The Emerging Church

For years the phrase “missional church” has been a way to avoid seriously engaging with ecclesiological issues. The phrase sounded like the name of an ecclesiology but there were several versions of what it meant extant and many of them were not very well thought out. As a result we find that several fragmentary ecclesiologies can be found in ‘emerging church’ circles. This is now the source of no little controversy.

First let’s follow what has quickly become the convention of distinguishing between the ‘emergent’ contingent and the broader ‘emerging church movement.’ In this model the ‘emerging’ movement may be described as being made up of Christians who believe that we are entering into an age in which the cultural  structures of modernity which were put in place by the Enlightenment are coming apart.

The modern era is over. The difficulty is that the churches have so accommodated themselves to the rationalistic, individualistic, and bureaucratic structures of modernity that they’re in danger of going down with the modern ship. We must move away from modernity and develop new postmodern models of ministry and theology.

The ‘emergent’ contingent is made up of a group of evangelical Christians who have been discussing these matters with one another for some time. This group is generally regarded as including Brian McLaren, Tony Jones,  Spencer Burke, Rick Bennett, and others as well as those who follow their lead. This group of friends went on to establish an organization called “Emergent Village” (thus the ‘emergent label).

In this circle there is a belief that we must not only be postmodern, we must be postmodernist; i.e. we must adopt the ideas of postmodern philosophers (Jacques Derrida is held in particularly high regard) and trim the tree of the theological tradition of many of its largest branches (some, for example, see the doctrine of the trinity as a dead branch that bears no fruit).

There appear to be two different ecclesial approaches in ‘emergent’. One group is in favor of establishing what I’ll call ‘emerging church churches’. In structure these churches are not very different from neoevangelical churches that were interested in ‘church reform’. There are some distinctive characteristics to them.

They are interested in adopting some historically catholic devotional and liturgical practices but they generally do that in an aesthetically driven cafeteria fashion ( “I’ll take some of that and a little of that. But I don’t want any that this other stuff”) that takes these practices out of the context that gave them their original intelligibility.

They also generally operate at higher intellectual and aesthetic levels. Outside of that they vary from blue jeans conservatives to pomo megachurches to very experimental groups that still work within the framework of conventional neoevangelical organizational frameworks. Brian McLaren is sometimes regarded as an especially attractive example of this approach.

Another group within the ‘emergent’ circle is sometimes referred to as being ‘postchurch’. They want to dump over the side all of  the structures of the historic Church. They include among these structures the practice of holding a regular meeting for members of specific fellowships who are committed to the entire community as well as to its individual  members. They view this is unnecessary and cumbersome and potentially oppressive.

Christians can just fellowship on a more-or-less spontaneous basis in coffee houses, taverns, malls or wherever they may encounter one another. There’s no need for any communitarian commitments. Commit yourself to God, to your family and friends and to social justice, but don’t commit yourself to the visible church. I’ve really enjoyed and benefited from most of what I’ve read in G.K. Chesterton. One of his best books is his slim volume on St.Francis. In it he deals with the duality in the life of this great saint. Francis is both the man often painted as contemplating a human skull, and the playful “troubadour of God”.are frequently taken to be adherents of this school.

There are, however, many in ‘emerging’ who are not ‘emergent’. They want to dump modernism. They don’t want to adopt postmodernISM. They share a commitment to life in a visible, disciplined Christian fellowship. Being a Christian is not just a matter of personal discipleship; it is life as a part of a divinely called community – the Church. Personal discipleship grows out of the practices and disciplines of life together as the people of God.

The best known advocates of these views are what Tony Jones has snarkily referred to as the “Hauerwasian Mafia” (is he part of the “Derridian Mob”?). This is because one of the theologians who has influenced them is Stanley Hauerwas (  but they’re also influenced by John Milbank, Rowan Williams, George Lindbeck and many others).They see the way forward as the recovery and redescription in today’s context of the historic Christian tradition as it existed prior to the era of decline that we know as the late Middle Ages.

The Christian vision is made intelligible when it is set in the context of the Holy Trinity’s  extension of the sharing of life that is God’s own Triune life to us through the Incarnation and the death and resurrection of the Man who was God. This life is made available to us through the practice of Christian worship (i.e. the liturgy) as centered in and normed by our sharing with Christ and one another in the Eucharistic feast. The fruition of such sharing is to be seen in a life of love for one another and for our neighbors. The historic Church is seen not as an essentially bad idea but as an identity given to us as a gift from God which we collectively forgot (the name of that forgetting is “modernity”).

The modern Church is not the historic Church; it is our joint act of forgetting what it means to be the Church. This means that we must recover the ancient catholic practices and disciplines that were and are the way to simply be the Church. This does not mean that we need to put on our swimming suits and prepare to swim the Tiber (i.e. convert to Roman Catholicism). Among the ‘Hauerwasians’ there are people committed to different ecclesial communities. This means that there are still a lot of issues to be worked out among them.

Another group of ‘emerging’ Christians is attracted to what is usually inaccurately called the “house church” (one advocate prefers “organic church”; we’ll see if that catches on).

They do away with a formally recognized (i.e. ordained) leadership and distinctive buildings in which to gather for worship and practice holding informal, participatory , ‘open’ meetings in informal meetings usually including the eating of a meal together (this is usually viewed as the Eucharist).

They do not, however have a shared way of understanding what they are doing and this can lead to an extraordinary range of practices from edifying and encouraging informal gatherings to wild, wooly, and dangerous spiritual stunts. A few, like Frank Viola (though Viola isn’t really part of the emerging church, but rather describes himself as “beyond evangelical” instead), are trying to put together a thoughtful ecclesiology that can commend this path to others and provide some guidance to those on it, but there’s still a long way to go.

Actually that’s pretty well true across the board. This is true even for the “Hauerwasians” who have a head start because their approach makes the insights of the greatest in the historic Church readily available. Much of the sometimes ill-tempered discussion of these issues is the result of the surfacing of the ecclesiological issues that the “emerging church” has neglected for too long.

We need to grow up and have a candid but loving discussion with one another over our differences in this area (the emerging church) in the certainty that if we bear with one another, submit to one another, and speak the truth in love to one another, God will bring us still closer to his Truth.

Also see The Coming Ecclesiastical Mass Extinction and The New Gnostics