Absolutely Not!
A critical look at the emerging church movement
by Phil Johnson
2006 Shepherds' Conference
Grace Community Church, Sun Valley, CA
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 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, 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."
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