P Johnson continued.... "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."
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 on line.
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."
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