Bryce raised a really good question in response to this post (which followed up this post) to which I responded, but want to repost here. His question:
A pragmatic approach would be offering young adults an "emergent" service at a time and location convenient and accommodating to them in which all the surrounding PC USA churches "released" and encouraged young adults to go instead of each one trying to "create" something within each of their walls. Replace young adults above with college students too.
Why don"t we take the best ministry, mission, worship service, whatever each church has to offer and maximize that to the benefit of other churches? We need to get away from each congregation being everything to everyone. That would be pragmatic.
While ecumenism is an old hat way of trying to maintain ecclesiastical structures in a secularized social frame (which does not mean less religious in the USA, but it does mean differently religions to be sure), there is reason to reconsider why it might be helpful and in many respects unavoidable.
Since one of the notions in emergent is to have less structured social and theological boundaries it seems palatable from that view. From another view, it makes sense given the fluid and almost artificial boundaries of denomination on belief systems these days. We tend to fear ecumenism because it essentially eliminates corporate boundaries. But we have to accept the realities that Wuthnow first wrote about followed by Wills, Roof, Roozen, Chaves and others: denominational and theological views are no longer mutually exclusive. The boundaries of our traditions no longer define theological views, and parishioners in one church may hold theological views more consistent with those in another tradition than fellow members of the same church!
This does not mean that we ought to reject our traditional boundaries since they form our "home" as it were. But it might mean that we need to give ecumenism more than lip service and not fear it as a vehicle to undercut competition between local parishes. It might be a vital and pragmatic link to the future of the church in the US. Maybe we have been trying to change the fluidness and tentativeness of our denominational boundaries for so long that we have become immune to accepting this as an irreversible social reality. It is something that we cannot change and I know of not a single sociological view that would say we can. Think about it for a bit.
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