Much Ado About Emerging

For the last couple of years I have been following the emerging (pun intended) saga of the Emerging Church movement and it's critics. Defining just what the Emerging Church movement is all about is easier said than done. In short, the Emerging churches are basically trying to reach young adults with a post-modern view of life. This requires defining post-modernism. That is even harder to do than defining the Emerging Church. I will define it (it would be a very un-postmodern thing to do to quibble with how I define the term) as the philosophy that there are no absolutes .

Now that we have highly disputable definitions of both the Emerging Church and Post-modernism, I will now chime in with an absolutist middle-of-the-road view of the Emerging Church. But first we must address the critics of the EC movement.

The easy answer for the critics is to say of all EC people:"Their all heretics! Where is the closest dungeon?". This seems to be the approach of John MacArthur in his latest book The Truth War (in fairness MacArthur is not an advocate of dungeons). MacArthur has done some good things in his time but I feel he paints too broadly a brush here.

Of course, we could just say "Their all cool! Can I get a picture with you guys?" Not so fast!! There are some truly disturbing writings by some of the EC people. Brian McClaren is one author I have great reservations about. McClaren is the kind of person an attorney would find troubling on a witness stand. He doesn't seem to answer direct questions and I feel some of his viewpoints in his book A Generous Orthodoxy are just a little too unorthodox for me to be generous towards. Not to mention the fact (this is sort of a side issue) that he feels I should feel great guilt about the Conqistadors conquering the Incas almost 500 years ago because they called themselves Christians and I call myself a Christian. Sorry, Brian, but those guys most likely were extremely unsaved and thus not really Christian.

Anyway, there is great division in the EC movement to the point that one EC leader, Marc Driscoll, has totally seperated himself from some of the other key figures in the movement over their embrace of liberal theological positions. A more balanced view of the EC movement can be found in a book by D.A. Carson whose title I can't remember right now (the words "emerging church" are in the title so you can probably google or amazon or yahoo it and find it easily).

But here's the main point. THE EMERGING CHURCH MOVEMENT IS SMALL, TRENDY, AND IS SO RESISTENT TO FINDING ANSWERS TO LIFE'S QUESTIONS (IT LIKES QUESTIONS SO MUCH THAT IT DOESN'T LIKE TO ANSWER THEM) THAT IT CANNOT LAST INDEFINITELY AND WILL THUS BE A THING OF THE PAST IN A FEW YEARS!!!!!!!!!!! People will eventually want to move beyond a vaccuum and in short, grow up in their faith.

I feel it won't be too long before you'll find The Truth War and A Generous Orthodoxy at a lot of garage sales. So don't get too stressed out.