What some pastors and theologians don't like about the emerging church

I thought this comment from Micheal Horton was interesting and worth noting: “When will we get off of the movement roller coaster and patiently endure the community that Christ has established for the fellowship and growth of the saints…”

One word struck me straight away, endure, maybe it was a throw away adjective, but none-the-less. When are we going to stop enduring this thing that was supposed to be the most dynamic, diverse, active and deep community, persecution, yes I could endure that, a bad B-Movie, maybe, but the last thing I ever thought I would need to endure was the bride of Christ, maybe that’s why we are all a bit confudled about the whole affair!

Andrew,

I was going to comment on my belief that you may have missed an important theme in those reflections on 9marks, but the page is no longer available.

That’s….odd.

Anyway, I was going to suggest that “male pastors” is a bit misleading on their critiques of the emerging church. Mark Driscoll, I believe, made a comment directly about “men”. I think this hits more squarely in the real concern: by forcing an egalitarian approach to Christian practice (to include more than just pastoring), much of emergent is undercutting a specific view of the male self: as symbolic “head” of not just family, but public life more generally. I won’t use the “p” word here, but I will suggest that conservative males brought up (i.e.: socialized) into this type of view of the male “place” in society are beginning to feel a lack of meaning as (now) religious movements, such as emergent, are providing theological justification for the dismemberment of such worldviews.

Sometimes, occasionally, heated theological exchange obfuscates and serves as cover for underlying social issues (such as loss of power by one group to another).

Is there a UK/US divide in attitudes to the ‘emerging church’ - or even in the phenomenon of ‘emerging church’ itself? I find the comments about emerging church, and the sense of danger it represents to US evangelicals, hard to relate to. Mainly because I’m very unaware of a particular ‘emerging church’ phenomenon in this country (UK) - apart from a very striking ‘emergence’ of a variety of new church communities which aim to be more culturally adaptable, but which have fairly conservative theological underpinnings.

I warmed to Mark Driscoll’s concise summary of the difference between Reformed and Emerging theology as between an ‘irrelevant orthodoxy’ and ‘relevant heterodoxy’ - except that I was hard-pressed to pinpoint anything like that on the map of UK Christianity. He then spoiled it all by enumerating as heresies such things as the rejection of belief in inerrant scriptures (‘inerrant’ is a precise technical term which many evangelicals do not hold to), penal substitutionary atonement (again - a precise technical subdivision of a broad spectrum of definition, which requires so much qualification that it becomes a pointless test of orthodoxy), hell, and male pastors.

An ‘emerging church’ divisiveness was regretted by Michael Horn; again, I’m not aware of this in a UK context - but it is unfortunate when one group defines itself by rejecting another - in the way that protestants can reject catholics, for instance (and of course vice versa). It is also regrettable when one theological standpoint defines itself by rejecting another - when such a rejection is partisan, rather than theologically justifiable.

An ‘emergent’ objection to a reductionist version of church, churches playing to religious consumerism, is always to be welcomed (Daniel Montgomery) except that one wonders if an ‘emergent’ variety is just another aspect of the consumerism it seeks to reject. An objection to churches which are purveyors of ‘self-help guides’ - also to be welcomed. (The current best-seller in our local Christian bookshop is a book giving the 21 essential techniques which make for effective leadership. Anyone can be a leader, apparently, if they simply observe these 21 techniques). A ‘reductionist’ gospel is also to be deplored - but ‘reductionist’ need not mean the same as ‘simply presented’, or that ‘complexity’ is the necessary alternative to ‘reductionist’.

I also tend to agree with the thought behind Carl Trueman’s contribution - that evangelicals tend to play down historical context in their theology. The only ‘emergent’ alternative I have seen, however, is Andrew’s - so maybe I’m somewhat lacking in my education here. Can anyone help me out?

One of the US churches which is held up as a shining example of ‘emergent church’ - Rob Bell’s Mars Hill Bible Church (not to be confused with the Mars Hill church of Mark Driscoll - how confusing!) - seems to me just another version of a consumer mega-church. It’s even located in a refurbished shopping mall. The critique of Rob Bell’s “Velvet Elvis” on the www.9marks.org site seems to me to be fairly substantial.

Without commenting specifically on the 9Marks critiques, I’m wondering if critics are missing the panoptic picture of “emergence” – that of a broad, diffuse, rapidly growing, self-organizing ecclesial phenomenon born of the Internet. Critics nearly always try to evaluate the “emerging movement” as (1) a hierarchy of leadership, and (2) some perceived collection of core epistemology. From these perspectives, it’s no wonder one critic said “defining the emerging church is like nailing Jello to a wall.”

Emergence looks nothing like a top-down organization, and everything like a spontaneous consequence of God’s image reflected in vastly accelerated ecclesial interaction - facilitated by the microprocessor.

By vastly accelerated, I mean that the influence of virtual “ecclesial dialogue” is growing in parallel with the Internet itself. When Sergey’s and Larry’s first home page went up, they had logged something like 100 million web pages. Last year, when Google stopped listing their logging data, the number was nearly 10 billion. That’s a 100-fold increase in just six years. And the rate of change is increasing. Less than 15% of world population currently uses the Internet, and far fewer use it for social networking. As goes the Internet, so goes emergence.

Stacy says “if i were writing a screenplay about this story, i would have to cast the evangelical-powers-that-be as the political incumbents afraid of change…’church’ is still big business and it sure sounds like the old establishment is afraid of loosing head count in the market share game.”

I think there’s a bit of truth to Stacy’s observation. The keepers of religion historically fight against structural changes, arguing against the “disruptive influence” of new techno-cultural tools. Such dialogue is healthy. But ultimately, tools change – and often in unexpected and paradigm-busting ways. I believe we’re seeing the sunrise on just such a day.

To the annoyance of some evangelical critics, the emerging movement is not a hierarchy, and there’s no possible way that a traditional / vertical religious hierarchy could emerge, lest it becomes the “emerged” church. The EM isn’t a new theology. It isn’t a new franchise church plant (Emergent Village notwithstanding). The EM is simply a growing community of Christ-followers sharing their faith, concerns, questions, challenges, failings, dreams, prayers, and visions via emerging virtual networking. The EM is a model of new ecclesia; an example of how local church can be horizontally transformed by global dialogue; an example of how local church gets connected as a dynamic member of the global Church.

This global cyber-phenomenon has never happened on an instantaneous, un-moderated, egalitarian level. We’re witnessing the birth of a new ecclesial revolution in which age-old sectarian boundaries are becoming irrelevant - being replaced by a real-time congruency of global and local community born of unrestricted virtual interaction. The microprocessor is shrinking the literate world into a single village. John L

Seeing how these heresies proliferate make me wonder. ARe we in the dark ages again? Penal substitutionary atonement? What is that? And the denial of the inerrancy of the scriptures, that it seems to me like an idea spewed forth by lack of knowledge. Hopefully this will pass.

What I find most interesting as a broad brush across all their comments is their seemingly hard-wired assumption that while being critical of assumed interpretations of scripture is good because we can always have a new insight somewhere, there is an assumed line which if crossed automatically amounts to an inappropriate abandonment of core Christianity. An assumption that all Christian reformation must by its very nature be modest. There is an inherent assumption that the tradition of the church is in and of itself a kind of inerrance through crystallization. “If that idea were wrong, we’d have figured it out already” in a sense. This seems like a highly problematic position for protestants to put themselves into and yet somehow no one notices this?

~jhimm — nothing lasts. nothing is finished. nothing is perfect.