Emergent Church
The term emergent churchrefers to a new movement among evangelical Christians that builds on a deep engagement with postmodern culture through appreciation of key components in a postmodern outlook. The emergent church is usually identified with Brian McLaren, author of A Generous Orthodoxy and identified as one of the top twenty-five leading evangelicals by Time magazine. Other emergent church leaders include Leonard Sweet, Robert Webber, Sally Morgenthaler, and Thomas Hohstadt. The movement receives its best intellectual support from Dallas Willard and the late Stan Grenz.
Robert Webber has pictured the emergent movement as a third alternative to traditional evangelicals and pragmatic evangelicals. The former term refers to an older evangelical paradigm that places emphasis on apologetics and sound doctrine. By pragmatic,Webber means the seeker-sensitive paradigm, connected most famously with Bill Hybels and Rick Warren. Emergent leaders believe that the older models of evangelical Christianity fail either because of an outdated epistemology or because of a capitulation to a consumer view of religion.
The emergent church movement embraces paradox and balances competing realities. Leonard Sweet states that our faith is ancient. Our faith is future. Were old-fashioned. Were new-fangled. Were orthodox. Were innovators. Were postmodern Christians.McLaren writes that he can be viewed as Missional, evangelical, Post/Protestant, Liberal/Conservative, Mystical/Poetic, Biblical, Charismatic/Contemplative, fundamentalist/Calvinist, Anabaptist/Anglican, Methodist, catholic, Green, Incarnational, Depressed-Yet-Hopeful, Emergent, Unfinished.
Both Charles Colson and D. A. Carson have criticized the emergent church for being too sympathetic to postmodernism and too open to relativism. These concerns are worth keeping in mind but must not be overstated. The emergent church is far more concerned to address postmodernism and relativism than to embrace either or both uncritically. Robert Webber has noted, A postmodern setting demands relationship, participation, community, symbol, servanthood and the like. The radical renorming of biblical priorities coupled with an absolute rejection of slick marketing, showy worship and phony verbal games precede the birth of an honest, genuine, authentic community passionately engaged with being the truth.
The emergent church places a great deal of emphasis upon worship in community. This arises out of an emphasis upon the relational and subjective element in Christian faith. McLaren and other emergent leaders are critical of the seeker-sensitive movement because of its alleged preoccupation with entertainment. Sally Morgenthaler argues, The new worship paradigm contends that unbelievers can respond positively to a worship that has been made culturally accessible to them; it also proposes that unbelievers come to church, not primarily to investigate the claims of Christ,but to investigate the Christ in us.
R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, gave this indictment of McLaren: Embracing the worldview of the postmodern age, he embraces relativism at the cost of clarity in matters of truth and intends to redefine Christianity for this new age, largely in terms of an eccentric mixture of elements he would take from virtually every theological position and variant.This is far too harsh and distorts McLaren. However, McLaren should be more aware of the epistemological complexities involved in his critique of traditional evangelicalism. He and other emergent leaders should also correct an implicit elitism that shows itself in the rhetoric in emergent church discourse. Of course, traditional evangelicalism has an explicit elitism that emergent leaders properly critique
