An ecclesiological assement of the emerging church
I haven’t has a chance to read it yet (still suffering from a neck injury that means I am drugged on valium and other wonderful stuff) but if you are interested check out John Hammett’s “An Ecclesiological Assessment of the Emerging Church”
Let me know what you think.
June 4th, 2007 at 12:48 pm
I think the author is pretty brave, because he has just done the argument equivalent of nailing a handful of jelly to the wall. How can you critique something that is largely undefined? Both the emergent church and post-modernism deny that there is any central definition or voice which speaks for them. So anything you argue against, your opponent can say “well that is an extreme case, and not representative”
June 25th, 2007 at 12:48 pm
From Mark Berry comes this link to a very funny article about the emerging church promoting drug use! Tongue in cheek of course - or is spliff between lips? who knows but funny anyway
June 28th, 2007 at 10:07 pm
McClaren and Chalke are a pretty limited pool of reference… what about the Aussie EC writers… Hirschy and Frost?
“McCLaren is disturbingly vague…. about the ultimate fate of those in other religions”
As is the bible? (Can’t remember any verses about all Muslims going to hell, for example… I believe we are only put right with God through the death of Jesus, but doesn’t God also judge the hidden thoughts?….)
Ooops… that was a dangerously post modern sentiment.
June 28th, 2007 at 10:27 pm
By the way… to summarise, he basically says the emerging church is a response to postmodernism, and postmodernism may be on the way out anyway, and there are plenty of people still who are more “modern” than postmodern in mindset anyway, and some more traditional churches are successful in reaching youth (teenagers… didn’t really mention young adults) and the EC ought to be careful to critique postmodernity and beware of becoming another “consumer” church culture like the megachurches it criticises…. (the latter is a fair warning).
June 29th, 2007 at 3:23 pm
If the emerging church is a response to post-modernism, then I believe they should define what they are responding to. It seems to me that people have very different ideas of what post-modernism is, but they continue in discussion as if it is not important what they are referring to.
For example NT Wright on ABC radios “Encounter” program on the weekend said :
“By modernism I mean that philosophical and cultural entity which came to birth more or less in the Western world in the 18th century particularly with the great dream of progress” Post-modernism he defined as reaction to that - with 9/11 being the defining moment. Pretty black and white - Modernism being dictatorial, colonial etc. and post-modernism being skeptical and critical of that.
But most sources I’ve read and certainly the Wikipedia entry on Modernism define it as starting from around the late 19th century and it was already a reaction to the confidence in “Progress” during the Victoria era.
It seems to me that when NT Wright is arguing for “Post-Modernism” he is really arguing for “Modernism” in the common language - a battle that was fought (and largely won in the Churches) 100 years ago.
So what really do we mean by post-modernism? Does anyone care? Well I do. I didnt study Arts so I didnt have any courses on it, but I did study Maths and Science. In those disciplines it was of utmost importance to define your terms precisely, firstly so as to communicate with other people effectively, but also to ensure that you were not being intellectually sloppy.
But in post-modernism it seems there is a suspicion of definitions, and a move away from apologetics. Brian Mclaren in a letter to Chuck Colson wrote :
“Many of the people who think they understand postmodernism and write or speak about it lack the time, energy, or historical and philosophical understanding to begin to understand what they don’t understand about it, so it’s fruitless to even try to dialogue with them. It’s better just to let things slide.”
This might be the post-modern mode of operation, but to my ears it seems to quite a dangerous way of working. It seems similar to the early Pentecostal churches lack of engagement with other Christians due to them not being filled with the Spirit. Maybe I just dont get it.
June 29th, 2007 at 8:43 pm
The “emerging church” is highly diverse too… I think however (at its best) it is a response to the fact that the institutional church has experienced a period of decline in the Western world… a recognition there were whole subcultures who were not connecting well with the traditional church… hence an attempt to apply missiology (as applied to cross cultural overseas mission) to Western contexts.
So it’s more a response to a missional challenge than a simple response to “postmodernism”… although a missional response in the West will engage with groups whose mindset is more postmodern than modern.
That’s my criticism of the article really…. I feel like he’s critiquing the EC based on a smallish sample of authors and blogs… then deciding the EC IS a response to postmodernism… and critiquing that… in my opinion the whole picture of the EC broader than this.
July 2nd, 2007 at 12:15 pm
Janet, I think the author anticipated these criticisms.
In page 2:
“.. the movement is so diverse as to open anyone who speaks of it as a whole to the charge of misrepresentation.”
We have to get beyond this point. These people are leaders so the argument that “we dont even agree with each other so you cant argue with us” is a bit of a cop-out.
In page 3 he argues the bit about post-modernism being the common element.
It seems to me to be very pomo to endlessly dispute the premises of arguments so as not to engage in them.
July 2nd, 2007 at 12:32 pm
warren…I dunno…I understand what you mean in part, but you’re talking about an academic exercise.
Postmodernism is a cultural shift, and “cultures” are notoriously difficult to define (heck, what we mean when we say “culture” is notoriously difficult to define!) I don’t think postmodernism has been defined with any more or less specificity than modernism has been, and that’s the very nature of trying to define “culture”.
July 2nd, 2007 at 2:43 pm
By academic, bec do you mean fruitless or irrelevant?
To me its not just for the academics. When I read in the Emergent manifesto that someone is a trusted interpreter of Post-modern culture, how do I take that. Do I just trust her, like some priest of an unknown god?
When someone else says they want to do a reverse-conversion, converting Christianity to post-modern culture, what is this likely to mean in practice?
All these things are meaningless unless one has some general agreement on the terms and ideas in use. And ideas are important - they should be out there in the open.
For instance it could be argued that some pentes have reverse-converted Christianity to consumerist culture, and this is debated and analysed in this forum. I’m not against adapting to the culture, but the devil as always is in the detail.
July 2nd, 2007 at 2:52 pm
Nope, I don’t mean that…I am, after all, probably what you’d call “an academic” myself.
I don’t blindly trust anyone. I listen to/read what they have to say, and evaluate it for myself - this will often involve reading as widely as possible and educating myself.
I don’t believe in “converting” Christianity to anything. The Good News is for all times and all places. We do, however, need to use different vocabularies and methodologies in different contexts. The way I talk about God in Vanuatu is different to the way I talk about God when I’m hanging out with people who live on the streets of inner Melbourne, and it’s different again to the way I talk about God when I’m hanging out with my friends who’ve got PhDs in biochemistry and are into Wicca. I’m not compromising Christianity, or “converting” it - I’m just acknowledging that different people and cultures have different ways of communicating. I think that some parts of the Australian church have privileged consumerism over the Gospel, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t think that it’s possible to speak into a consumeris culture in ways that are culturally accessible and relevant.
There IS some “gneeral agreement” on what “postmodern” means…just because something can be debated, and there’s exceptions, doesn’t mean it’s beyond any kind of definition. Like I pointed out about, you’d be hard put to find a definition of “modernism” that captured everything that modernism and modernity means and can mean as well.
July 2nd, 2007 at 3:54 pm
So bec when you said it was an academic exercise, did you mean only able to be carried out by qualified academics?
July 2nd, 2007 at 4:34 pm
Not entirely…
If I were carrying out a research project, then sure, it would be really important to define what I meant, for methodological reasons aside from anything else. However in practice, there’s also a point at which one has to give up on the methodological debate and just *DO* something.
To give you an example…one can spend ages discussing what it means to be “poor”, “vulnerable”, “resilient” or “have capacities”, and these debates are really important because they influence thinking, methodologies, practice etc. However at the end of the day you sometimes just have to pick a definition and DO something…do you think the people of Banda Aceh in the aftermath of the tsunami cared whether the Red Cross is talking about “vulnerability” or “resilience” more? I don’t think so! The debate is important because it affects how we do our work, but these debates can also turn into a nice academic exercise, leading to paralysis, or being used as an excuse for doing nothing, if we don’t also just draw some lines and admit that this debate is going to go on forever and sometimes we just have to pick something and run with it.
July 2nd, 2007 at 4:38 pm
Sorry warren, I left out a line there…
What I was saying was that I am drawing a bit of a distinction between “academic”, or “bookish” exercises and “practical” “on the ground” exercises (and no I don’t think those approaches are mutually exclusive, in fact I think they need to inform each other…)
July 3rd, 2007 at 11:29 am
Well I dont go along all the way with this analogy. An international disaster is not the same as the current church culture (some might argue this point), and words like “poor” and “vulnerable” have been around for thousands of years and its well known what the meanings are.
I understand you were drawing on an extreme example in order to make the point, I guess its just a difference in viewpoint.
July 3rd, 2007 at 3:54 pm
warren,
I was not drawing on an “extreme” analogy, and I was not intending to compare an international disaster to the current church culture. I was drawing on the discipline that I work in.
Words like “poor” and “vulnerable” might have a commonly understood meaning, but that doesn’t mean that they are not debated within academia, and I have personally been a part of conversations that have gone on for DAYS about whether we should be talking about “vulnerability” or “resilience”. The point I was trying to make was that yes, terminology matters, and it can have a profound impact on the way that we do our work, but at some point we also just have to acknowledge that we need to just pick things we can work with, and that some academic debates might never be resolved.