I’m away in France. While I’m away, Church and Pomo Blog posted a review I wrote on Kevin Corcoran’s recently edited book Church in the Present Tense. My post is entitled “What Has Become of the Emerging Church?: The Problem of a Never Ending Discussion.” You can find it HERE. Kevin’s book is a good one because it draws together a diverse group of essays/ essayists that engage some of the key issues that have driven the founding and continuation of the emerging church movement. I think the book (in some sense) was meant to critically reflect upon “what has become of the emerging church?” Hence it’s tag line “A Candid Look at what’s Emerging.” I think therefore that one way you can read the book is as a status report on the state of the emerging church.
My suggestion in this post is that the articles in this book (can be read to) point to the nagging problem that the emerging church’s theological and philosophical drivers inherently produce “never ending tolerant conversations” that provoke existing institutional churches into self-examination (which is a good thing), but in the end accomplish little to change those structures, or produce new communities that become new expressions of the gospel. Emerging church, I am afraid, sucks us in to a land of never ending conversation.
I admit this is a tired argument. People have been saying this for a while. So I’m just putting it out there for discussion. I think that “never ending conversation” is a tendency of the emerging church (especially in the States) because emerging church is good at deconstructing and providing some general challenges to live a different gospel (love driven). This is what I have loved and do love about the emerging church. But it provides little for on the ground progress on the difficult issues of the day. It is too often attached to an inclusivism/tolerance that seeks to protect the autonomy of the individual and keep “disputed matters” at the conceptual level as opposed to on-the-ground practices of reconciliation, restoration, eucharist, discernment of righteousness grounded determinatively in the person and work of Jesus Christ. But this is typical of all American Christianity, isn’t it?
Do you see emerging church in this way? Yes or No? If yes, why do you think this is so?
I’m in France this week and next with Rae and Max. So my comments on this post will be spotty at best (Sorry). We’re working with a group of missionaries in France (C&MA) leading discussions on church, mission, post-Christendom and post-modernity. We hope to learn much from each other in a week long forum. In the meantime please (especially all my emergent brothers and sisters) don’t hesitate to clarify for me the gist of this post!!
On Sunday July 31st, 1530 hrs (3:30 p.m.), I’ll be preaching at Trinity International Church in Paris. If anyone’s around … check in won’t you?
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“It is too often attached to an inclusivism/tolerance that seeks to protect the autonomy of the individual and keep “disputed matters” at the conceptual level as opposed to on-the-ground practices of reconciliation, restoration, eucharist, discernment of righteousness grounded determinatively in the person and work of Jesus Christ.”
I really resonate with this. I feel like the first half of the sentence in particular describes something I have noticed.
I think you may be right, though, about the fact that much of American Christianity keeps things at the conceptual level. Even many of the harshest critics of the emergent church seem to engage it largely on the conceptual level.
Actually. I find it rather astounding that the emerging church is still a blog conversation topic. N’est-ce pas?
Really, there are two parts, the people that are actually doing the work and those that do a lot of talking. Throw in that ten years ago the doers were the only ones doing the talking, and it seems that the conversation has garnered far too much attention. It is also far too easy to critique the talker than the doer.
I actually visited the conference at Calvin in which these essays were debuted and most of the participants were serious practitioners. But the professors and guests (many from confessional churches, ie Reformed) obsessed over creeds and whether what the practitioners were doing “counts as church”. It seems that part of the EC’s problem has been those types of conversations, rather than the “isn’t this awesome?” and “can you believe what we just did?”
Thanks for covering this. I just stumbled across your blog, and I appreciate how you covered the subject!
In answer to your question about the never-ending spin-cycle of emerging-conversation, Dr. Fitch, first, here’s my espresso metaphor version: The emerging CD has a processing scratch that keeps it playing a loop on the introduction to the new song instead of moving through it and beyond. Second, the technical description: Emerging had/has a defective paradigm where identification of need to change has been confused as being the sufficient substance of change, so it has no inherent need to get any farther than intellectual deconstruction.
Now, my rantswer. Some of us have been observing/participating in “emerging” pretty much from the outset, and that’s about 15 years now. Some, like myself, who never really resonated with what became Emergent were even seeing the writing on the wall around the 2000 decade as “emerging” went from Xers in general to Young Leaders which became Terra Nova (briefly) and then became Emergent. We noted that there seemed to be the “right” elements – theology, leadership, justice, and arts/creativity – but they were still being drawn out as segmented parts on a quadrant chart instead of any kind of vital integration. This represented no major change in paradigm, no radical shift in epistemology … only some additions of new elements, or ones glued back into from the modernist liberal/conservative split of 100+ years ago, and/or more humility (or sometimes aggression) in questioning “received wisdom.”
Also, it seemed the decon-conversations just kept going and flowing, year after year, still dominated by celebrity Xians and by those with theological bents. A steady flow of newcomers kept fueling “the conversation” with their sincere seeking of help to put into words what they were sensing about something new and what to do. And, while some good questions and conversations did emerge, I still wondered/wonder if this domination combination just spun itself into a whirlpool, choking off escape with a clog of ecclesiastical jetsam.
I think I lost any hopeful imagination or horizon for this emerging movement about 7 or 8 years ago when I saw the exclusion and overlording of my friends by some so-called leaders in it. I (and others) also tired of all the dead-end (though potentially fascinating!) deconstruction of theology and ecclesiology, and searched for something more (re-)constructive. Not finding it, I/we began working toward providing some clues for when others likewise tired of the questions and were ready to work on living out their faith in new kinds of answers.
I understand that we need be like the Bereans and figure things out for ourselves in community, especially when we’ve experienced others trying to dictate everything to us. But sometimes – far too often? – the “conversation” phase has become the end instead of the means. Many of us, it would seem, dropped out of emerging/Emergent mid-decade, if not before, and ended up in the missional movement, which was a better fit from the start for us anyway and didn’t give us such theological fits. I suspect there’s a significant difference between the hard work of personal perseverance in cross-cultural research and relationships in the missional movement versus intellectual and social tolerance in the emerging movement. That’s because the two movements do not share the same paradigm, though there is usually shared interest in some common theological questions and concerns. Also, I suspect there’s a significant difference between the hard work of discerning good from evil, and work for inclusion of all voices. As we’ve come to see, some voices in some emerging “streams” turned out to be abusive and some of our celebrities turned out to be vain. Perhaps not everyone should be included … after all, is it “just” to allow bullies to have a pulpit?
*Church in the Present Tense* may well be helpful, as your extended review indicates, Dr. Fitch. But as I said, I don’t hold much hope for it as a movement – though those who tire of decon may eventually be ready for reconstruction. And I think it would intriguing to get beyond the clog, to examine the DNA of “emerging” and its overall health, rather than just keep taking a pulse to see if it’s still alive, and identify which blood transfusions seem to be keeping it going these days. I have to wonder if emerging/Emergent and its new legacy echo movements too easily succumb to “The Gregory House M.D. Syndrome” wherein the differential diagnosis itself is the main thing, and once the puzzle is solved, it isn’t all that important to heal the patient. We do need more research and development, not deconstruction and redaction. We could use more case studies of on-the-ground missional ministry and mentoring, not more celebrity books and conferences.
P.S. It’s been 10 years since the release of *In Search of Authentic Faith* by Steve Rabey. A former Associated Press reporter, Steve was there at the initial Young Leaders events and did interviews with both eventual Emergent celebrities and off-the-radar emerging and missional practitioners. That might make a great bookend to *Church in the Present Tense.*
CG,
Could you please provide references (hyperlink or something) for where you read/heard Jones’ comments? I would very much like to see it myself.
I don’t mean to sound deprecatory, but it would not surprise me if many in the Emergent conversation did find affinity with Savage. Savage’s comments on fidelity and marriage assumes a framework in which marriage comes into the sphere of the autonomous individual and serves that person. Many emergent ideas I have come across take the same approach with spirituality and even more so with epistemology.
To answer DF’s initial question, yes I do see the EC that way, but at the same time I respect them. The EC and the average North American Evangelical church share the same set of core assumptions, but the EC are the ones with the guts to ask the tougher questions that such assumptions lead to. The problem is that so long as the EC remains committed to a modernist epistemology, they can only offer sirens, not solutions, to the coming postmodern problems.
David,
Having been in/around EC conversations for over a decade, I agreement with your assessment of the symptoms.
HOWEVER, I’m not sure that the biggest problem here is conversation. I think you know our story here at Englewood ( For other readers, there is a short account here: http://englewoodcc.com/history.html ) well enough to know that we deeply value slow and conversational church life, and I have long appreciated the conversational tone that defines EC.
From my own experiences, the deeper problem is a lack (or at least a flimsy) ecclesiology. And of course, I’m sure that there are exceptions to this generalization, but I have seen it over and over again… To borrow local language from here at Englewood, there is little or no sense of (or commitment to) our church communities as “local manifestations of the Body of Christ in a particular place.” We can talk about the problem in terms of a lack of stability or commitment or even of allegiance (individual narratives ultimately trumping that of the social narrative of our life together as a church community.) And maybe I’m reiterating your point here, but for all the talk, I have not seen in the EC’s much of a manifestation of an alternative way to modern liberal (and I’m not talking Right vs. Left politics here) individualism. In fact, on the contrary, all the focus on tolerance, individual autonomy/narration/discernment only serves — IMO — to propagate these myths of Western culture.
I appreciate you implying the question of “what is the end of conversation”? And I would argue that the telos of conversation is our maturing together into the “fullness of Christ” (Eph 4, I think a pretty good case can be made that Paul is speaking here of the body as a local church community). With this point in mind, yes, I agree with you that the EC is largely defined as conversations without an end. Yes, as you said, these conversations have played a beneficial role in critiquing evangelicalism, but they have largely failed to produce sustained and sustainable communities that offer an alternative way of life together — church communities that exist as, to use Gerhard Lohfink’s term, “contrast societies.”
Chris Smith
It was interesting reading this and the comments – I admit I haven’t thought much about the “emerging” thing for a while.
I am less convinced that the “endless conversation” is really a problem. Because it is that open conversation that generates free space and new questions, and those are the preconditions for new imagination. And without a new imagination, we are going nowhere.
But there is a second issue for me, and it is nicely focused by Skye Jethani in his blog post here: http://tinyurl.com/3ok7py9
Skye asks, “has mission become our idol?” But generalizing into the wider disciplines of spiritual life, I would rephrase, “Is activism the answer?”
I suppose this is always the danger – to swing the pendulum back and forth between activism and an inward spirituality divorced from life. Yet it’s not merely a question of balance, but of rhythms and of priority. So many young leaders fall into the activist error on the path to burnout. One of the tasks of us older dudes is to model patience, and a rootedness in Christ that is truly peace-filled. Our sense of worth is so often tied up in our ability to measure our work and our effectiveness. As GK Chesteron quipped, “Any fool can run around getting things done. But where is the one who can do nothing? That’s the man I admire.”
Many years before him John Bunyan put it another way, “He also serves who only stands and prays.” And a few centuries earlier another activist understood the rhythm. While both teaching and working with the poor Bernard of Clairvaux wrote,
“The man who is wise will see his life more as a reservoir than a canal. The canal simultaneously pours out what it receives; the reservoir retains the water til it is filled, then discharges the overflow without loss to itself. Today there are many in the church who act like canals, the reservoirs are far too rare.
“You too must learn to await this fullness before pouring out your gifts, do not try to be more generous than God.”
I’ve taken the time over the years to get to know many adherents to, and leaders in, the Emergent Church Movement/Conversation.
I’ve gotten to know them in my home city and also online. Sadly, the conclusion which was apparent quite early on and affirmed in subsequent encounters is that the underlying flow of the EC goes back to Satan’s first temptation of man and his purpose in it.
He asked Eve if God had really said what He said, and he didn’t ask that to reinforce the truth, he asked it to fertilize the seed of doubt. Immediately Eve was off-track and continued that way. That is the general thrust of the EC; to foster and encourage doubt in the permanent validity of what God has said.
David,
The emerging church “conversation” has not been my primary framework for pastoral engagement but your argument makes sense to me. The generative conversation, full of wonderful ideas about church, has not landed in the concrete world of practices in particular places as people imagined it might.
But, then again, the same could be said about the missional church conversation. Am I the only one who has noticed that it’s been 2 years since the Gospel and Our Culture Network has posted an update on their website. For all the talk of missional churches, hasn’t that conversation also gotten stuck in a similar bind.
And what about the church growth conversation and the signs and wonders conversation and most other recent expressions of renewal in North America.
I seems that all these movements have ended up captive to modern sensibilities that focus on getting the “idea” of church right, so that we can then try to conform our reality to these ideas. The passion of the practitioners that launches the conversation is inevitably taken over by the experts who distill the conversation down to principles and essences — and maybe they then complain that practitioners haven’t done a good job of inhabiting the high-minded ideals.
This is one of the reasons I have hope for the mainline church (I’m Presbyterian), because the concrete presence of our churches in neighborhoods mitigates against romantic ideals of church life.
While I agree that EC is a conversation without an end, its also a conversation without sufficient End in view. Fuzzy focus begins when movements lose their focus on Jesus Christ and begin talking in a way that substitutes something humanly derived, something we put together for ourselves, something we are doing, for the End, who is Jesus Christ himself. He brings the End to us, not the other way round.
Chris Smith, you and I think are in agreement. I am suggesting in the post and this prologue that it is a.) the philosophical/theological assumptions of emerging that lead to never ending conversations, and b.) insufficient practices that ground a politic i.e. ecclesiology. Your comments help to focus more on this two lacks of emerging that I think come out in the book I am reviewing.
CG,
Sorry I had to moderate two of your comments because there was an unsubstantiated claim (at least I couldn’t find a link to substantiate it) towards an individual in the emerging church movement? E-mail me if you think I got it wrong.
DF (from France so give me a day or two to get back to you)
No worries! I’m not certain which claim, though – I thought I linked to everything in the 2nd post, but it’s of course possible that I goofed somewhere.
It’s certainly not my intent to make spurious claims – there’s no sense inventing imagined concerns when there are so many real concerns to deal with!
good discussion.
I started reading Corcoran’s book a couple of months ago. I suppose I am a ‘practitioner’ who feels a little lost in the forest. I like the EC emphasis on love and tolerance, and I appreciate the missional movement, but from where I stand, I cannot see anyone making much headway in forming communities of faith among secular young people. These theological ‘conversations’ often seem very much like the dog chasing his tail. I’m concentrating on living out an authentic life of faith among the normal (read ‘unchurched, and religiously pluralistic’) people around me who are my friends and neighbors. I’ll try to let Jesus worry about the church. He did say that he would build it, and I admit I don’t have a clue …
Joseph
Part of the dominant world-view is to focus on the institutional structure of things: who is the leader, what is his/their/our creed, and what is the mission. The EC has, from the beginning (for the Anglican side of things) begun in practice and worship (beginning in England in the early 1980s). But that institutional obsession messes with our ability to see what is really being talked about–the only trans-denominational movement that has obvious origins in both the mainline and evangelic church groups that is still bringing an ecumanism that we haven’t seen in (my) lifetime.
This ecumenical spirit is the key to seeing the fruits that are currently growing within many different institutional structures. In the Episcopal Church, we have a few outposts in this world, but my hope is for that to grow. All of these groups, most notably Church of the Apostles in Seattle aren’t talkers, but doers.
I think some conversations will be “never-ending” because of the deep complexities to certain subjects as well as the diversity of perspectives in communities. I think this is to be expected especially after modernity.
I’ve deeply appreciated the “conversation” that has developed from the emerging movement. Is all conversation intended to be driven to a “solution” or resolution? I think part of the point at least some level of conversation in community is relationship, growing and nurturing relationships as the conversation deepens, as the need for deep listening sets in while the diversity of perspectives unfolds. We’re not going to be have a deep missional impact on the ground if we can’t learn to nurture conversations of deep significance and difference in our communities.
I’m with Len “open conversation” and imagination.
I’m beginning to wonder if this is the sole task of the Emergent Church movement… simply to facilitate ongoing discussion and growth amongst the Evangelical Church. I’ve witnessed at least two non-Emergent Church organizations/churches adopt some of the principles of what the Emergent Church have been discussing and actually implement them. Perhaps it’s time for the Emergent Church to spend some time in self-reflection to determine who they really are and what they’re really about. Instead of calling themselves a “church” or “church movement” maybe they are simply a think tank; because this is all I’m really seeing. Not to discount this, but to call it what it really is.
Watchman,
I think you are basically correct. Most recent movements have primarily facilitated an ongoing discussion and growth amongst the mainline church. EC and the current missional movement are doing the same.
Actually, I think both Dan and Chris have hit the mark: a deep exploratory conversation was inevitable given that evangelicalism has lacked an ecclesiology. Our task in that space was first to locate ourselves again, and then to locate the church. But given the complexities, and our culture and discontinuous change guarantee endless complexity, the conversation has to continue. Also liked the insight that this is not merely a theological task, but a relational one. When we first hit the end of the marked trail and found the new forest there is a certain anxiety. We look for others to continue the journey forward even as we try to locate the path.
The Emerging Church is on a wild goose chase into a new postmodern form of progressive/liberalism: http://tiny.cc/hqh1s
Progressive liberalism versus what? Stagnate conservatism? Do we really have to choose sides?
Pretty much.
Some great thoughts here, both the original post and the ensuing comments. EC adherents can certainly be prone toward conversations that don’t actually produce anything new (church folk, if not all human organizations, are often guilty). In that sense, “never ending conversation” is a sign of immaturity or foolishness. At the same time, critique of said movement leans toward never ending as well. That’s not an indictment of anything that’s been said here, simply an overall observation.
One of the unfortunate consequences is that the phrase “emerging church”, a seemingly helpful label, has probably been lost for future use. Emerging Church (EC), Emergent, and the emerging church, are not synonymous, though there’s obviously a good deal of overlap.
Any particular slice of the Church in history can’t be in a perpetual state of emergence. Perhaps the EC is entering a post-emerging phase, therefore freeing up the terminology for the next identifiable emerging church, which is probably not Western, let alone American.
For anyone interested, I wrote my own blog piece, “Disputable Matters and Never-Ending Conversation.” http://tinyurl.com/3rdozfl
In certain aspects, yes. For example, my LGBTQ friends are pretty frustrated that not a lot is being done to promote full inclusiveness. And they’re right.
The never ending conversation about a never ending conversation.
I tend to agree with Bill K. at the amazement that the American expression of the emerging church is still a blog conversation topic.
David,
I have been pondering you posts on this for a week or so. Actually I don’t disagree. I would say that any theological interest group has a similar struggle. It seems that for a school of thought/theology to reach a wider audience conversation has to be the primary focus. I think this is related to your second critique, that of a lack of practices. I have found myself wondering if the practices of any theological movement are down played by necessity. Aren’t the practices of a community what make it unique or particular? I argue that in many ecumenically oriented circles, practices insert a rich diversity but also make common ground more difficult to find. I wonder if the creative and particular expressions of any school, such as the Emmerging movement, remains with the local leadership both pastoral and lay.
Josh
[...] funktioniert und erst viel später weiß, was an Stelle des Alten nun entsteht. David Fitch hat das in diesem Blogpost unter anderem als Problem benannt. Vielleicht hat das aber damit zu tun, dass etliche der [...]