The Emergent matrix: a new kind of church?

LAST SPRING the Nashville Convention Center played host to both the National Pastors Convention and the Emergent Convention. While the former was largely geared toward evangelical baby boomers, the latter catered to Gen X and Millennial evangelicals (and "postevangelicals") who are trying to come to grips with postmodernity. Though the two conventions intentionally overlapped, that proximity suggests a closer kinship than may actually exist. Indeed, the professed goal of many in the "Emerging Church" is to embody an alternative to the model of the Willow Creek, seeker-driven church that blankets the contemporary evangelical landscape like kudzu on a southern hillside.

At first glance the differences between the two conventions seemed to be primarily stylistic: the Emergent music was hipper, the videos faster, the clothes trendier, the technology more sophisticated. But for many of the Emergent leaders, the convention's flashiness did more to confuse than to clarify the nature of the emerging church.

"For the most part, the general sessions just look like an extension of the mega-church movement and the 'rah-rah' youth movement--feelings and loudness," complained Robert Webber, one of the main speakers--as if "the louder you can be, the more direct relationship you have with God." Adds Webber, professor of ministry at Northern Baptist Seminary: "There's nothing here in file public face that lifts you theologically or lifts you into liturgy or anything that has historic connection or depth or substance."

Webber's critique gets to the heart of a major question for the "emerging church": as younger generations of evangelicals find themselves dissatisfied with the dominant expressions of "contemporary" church, will they simply engage in a change of style, seeking relevance for a new generation, or will they engage in a change of substance, including a more radical rethinking of the evangelical project?

Brian McLaren, one of the most important figures in the Emergent conversation, would be the first to agree that a change of style alone would miss the mark. To make evangelical revivalism hipper or louder, he says, does not change the fact that it is still just "emotional manipulation." Neither rap music nor video loops will provide the needed change, since, as he emphasizes, "the real core of this thing is theological."

"This thing" to which he refers began in the 1990s when a group of young evangelical leaders initiated a conversation (they still prefer to call it a "conversation" rather than a "movement") about renewing the church for mission in a postmodern world. The dialogue grew out of a sense of both crisis and opportunity.

For evangelicals, the crisis involved their tradition's theological rigidity, superficial worship and ingrown subculture, and the inability of the boomer-driven megachurches to capture the imaginations of Gen-Xers and Millennials.

At the same time, the mainline churches were facing their own crisis involving declining membership (especially among younger generations), clergy shortages, and deep polarization over issues such as human sexuality. The very churches that had sought to be relevant to the modern world (each in its own way) had become irrelevant to and ill-equipped for the postmodern world.

Overshadowing the sense of crisis, how ever, has been a contagious sense of opportunity--a belief that the time is right for churches to reshape themselves as thoroughly missional communities. Doing this will require moving beyond the sterile polarities that have defined the church in the modern era: liberal vs. conservative, traditional vs. contemporary, reason vs. experience, faith vs. science, megachurch vs. maintenance church.

The 15 people who make up the Emergent Coordinating Group may constitute the organizational heart of the movement, but the Emergent conversation itself happens primarily at the grassroots level through Web sites, Web logs (or "blogs"), regional cohorts and conferences. The conversation is amorphous by design, since the goal is to cast the net of renewal as widely a possible.

More than 1,400 people met for the Emergent Conventions in San Diego and Nashville this past spring. The list of main speakers reflected the growing theological diversity of the conversation: writer and poet Kathleen Norris, social activist Jim Wallis, Episcopal writer Phyllis Tickle, postmodern (and Roman Catholic) philosopher John Caputo--hardly the "usual suspects" at an evangelical conference. And though the majority of the participants were from conservative denominations, Vineyard churches or nondenonminational churches, there was no shortage of representation from the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and the Episcopal Church.

"We realized very early on that we weren't going to find the intellectual resources we needed in the evangelical world, so we were either going to have to create them or borrow them," notes McLaren. "And it turned out that a lot of us were reading the same people, who would be more respected in the mainline world, such as Walter Brueggemann, Jurgen Moltmann and Stanley Hauerwas. What happened is we started to identify ourselves as postconservative and then we found out that there was almost a parallel movement going on in the postliberal world. And the affinities that we had were very, very strong."