Stephen Johnson's Blog
What's so emergent about the emergent church? / 05.25.09, 08:45 PM
Let me apologize beforehand. I seemed to have temporarily lost sight of objectivity. This one turned more into a vent than a forum. But hey, it’s my blog, and I can whine if I want to.
What’s so emergent about the emergent church movement? The conversation still looks too much like the old one. Deconstructionism needs to become less about postmodern rhetoric and more about justice seeking pragmatism. The incessantly repetitive literature has become nothing more than circumlocution. There is too much talk. Where is the change? The adoption of postmodernity’s pluralistic paradigm is not reflected in the picture of the church’s emergent response. Let’s look at an example. In the Emergent Manifesto of Hope, the leaders of the movement come together to outline what the movement represents, placing themselves at the forefront of what where the church is heading. Included in this manifesto is a chapter written by African-American leader Anthony Smith titled, “Practicing Pentecost: Discovering the Kingdom of God Amidst Racial Fragmentation.”
Smith defines the role of the church as this:
Practicing Pentecost is about participating in the shalom of God that is producing local ekklesias that will embody a racial and cultural unity while also resisting death-dealing Powers in their profound rebellion of influencing ways of doing church that perpetuate racial divisions and hostilities that are ultimately an affront to God’s intent for a new creation that is to be found in Christ’s Body.
The chapter seems more like a cry to be heard than an appeasing addition to an already settled proclamation. Has the emergent church turned into the white guy who says, “I’m not racist, I have black friends,” without sufficiently recognizing the systems in place that perpetuately polarize people along the lines of race and ethnicity? Sunday mornings have become the most segragated hour in the United States. I’m certain the emergent leaders would agree. The problem is big. Far bigger than many of us are ready to acknowlege. We are far from the New Jerusalem.
How far? There are seventeen official publications by Emergent Village, with every single author being white. A quick glance at the books written for the emergent church reveals a long list of white males under the age of 40: Brian McClaren, Tony Jones, Dan Kimball, and Doug Pagitt.1 My neighbors are from Somalia, Nepal, and Burma. They couldn’t care less about goatees or Rob Bell’s glasses. Where is their voice in an emergent church? Where is my voice, as an Asian American, in a church that predominantly speaks to the white majority? Where is the single mother’s voice? The immigrant? Those on the margins? I have yet to see it. Being relevant within God’s Kingdom should have nothing to do with the majority, and every to do with those living on the fringes of society.
To begin, lets define some terms:
Postmodernity—“Postmodernism refers to an intellectual mood and an array of cultural expressions that call into question the ideals, principles, and values that lay at the heat of the modern mind-set.”2
Emergent Church—“communities that practice the way of Jesus within postmodern cultures. This definition encompasses nine practices. Emerging churches (1) identify with the life of Jesus, (2) transform the secular realm, and (3) live highly communal lives. Because of these three activities, they (4) welcome the stranger, (5) serve with generosity, (6) participate as producers, (7) create as created beings, (8) lead as a body, and (9) take part in spiritual activities.”3
And I’d like to introduce a new term—Postemergent—it has yet to be defined by the church, but the direction that it takes will certainly demand that the church embraces all voices, breaks free from cultural infatuation, and strives to rewrite the normative scripts that define postmodern Christianity.
This is not to disregard the many positive additions the Emergent Church Movement has added, but let’s please keep adding, and not subtracting. The good news is that there are positive voices speaking to the the Emergent Church. Will they be heard?
Anthony Smith’s blog defines racism as this:
Racism, within the North American context, is the making normative of white European culture with its attendant hegemony of power. Racism is the denial of God’s new creation whereby one’s cultural presence dominates the existence of other cultures. Racism is the denying, through political and ecclesial institutions, the imago Dei of other human beings that are not descendants of Europeans. That is the more contextual version of racism as it relates to North America.
Racism, in the North American context, is embodied when European-American Christians assume, oftentimes unknowingly, the normativity of their expression and practice of the Christian faith. This is exampled by European-American churches that think they are racially diverse but still have a white, middle-class aesthetic while having people of different cultures present in their worship. Such practices are racist and are examples of the church being handmaiden to the Principalities and Powers that continue to oppress and render hostile different cultures towards each other. Racism is capitulation to Powers in their perpetuation of hostility and oppression between different cultures.
As the world continues to globalize, things are beginning to come full circle. Nations that were once targets of missiologists centuries ago are now returning missionaries to the countries where it all began. With this in mind, it now seems almost arrogant for a relatively small group of white men to claim their churches as emergent. According to the book Emerging Churches (2005), by Fuller Theological Seminary professors Ryan Bolger and Eddie Gibbs, the number of churches and communities that would qualify as emerging in the United States was only about 150.3 This is not the emergent church. The emergent church is in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The Emergent Church Movement is not relevant to the majority of the world’s Christians.
From Jamie Arpin – Ricci’s blog, author of “Looking Forward: Facing the Future of Christian Leadership”:
I was once visiting a church where a First Nations woman began to dance to the worship. A (white) woman leaned over and said, “Isn’t it just lovely when they dance around with their feathers? The church needs to encourage that sort of thing”. While this woman was sincerely genuine in intentions, too often our desire to see culture celebrated never goes beyond external novelties, requiring nothing of ourselves as the Church. We need to go deeper.
We need to go deeper.
[1]Soong-Chan Rah, The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the church from Western Cultural Captivity (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2009), p.111. Many of the ideas for this entry were spurred on by Rah’s book.
[2]Stanley Grenz, A primer on Postmodernism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), p.12.
[3]Ryan K. Bolger and Eddie Gibbs, Emerging Churches (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), p.331.
[4] Photo borrowed from DJChuang
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