EmergentVillage

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How I would characterize the Emergents

Plenty of fine books written by young emergent Christians have explained their perspectives. These books don’t get read much by their detractors, especially the ones just passing along what they heard someone else say. In fact, most Christians I know who are bad-mouthing the emergents have never read any book by an emergent author, and are simply passing along information they’ve gleaned from websites or books antagonistic to the movement. This even includes pastor friends of mine!

When I wrote about the ‘Mesa’ group’s ten commitments, someone asked if I’d say it was just the New Age movement re-packaged? (Part of my response was: “Mesa, as far as I know, are practicing Christians and understand their entire reason to exist as Gospel-driven and Kingdom-purposed. God’s will being done on earth, loving enemies, serving the poor, justice, care in how Scripture is used, churches, Christlike people, the common good, racial harmony, being good stewards of Creation, peacemaking and our relationship with God – all sound like Bible to me!”)

But the question got me thinking, how would I characterize the Emergents? Anytime you try to paint a picture of a large, diverse group, you step into a minefield of mis-characterization. However, I will simply do this:

I will describe the most common ‘type’ (using the word in the way ethnographers do) of Emergent Christian that I have personally known and talked to. So here it is:

Primarily young. Grew up in evangelical church. Believes Jesus is the Son of God and Savior of the world. Thinks the evangelical church sold out to upper middle class Republican values. Thinks the evangelical church confuses being Republican so badly with following Jesus that they can’t see the forest for the trees. Feels that the evangelical church functions largely as a religious grocery store servicing its members while ignoring the pressing needs of the world’s poor and injustices and needs a healthy dose of Matthew 25. Longs for a sense of Christian community they didn’t find in the church they grew up attending. Wants to follow Jesus and do the things he said to do in the Gospels. Isn’t nearly as taken with Paul’s theological explication of Jesus as they are with Jesus himself.  Thinks their parents’ churches are often long on doctrines about Jesus and short on actually following him in the sense of doing what he said. Wants to actually live among the poor and minister to them. Values all kinds of expressions of Christianity across the spectrum of denominations more than just settling into one.  Are often antagonistic toward 5 point Calvinism (though not all of them). Values community more than individuality. Yes, they are democrat. Yes, they are often politically liberal. Yes, like most of their generation, many of them see homosexuality as just how people are born. Their most over-powering goal in life is to live out the Gospel as Kingdom of God followers of Jesus.

These are the characteristics of most Emergent Christians I know.

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Orthopraxy over Orthodoxy

For those of you still trying to sort out the “Emergent Church” or “Postmodern Christians,” here’s a piece I wrote a couple years ago:

        A nearly universal commonality “Emergent/postmodern” congregations share is that the Gospel is more lived by the life than believed in the head. Emergents believe that living the way of Jesus is better than having all kinds of accurate doctrines about him stuffed in your brain. They value the accurate living of a Jesus-formed life a greater good than accurate parsing of sectarian doctrine. Postmodern Christians feel that an over-emphasis on doctrine (and proving my church is right – not yours) took up too much of the modern’s church’s time in the twentieth century – at the cost of teaching people to actually live out the way of Jesus.

 “…believing that healthy theology cannot be separated from healthy spirituality” is a characteristic thought from EmergentVillage’s website.

Perhaps Dean Blevins sums this up well:

“Modern churches embrace a set of propositional statements (e.g., articles of faith, a confession, or a creed) that serves as the main gateway into the church. One must “believe” before “becoming” and “behaving” as a Christian.  Emerging churches seem more interested in Christian community and daily living as the beginning point. These churches do not oppose theological or biblical guidance. Often these churches openly discuss core Christian convictions… and engage in open theological reflection. However, established doctrines do not define them as much as Christian living does. ….Emerging church practice seems to model the message, ‘Religion is not what you say you are, but how you live your life.’  “ (Dean Blevins, Postmodern and Wesleyan,103).

In A Generous Orthodoxy, Brian McLaren contends that orthopraxy is the POINT of orthodoxy. (Brian McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy, 31)

This might be a good place to draw attention to a distinct emphasis in postmodern, emerging Christianity: an emphasis on the teachings of Jesus rather than doctrines about Jesus. Modern Christianity, born in the fires and debates of the Protestant Reformation and the scientific revolution, focused a lot of energy in getting the right answers nailed down, science style, to every doctrinal issue they thought might pertain to individual salvation. In the modern framework, since everything is built in a logical framework like a scientific experiment, you have to get all the doctrines correct or the whole contraption starts leaning over, eventually falling down.

Postmoderns, leery of claiming to perfectly understand overly much, replace Correct Understanding with Correct Relationship as the key issue. This is blisteringly upsetting to some evangelicals, who demand a list of correct doctrines before they will admit you are among the saved.

Nevertheless, postmoderns do not believe a mistaken point of theology is going to keep people out of salvation. That is because they believe that it’s not the accurate answers on a theology exam that saves, it’s Jesus. Therefore you will find a strong emphasis on the living of the Christian faith, rather than whether you have all the right doctrinal points nailed down.

I’ve already stated that trying to argue your denomination’s historical theological distinctives to postmoderns  is most likely going to fall on deaf ears. They’d rather serve in a soup kitchen or talk with their heroine-addicted neighbor than sit and argue with another Christian. They wonder: If you believe all the ‘right things’ (according to your church, of course) but aren’t doing anyone any good, aren’t you missing the point?

Postmodern/emerging/Emergent Christians also wonder: can a community so focus on maintaining its orthodoxy that it stops reflecting the character of God? Can love, justice, mercy and humility get left behind somewhere in the iron-grip of maintaining a theological grip on something? This seems to be just what the Pharisees did.