these degrees appear to stem from different thinkers or leaders who are a part of this movement(s). For example, Brian McLaren appears to be one of the more influential leaders of the emergent church, but his thinking on the topic seems to be more liberal-theology than Dan Kimball, whose book is heavily focused on culture and the arts over theology. Appropriately, no-one who I have read claims that the emerging church has a central manifesto or set of articles of faith – much like the postmodernity that it clings to, emergence claims that it cannot be boxed. Instead, it feels more like a series of ‘works-in-progress’, always moving towards something rather than saying, ‘this is what we are’. I’m not sure what it is they are moving towards, though. It smacks of narrativism.
Secondly, and relatedly, the emerging church is characterised by mystique. There is a (renewed?) fascination with the unknown and the unknowable. I have read (though I am yet to rediscover this source) that there is a tendency to be somewhat agnostic about God’s character – we cannot know all about God, in our limited human wisdom, so we should embrace a more mystical view of Him. I wonder if this goes hand-in-hand with the generally liberal theology that is coupled with the emergent church movement(s) – to create a spiritual experience for today’s savvy non-churchgoer who is suspicious of the more traditional church, it seems that many thinkers and leaders in the emergent church(es) have abandoned hard-fought-for fidelity to the Bible. Emergents seem to advocate a view that we cannot know God through His Word, so we must turn to other ways to find Him – experience, meditation, music, the arts. I wonder, then, if the emerging church has more in common with gnosticism than Biblical Christianity.
Thirdly, I am yet to read a coherent and cogent analysis of postmodernism which validates the emerging church’s foundation. Dan Kimball’s book devotes some time to talking about postmodernism, but I am not convinced that he is really engaging with postmodernity and its associated epistemological underpinnings. For example, I think he has failed to appreciate what the word ‘deconstruct’ means – he seems to use it as a synonym of ‘take apart’ (which, on the surface, is what it literally means), whereas the word takes on more nuance when discussing postmodernity, suggesting an analysis of meaning in texts and language and how meanings shift when read in light of certain contained assumptions. I am also dissatisfied with Kimball’s rendering of modernism (and, to some extent, postmodernism) as a homogeneous caricature with little nuance or detail.
Fourthly, I get the feeling the emerging church is generally more critical of the ‘institutional church’ than of postmodernism. Perhaps this is an unfair statement, but so far, the general attitude towards ‘traditional’/‘seeker-sensitive’/‘institutional’ church in Kimball’s book is that it works for ‘moderns’, but not ‘postmoderns’. But he then appears to let postmodernity drive his proposed new way of structuring church, without really critiquing whether that’s appropriate.
Fifthly, there are some positives to the emerging church, despite my grouchiness. It prompts us to take a good look at culture and subculture and assess how church interacts with those around us. It promotes the need to take the gospel to the unchurched (i.e. those who have no Christian experience or roots and have little to no exposure to Biblical Christianity in their lives). It challenges us to rethink methodology and how we ‘do’ church gatherings. It demands that we confront issues that we are perhaps scared to confront.
I am working on being more lucid about all this soon (with references! I promise!).