(Ir)religiosity

I feel somewhat obligated to comment on the the latest “death of emergent” meme looping its way around the blogosphere. If you know what I’m talking about, you’re probably tried of hearing and talking about it — if you don’t, Tony has the most comprehensive link list I’ve seen. Just be sure you check out the post (and the comments) by Nick Fiedler that started it all, whether he wanted it too or not: “The Great Disappointment (A Post About Emergent). To be fair, Nick has further clarified his feeling in a later post, and perhaps best in a video chat with Zach Lind.

I’ve read/listened to all of these posts and commented on most of them, floating my thought on the whole thing. But after reading and commenting and re-reading and getting too upset and deleting comments I had typed up and ready to submit, I think I’m ready to publicly reflect.

I’ve expressed some of my own “disappointment” (as I originally called it) in some of my comments, but for different reasons. I said more than once and in a few different ways, that I’d like for the movement at large to move past a rejection of traditional Christianity and on to a different stage of the conversation. In other words, I’d like for us to get over the baggage that comes along with traditional evangelicalism and maybe even engage some fundamentalists from the other side of the spectrum who seem to think they have a monopoly on the prophetic voice.

Now I’m beginning to see that that’s not really disappointment at all. It’s my hope for the future of the conversation. That there is never any stasis in our dialogue and that we’re always pushing the envelope with a creative imagination.

And now you know where I stand.

I don’t think emergent is dead or dying; it is evolving.  It’s changing, re-forming and re-shaping itself.  In that respect maybe it might be best to say that  it is dead.  Emergent dies and is reborn all the time as it is guided by the dynamism of the Spirit.  It’s constantly rupturing it’s own forms.

I think the disappointment of some may be rooted in one of two ideas: 1) that at some point we would completely emerge from something and completely re-shape the face of the American church or 2) that we would completely emerge from something and become a radically subversive fringe group whose sole role was to critique the institutional church. Neither of those really happened in the way that some of us wanted.

Instead we surprised ourselves.

We thought we would fully and completely emerge and we didn’t. Instead, we’re discovering — perhaps painfully — that we are, in a word, still emerging. And in my view we always will. I plan to be doing so until I draw my last breath. I believe that to be the nature of things.

I think it might be safe to say that we did peak as far as publicity and national (global?) attention goes. And I think that’s fine. Peaking doesn’t mean dying. Here I find the image of a tidal wave to be particularly helpful. A wave picks up speed and gains a lot of momentum and at just the right time when both it’s speed and momentum reach their apex the wave itself peaks. But the wave is hardly over because its real power is not fully realized. That happens much later. After the peak, the wave begins to dissipate and its waters spread to reek havoc on every crease and crevice possible. The wave becomes much more dynamic as it becomes decentralized and it’s fingers probe virtually every inch of the surface area it consumes.

I think thats what is happening with emergent. We’ve passed that peak and now we are dispersing, infecting all sorts of contexts and locales. We’re still connected, to be sure, through a hub (EV), but we’re flattening out and our fingers are reaching much further as a result. I think that makes us stronger and more effective.

Sure the popularization dilutes the subversive quality at times and of course there will be inherent tension between the those operating on the margins and those opting for various positions between the margins and the center — but I think those are risks we have to be willing to take. Because if we are really honest with ourselves we understand that we need both. We need the tension. And we need the two to sharpen one another, because ultimately we’re all on the same team.

I believe we live in some really exciting times, a turning point in history. And I stand with Phyllis Tickle in her belief that we are the cusp of a period of radical evolution in the church in which we seriously rethink and re-appropriate our theology. Emergent is only one part of a larger movement at work, a movement that will turn out to be, I think, much more robust and much more substantial than we realize. But all of this will happen slow. When you’re riding the peak of a wave it is easy to think it will reach the furthest depths in an instant, but it takes time for the dissipation to really seep into the fabric of its surface area, completely soaking and permeating it.  Guys, we are soaking right now. But someday, maybe it will be soon, or maybe it will only be seen by future generations, someday the crust is really gonna break loose. And that will be awesome.  But it will only happen if there is no stasis, it will only happen if we keep moving and keep evolving, embracing our own constructive tension  It will only happen if we use the right suffix.

Until that day, I take hope in knowing that we stand together not as the emerg-ed, but the emerg-ing.