I’m assuming, if you’re reading this, that you’re
kind of a church nerd (like me) and have some familiarity with what I mean by “the
emerging church.” If not, this description is as good as any:
I would say I’m an outsider to the emerging “movement”
but an insider in the “conversation.” These comments come not from a place of
opposition but from my desire to see the movement continue so that it might
help enrich and reform all expressions of the church in North America. I make
hard critiques assuming that if Achilles could have been humbled, he might’ve
thought to protect his heels.
11) The
emerging movement needs to stop defining itself as anti-institutional.
Institutions aren’t bad. Bad
institutions are bad. So long as humans want to continue gathering with any
level of organization (that is, by anything other than sheer randomness and
happenstance), they’re going to form institutions. There is something
anti-incarnational about this attitude. It says, “I’ll go along with this so
long as it defies any known way that humans have ever learned to be human
together.”
22) The emerging movement needs to become less
utopian.
This is a tough one to tackle since
many emergents are extremely hesitant to call their movement anything more than
a “conversation”—certainly they’ll say nothing of it being missional, attractional,
evangelical, let alone that it begins with any clear endgame in sight. To save
space, I’ll grant the last one. However, most emerging churches I’ve come
across do build their purpose and theology around the needs of their immediate
context (missional), they obviously appeal to a certain limited demographic or
subculture (attractional), and in some way they’re trying to share the good
news of Jesus Christ (evangelical).
Beyond semantics, though, the
larger issue here is that when any group (and there are certain umbrellas underneath which emergents can be considered
one group) defines itself in opposition to what came before, they start to emit
an unstated but palpable arrogance that tacitly says, “we finally got it
right.” Emergents aren’t the first to push back with a less defined, more
open-ended, Spirit driven movement when the historical church has become too
propositional, too self-assured and too institutionally rigid. Jan Huss did it.
Philip Jakob Spener did it. Nikolaus von Zinzendorf did it. As the more
informed emergents are aware, this is also the basic spirit that birthed the
writings of the great mystics like Theresa of Avila or Meister Eckhart, and
ironically, it may have even been at the heart of early American revivalism (widely
regarded as the predecessor to modern American Evangelicalism).
My point is that we’ve seen this
movie before. The ending is always the same. Mel Gibson’s The Patriot was different in detail than Braveheart but we recognized the basic outline even before seeing
it play out. It’s no different with church history. Over and over again (1) the
church becomes too propositional, too self-assured, and too rigidly structured until
it starts to look very much like any other hierarchical institution and very
little like Jesus; (2) some honest disciples yearn for more and break off, in
the process holding a mirror up to the parent institution (which, itself,
begins to reform even after the discontented have left); but (3) over time, the
trailblazers themselves who broke off, become too propositional, too
self-assured, and too rigidly structured. They do this for the simple reason
that they’re human, and that’s what humans do. Eugene Peterson nails it when he
says, “In two thousand years of practice we haven’t gotten any better. You
would think we would have, but we haven’t.”[1]
I’m thankful that this cycle
continues. I’m thankful that there are groups who continue to yearn for a
better church, and we’re all enriched when they act on this yearning. But if
you’re an emergent, just acknowledge this larger history here, be humbled by
it, chastened by it, and your movement will be better for it.
33) The
emerging movement needs always to recognize the beam in its own eye.
You’re seeing by now that these are
all very nearly the same critique. To be sure, many emergent thinkers are sharp
enough and careful enough to acknowledge the hidden irony in their own
critiques of Mainline and conservative expressions of the church. If ever they
aren’t, the results are tragic, because like any of us, they’re always one
self-righteous remark away from becoming what they hate. Don’t become
hypocritical when you point out the establishment’s hypocrisy. Don’t be
triumphalistic about the fact that you’re not triumphalistic. Don’t become
dogmatic about your avoidance of all dogma. That’s all.
44) The
emerging movement’s thinkers should spend at least as much (and probably more)
time responding theologically to mainstream and more centrist Christians as
they do to fundamentalists.
Here’s an example of what I mean. I
love Peter Rollins. Seriously. So far unreciprocated, but I love Peter Rollins.
Nonetheless, I’m guessing his words on the otherness or absolute subjectivity
of God are little different in content (if, marketed better) than so many
dissertations of Karl Barth scholars
sitting in dusty library storage rooms across the western world. Did I mention
that I love Peter Rollins? But his words on doubt being a vital part of faith
and discipleship say little that Douglas John Hall hasn’t been saying for forty
years. My point is not that what they’ve said isn’t worth repeating. I just
don’t see evidence, most of the time, that emergents are aware that some hoary
old scholar buried away in some third story office of a mainstream seminary has
been, for decades, saying the same “inflammatory” things that they are now
saying. It just never caused quite the same stir before because those scholars
didn’t think to market themselves to recovering fundamentalists. My suggestion
for emergent thinkers: pay attention to what’s going on in mainstream academia.
By all means, continue making these ideas accessible to people who otherwise
would never encounter them. But don’t stop at the low-hanging fruit of mocking
fundamentalism. Poke some holes in my own mainstream worldview so that I too
can be enriched by your observations.
[1]
Peterson, Eugene. Under the Unpredictable Plant: An Exploration in Vocational Holiness (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992)
