Every year it seems there are a handful of posts in the blogosphere proclaiming the death of the emergent "church" with the vigor and noise of a town crier with a twist rapturous joy (Jim West). Others take a more irenic tone (Brian LePort, Andrew Jones). Others try to make sense of it all (Tony Jones, Danielle Schroyer, Thomas Mathie). It is like a year's end ritual which ironically calls people who identify with the emerging church movement to re-connect and respond to such claims. I am fine with people in the blogosphere proclaiming the death of things as they wish. It's not an academic forum that requires actual evidence to substantiate anything at all. But as long as we are clear that claims that have no true substantiation are fictions in as much as a Fox "News" report on the turnout for the lastest round of "teabagging."
Jim offers a hearty thrust of gratitude for this death of a "movement devoid of the Spirit and completely beholden to the whims of its participants. A movement mocking Christianity and bereft of God himself."
The death of the emergent movement, if it has come to pass, will put the ‘fun’ in its funeral. A funeral which should rightly be marked by all God’s true people as the end of a heretical schism. A good death indeed. A death whose time has long been overdue. A death by which God proves his hand was never in it.
The irony is that the movement is itself a new kind of ecumenism where differences coexist among theological similarities. It is, as I have described it, a meta-denominational movement. It has become this even as people from numerous denominations have joined together with a shared understanding of their views of Scripture, tradition, worship, sacraments, etc. It is a community of Christians who share that community beyond traditional structures which are no longer esteemed to have any special purpose to receive the gifts of God, namely grace. It is thus quite ironic that a movement that is declared not to have the hand of God in it is a movement that began as a process to find the hand of God at work in the world. When the hand of God is no longer seen to be active in churches that have confused traditional structures with that very hand, something literally emerges from that structure. That's the emergent(ing) church movement (ECM).
While I do not hold that this is some new Reformation of special purpose as some have said this year, neither do I hold that this is some kind of heretical movement that has lost sight of the central position of Scripture. Rather it reclaims Scripture as that which must reform and even destroy religious traditions and customs in order for the Word of God to be revealed through the drawing near of the Kingdom of God. Moreover our doctrinal and hermeneutical tools to understand the meaning of scripture must continually evolve. I do think that this is a classically liberal movement because it reclaims the freedom of one's conscience to discern God's revelation both individually, and most importantly corporately to critique rampant American individualism. While I do not think this is particularly post-modern given that one of the hallmarks of modernity is this self-critical impulse, it is neither fully modern since it is intentionally non-foundational in how rational systems clarify revelation.
What ECM is becoming, the central issue here, goes more back to Niebuhr’s hypothesis in the Social Sources of Denominationalism. ECM is in a pattern that is not new and we can find examples of it in the past (Disciples of Christ perhaps?).The pattern is that if this is an emerging movement, at what point has it "emerged" and what has it emerged into? History shows us that it will emerge into its own social system (arguably it already has done so). There are fault lines of disagreement that are already quite pervasive in the movement. The current fault lines are where things will break apart into contained sub-movements for which the radical edge may be one (see Outlaw Preachers).
I think it is important to see where the tensions are that are forming these social faultlines. This will show us how the Emerging Church Movement (ECM) is evolving and into what it might be evolving. Positive points of unification are worth holding up, but this is never where change occurs. Change occurs at fault lines and fault lines change landscapes in often dissentful and unfriendly ways. While ECM has not reached that point in a lasting way (there have certainly been conflicts), there is nothing in the social history of religious movements to indicate that it will not. To this point I agree with Andrew Jones that it is not quite a radical movement at all as much as a re-set for the traditions that up until 20th century modernity were assumed to be adequate vessels for the Kingdom of God. But what this re-set will become is what we are trying to understand right now.
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