Pulpit Magazine

(By Phil Johnson)

The following is taken from a transcript of a seminar delivered at the 2006 Shepherds’ Conference.

I’ve been assigned the impossible task of explaining and critiquing the emerging church movement in one 75-minute session. It will save some time if I start by being totally candid with you:

I don’t suppose anyone who knows me expects me to be very positive about the emerging church movement. I’d love to stand up here and spend the first half hour or so listing features of the emerging church that I think are admirable. I do think there are actually a few valid and important points being made by people in the movement, and I’ll get to them, but I’d rather not start there, if you don’t mind. 

(By the way, I realize it would be very stylish if I took the other approach. If I gave you an ambiguous review and a totally dispassionate analysis, so that when I finished you couldn’t actually be sure whether I think the emerging movement is a good thing or not, that would fit perfectly with the postmodern paradigm favored by emergent types. And I’m sure a lot of them would congratulate me for it. But that would not reflect my own honest perspective, and I’d prefer just to be totally frank with you. So that’s what I’m going to do.)

My goal in this hour is not to persuade people who are already sold on the emergent idea that it’s a bad idea. My aim is to help conservative pastors of established churches who are committed to biblical principles by making you aware of some of the things that are going on in the so-called emerging church movement. And I hope to explain why I believe it is worth the struggle to resist these trends. Because you will invariably be confronted with pressure to embrace some of the philosophy and style of the emergent movement in your own ministries. And judging from what I know of church history—especially recent church history—it will be a difficult struggle for some pastors to resist. 

About the Nomenclature . . .

Before I start to describe the emerging church movement and outline some of its main characteristics, I want to mention that there’s been quite a lot of debate about what name we ought to use when we speak of this movement. For the sake of this seminar, I’m pretty much just going to refer to it as “the emerging church movement,” in keeping with popular usage. I couldn’t think of anything else to call it without inventing some circumlocution that would only confuse matters. So I’ll refer to it as the “emerging church movement,” but I want to add a long disclaimer here to acknowledge that none of those three words actually fits the thing we are describing very well. 

Emerging. In the first place, I object to the implications of the word emerging. This movement is not some beautiful new butterfly coming out of a cocoon. Although people in this movement sometimes claim to represent the next great step forward after the failure of modernism, my assessment would be that what we are really seeing here is the collective dying gasp of every major modernist idea evangelicals and fundamentalists have stood against for the past century and a half.

Virtually all the literature, style, and philosophy associated with the emerging subculture are shot through with conspicuous elements of worldliness, man-centered worship, the narcissism of youth, liberal and neo-orthodox theology, and the silly, ages-old campaign to be “contemporary” at all costs. 

And I hope you realize that very few of this movement’s most obvious features are truly inventive. The philosophy and even some of the novelties of style are really not that much different from what was happening during my junior high school years in the youth group of the liberal Methodist church I grew up in. We had the candles and contemporary music and every kind of religious paraphernalia you can imagine—but not the gospel. Methodist church leaders, who had abandoned the gospel years before desperately sought a way to make the church seem “relevant” to a younger generation in its own language. There has always been some segment of the church or another that is desperate to keep up with the shifting fads of culture and looking for novel ways to adapt Christianity to the spirit of the age. That has been true at least since Victorian times. Spurgeon wrote against it.

Although that philosophy has been tried repeatedly in various forms, it has never genuinely contributed anything to the growth or effectiveness of the church. If the pattern of history holds true, my prediction is that the emerging church movement will be dead and irrelevant even before the current generation gives way to the next generation. That’s what inevitably happens to movements that are tailored to the tastes of a specific generation. At most, they have about a 15—or 25-year lifespan. So in my judgment, the term emerging will almost certainly prove to be a major misnomer in the long term—and quite possibly even in the short term. 

Church. Second, questions have also been raised from within the movement itself about whether it’s really appropriate to speak of “the emerging church.” Brian McLaren is without question the leading American figure and most prolific writer in the movement. He said last summer that he now prefers to speak of the emerging “conversation.”

That would actually be fine with me, because in some ways the movement isn’t very churchlike in its attitude toward structure and authority. (I’m tempted to propose nomenclature of my own: “the emerging free-for-all,” because that actually seems to fit what is happening in the movement even better than the idea of a “conversation.”) But I think it’s worth noting that the best-known spokesperson in this movement has indicated that even he thinks the word church really doesn’t fit the movement very well. 

Movement. That’s not all. In some important ways the emerging subculture is not really even a movement in the classic sense. There are no clear leaders or universally-recognized spokespersons who would be affirmed by everyone associated with the emerging church. The closest to a dominant figure would be Brian McLaren, and he is so controversial and so prone to making disturbing statements that many who have adopted the emerging style or otherwise identified with the emergent movement say they don’t want their ministries or opinions to be evaluated by what he says. And I don’t blame them.

On top of that, this is a movement that hates formal structure, so it has been resistant to any kind of definition or careful boundaries that would make its shape easy to discern or describe. It’s a movement that is purposely foggy and amorphous, fluid and diverse—and most in the movement want to keep it that way. 

That ambiguity is a major aspect of the emerging subculture’s love affair with all things postmodern. The lack of clarity and the absence of any clear consensus in the movement is also the main strategy for self-defense against critics. No matter what you criticize within the movement, practically the first response you are going to hear is that “not everyone in the movement holds that opinion.” And in most cases, that’s probably true. It’s a movement that loves ambiguity and diversity and despises clarity and organization.

Nonetheless, last year Brian McLaren and a few other leading emergent figures banded together to form an actual organization called, simply, “Emergent”—also known as “Emergent Village,” or (as you find it on their website) “Emergent-US.” So the terminology becomes even more difficult.

Emergent—the organization, is actually different from the “emerging church movement.” Until last summer (2005), you could use the word emergent as a kind of shorthand term to signify the phenomenon itself, but now that’s the name of an actual organization. And at times there even seems to be a bit of tension between Emergent, the organization, and the “emerging church movement.”

According to a June 8 news release from the organization, Tony Jones was appointed “National Director” of Emergent. Others within the emerging church movement practically saw that as a betrayal of the spirit of what they stand for. So a week later, the organization issued an update on their weblog in the form of a memo to the rest of the emerging church movement. The memo said this: 

Some of you read the last post regarding the recent appointment of Tony Jones as “National Director.” Before the official press release was sent out the decision was made to instead use the title “National Coordinator.” This felt more in keeping with both the spirit of Emergent and the overall purpose of the role.Here you begin to see why “the emerging church movement” is next-to-impossible to define. But I hope you can also begin to get a flavor for what makes the so-called “emerging church” different from the historic churches of the past. What we have here is a large and growing subculture on the fringe of the evangelical movement that has been profoundly influenced by postmodern ways of thinking, discourse, and attitudes. 

I dealt with “postmodernism” in a seminar here at the Shepherds’ Conference last year and the year before, so I don’t want to cover the same ground again. If you feel you are totally in the dark about postmodernism and what it looks like, you can get a CD of that message or download the transcript of it from the Internet. I’m pretty sure it’s freely available somewhere online. 

It includes a partial critique of one of Brian McLaren’s books, A New Kind of Christian, because that book is essentially a plea for Christians to embrace postmodernism and adapt to the postmodern way of thinking—not to fear and resist it. We need to conform our perspective and our style of discourse to the postmodern fashion, McLaren says, in order to reach a postmodern generation.

That is, I believe, the central idea that drives the emerging church movement—although many in the movement might balk at the label postmodern, and (in all fairness) many people in the movement would also want to add several paragraphs of qualifications and clarifications to make it clear that their own assessment of postmodernism would not necessarily be completely positive. 

But there’s no question that the movement is self-consciously and purposefully trying to accommodate or adapt to or otherwise indulge the postmodern climate of the age we live in. And that is why some of the essential features of faith and assurance that you and I might think are absolutely essential to communicating the gospel clearly and in a strong, biblical way are sometimes actually held in contempt by people in the emerging subculture. I’m speaking of features such as authority, strong convictions, doctrinal precision, clear definitions, and candor. All of those things run counter to the values prized by postmodernists.

So naturally, one of Tony Jones’s first duties as “coordinator” for the Emergent organization was to write a long weblog entry explaining why the group found it necessary to have a “coordinator” and a board of “directors” and an actual staff and organization and a real, tangible hierarchy. 

It honestly did not surprise me that he would feel obliged to write such a justification for the organization’s existence (or that many in the movement were demanding that kind of explanation), because for the most part, the emerging church movement (like the postmodern culture it imitates) is highly suspicious of (or even contemptuous of) things like organizational charts, or structured definition, or even the idea of authority itself. Obviously, all of those things are necessary in any kind of formal organization. But if you understand postmodernism, it makes perfect sense why postmodernists would nevertheless resist the clarity and authority that comes with any kind of formal organization.

All of that is to say that the word movement is also not quite right, and even most insiders don’t like the implications of the word movement. But for lack of better terminology, I’m going to continue to refer to the “emerging church movement,” and I hope that for clarity’s sake and for time’s sake you will indulge me in that shorthand usage of three terms that really don’t quite fit. (If it’s a comfort to anyone in the movement, every time the expression “emerging church movement” appears in the notes I am using, I have put it in quotation marks.) 

I have to say, by the way, that one of the really fun things about watching the “emerging church movement” is keeping a score card of how quickly every discussion melts down into a dispute about words and terminology. Many in the movement are recent college grads who learned the postmodernist technique of deconstruction as their primary method of interpreting language and ideas. That’s what postmodernist lit teachers have been teaching for 15 years or so now. Emergent types have learned the technique well, and they use it to good effect.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS