As in Jim Bonewalds case, my church is also a small congregation in a blue-collar part of the country (and churches with 150 on the active roll or less are about 50% of PCUSA congregations BTW). I also ask the same question but not only because of this. This is a continued conversation following the Presbymergent gathering in Louisville, KY last week. My initial response is here.
The primary problems with any talk of the postmodern for which emergent is consistently indebted are:
1) I am not convinced that the postmodern and hence "emergent" applies evenly across socio-cultural frames. It is therefore a frame more attuned to cosmopolitan centers with higher education attainment among residents and who spend their leisure time enjoying cultural activities such as art, music, film, and technology. If we read various postmodern literature, it is clear that the movement has come from and is still rooted in this sort of cultural frame which, incidentally, strongly favors the left in terms of social, cultural, and political values.
2) I am not convinced that postmodern is a very radical shift in culture away from anything modern. It is true that in the 1960s there were clear protests against modernity largely from the French intelligentsia, but nonetheless, I think it is a movement within modernity no matter how you cut it (epistemology, culture, technology, architecture, etc.). It applies more to style than anything else and is therefore not something intrinsically different to how people in the US are socialized. In fact, critique and introspection are two clear hallmarks of modernity. Postmodernity just takes them to another level.
3) When we speak of "postmodern" it often lacks human agency. We speak of cultural shifts in terms of ambiguous "isms" and ideological constructs without identifying clear participants and leaders in these movements. Moreover, we tend to ignore where these agents are most active and for whom they are most important. Leaders within "emergent" only appeal to this vague and agent-free notion of the postmodern, but without identifying who is involved in this cultural movement other than an equally vague distinction of some kind of "us" versus "them." Without agency, the conversation becomes anemic towards practical actions in which one can engage to change specific social structures that are causing this or this problem in the ways we understand "church" and "theology" among other things.
4) What is affecting just about everyone, which is also something of modernity, is the movement of capital in the world and increased choice of just about everything due to pluralism. Fredric Jameson, couched in other language related to cultural manifestations of the postmodern, calls this "late capitalism." However, Peter Berger argues that if one thing that modernization does produce, it is pluralism itself. This is not only in terms of the expansion of choice that the media and marketing of goods produces, but also in terms of worldviews, ideologies, religions, and value sets. Therefore, I like to focus on a Christian understanding of judgment and choice which is like wading through much of the issues raised in "emergent" but without the academic aplomb.
I am convinced that the only bridge between a vague, abstract, and therefore socially anemic "postmodern discourse" and the pluralism and changes in capitalism that are clear in modernity is pragmatism that is buttressed by a critical theory that is not content with abstractions that tend to pervade postmodern discourses. In other words, the conversation is nice, but it is self-limited to whom it is relevant and applicable based on uneven distributions of class and cultural frames in American class and religion. If the conversation is self-limiting this way, one can only hope for very minimal structural changes in anything at all. This is why we need a pragmatic schema to ground it in language and situation where it makes sense.
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