i think emergent was domesticated awhile ago by the mainline churches, or at least by their theology. it leaves some of us who no longer consider ourselves evangelical without a community to call home as we don’t fit in the emergent crowd anymore. what ever happened to being postmodern? conservative and liberal are such tired clichés however they are repackaged and renamed.
i should probably clarify that i think the emergents domesticated themselves by aligning with liberal theology. i don't think the mainliners searched them out to tame them. personally, i'm kind of over it all and yes i feel a bit cranky about how it's all turned out. i'm still postmodern, and postcharismatic, and that leaves me without much community to speak of. i think i'll just go back to being simply a christian, or christ follower, where "christian" is too loaded a term.
what about you? do you feel like you have a stream to swim in these days within the church? or do you also feel a bit adrift?
3 comments:
I feel a bit adrift at the moment as I feel my community is shifting into something with which I am no longer comfortable. However, I know this is a temporary thing. As I begin the long road back to church planting the journey is filled with a lot of new people to meet and communities to greet. It's going to be a fun journey.
I like Mike and Julie Clawson quite a bit, so while I don't know that I'm part of the reified Conversation, I do think that some folks carrying forward with it are good folks.
I'm once again reminded, as I try to keep up with the Joneses (couldn't resist the pun), that Emergent, though its talking heads (I initially wrote big heads, but I'm no Freudian) have influence at the small Christian colleges where I've conducted much of my intellectual life, operates in categories that don't really make much sense of my own experiences with ecumenical Christian teaching faculties at such schools or in big universities. I don't have much experience with the big-shot divinity schools that many of them have in their backgrounds, and my hunch is that much of the direction that the "biggies" have taken in the last several years has to do with movements in those places more than many folks realize.
As I wrote recently over at HLW, I still think of myself as a friend of small-e emergent and small-e evangelicalism, and as long as I keep learning things from both "camps" (and I still do), I don't see much of a reason to declare the death of either.
More and more, although I disagree with him strongly more often than I find myself in his camp, I appreciate the general approach of Michael Spencer (aka the Internet Monk) and folks like him. Perhaps it's because we're both teachers, but I really dig that he's simultaneously unafraid to articulate intelligible and arguable positions and unashamed to name as friends people who disagree with those positions in word and deed. I'm not sure whether he counts as "emergent" or not (he calls himself "post-evangelical"), but if I had to point somewhere hopeful, I'd point towards Kentucky.
An Obituary for the Emerging Church, satire at Cheaper than Therapy: http://djword.blogspot.com/2010/01/obituary-for-emerging-church.html
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