Source: http://www.thinkchristian.net/
Folks of the emergent persuasion have had a tendency to use and sometimes overuse the prefix "post" in the conversation. Post-modern, post-denominational, post-Christendom, post-evangelical, etc. As I have argued before, I do not think that postmodernism is really a "post" at all. It is really a different way of being modern primarily in post-industrial economies. Too much focus on the "posts" is not helpful in the long run since it creates a level of unsettled ambiguity that makes lasting change a slippery outcome.
Nick Fiedler perhaps unwittingly began a fruitful conversation last week regarding the supposed "death" of emergent Christianity for which Tony has posted a list of various responses from across the web. As I argued, I do not think emergent Christianity is dead, but the idea that it was going to be "revolutionary" is in fact anemic at best and this is perhaps what the disappointment is really all about. As Blake has posted, it became something that produced something that was not expected and this is not a bad thing. It is more than frustrated evangelicals now and hence more than those who are looking for a radical revolution in evangelicalism. Perhaps it always was more than just this, but it it clear that in movement is not best identified by this response.
The term I am using to describe this unexpected outcome is not post-denominationalism since denominations still exist in various forms of "churches" all over the map of the American religious marketplace. I am calling what is occurring meta-denominationalism. It is the experience or desire being beyond yet with denominational structures of religion. So what does this mean?
In the past year or so in which I have been listening to the conversation before I became a more or less active participant, traditional denominations began to form cohorts of their own to discusshow emergent Christianity works within their own denominational structures and how this movement might work to create new shapes and structures inside of these traditions. No doubt some within these cohorts are after something revolutionary. Others, like myself, are more interested in carving out a space that can act like a little portal to other Christians in other denominations where we can unify at least some aspect of our churches and denominations. Since Robert Wuthnow's classic book The Restructuring of American Religion (1990) the idea that denominations are more fluid and similar than ever before due to the convergence of theological ideas and leveling off of social classes has been re-asserted by others and re-confirmed again and again. In other words, a Presbyterian (USA), a Catholic, a Methodist, and a Baptist may all have very similar views of the world that are actually more alike than with others of their own denomination! In previous decades this was highly improbable. Now the new question we are hearing people ask is how to find connections to engage that unique niche in the American religious marketplace and to come together in an effort to share similar religious experiences and views of the world that the denominational structures alone can no longer hold by themselves.
This is essentially what Brian McLaren has shown to be an significant outcome in the structure of this conversation we call emergent. It was his own religious experience that he describes in A Generous Orthodoxy. McLaren's version sounds a bit like Wade Clark Roof's analysis of baby-boomer religion where it is about individuals collecting and reconfiguring once disparate religious experience in their own reflexive pastiche. But what I think is happening with emergent is both a rediscovery of our own religious traditions through a conversation with others and the discovery and construction of new structures to hold and shape religious experience.
As sociologists have argued, as measures of social class even out more and more between denominations similarities become more pervasive. As this phenomenon has reached a certain level of maturity in American religion, those same traditional denominations have been in decline. While no evidence suggests that these two observations are necessarily correlated, other factors such as birth rate and young adult retention affect mainline declines, they are both phenomenon that people in the church experience on a regular basis in worship, programming, meetings, etc.
The idea of meta-denominationalism means that people are gathering in various media to understand the convergence of their religious experience and then to find ways to carve out and construct new spaces to enrich their theology, worship, and relationships that denominational structures inherently limit. In some ways it is a new ecumenism without the pretense of a grand unification of Christianity as an expected outcome. But it is a convergence of ideas and experiences that is new for many people. Meta-denominationalism means emergence through convergence. I think that's something rich and powerful to embrace as participants in the continuing and progressive revelation of God's kingdom. Don't you?
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