emerging church to crash and burn?

Where is the EC going? Is it going anywhere? Is it going in the right direction? Does anyone know? Does anyone care? I am close to the saturation point with the talk about the emerging church. It is all beginning to feel a bit trendy. It feels at the same time so wide open that it is becoming disconnected from anything that has come before in the Christian faith, (maybe that is intentional?) and limited to only those who say let’s trash everything and reinvent the wheel to fit our (predominately Anglo) liking.

 It seems to me that the conversation outside the core circle of those who head up emergent village is not amounting to much more than repeating the patterns of the modern church I hoped the emerging church would critique. A recent conversation on the EV forum over at the ooze left me wandering?  Is the EC just about having a place for church drop outs or is something bigger than that. It is just this simple as one person responded to the concern about the lack of people of color in the EC.

This is going to go against the pc code of diversity ethics, but I’m looking at this from a different angle. I don’t see Emergent being the Sacred Circle that invites people In. We’re not a popularity club.

Emergent is made up of people who have drifted away from all the other sacred circles. We became a demographic at some point, and when that happened, the sacred circles were asked to come to terms with that. It is the sacred circles that are presently having the hard time letting us bring what we really want to bring back inside. It seems to me that African American Churches are very satisfied with their identities and their sacred circles, and I have not been made aware of any exodus from them that looks like Emergent.

Instead of looking at the White spiritual exodus and saying, "Hey, whatta ’bout us?!" why not look at their own situation and ask, "What is emerging out of our own Sacred Circles?" and then just showing up at a gathering and report on it.

So should we all now go and find/create our own little sacred circles and do that, because there is nothing that really connects us anyway? The one thing I thought the Emerging church had going for it was drawing all kinds people together to live into the great narrative of life and faith in God. Now that seems to relegated to the sweet by and by, as some gather in their sacred circles to celebrate being dropouts. I believe that’s the kind of stuff that is raising eyebrows all other the church at large. It looks more like a home base for trendy reactionaries rather than this;

Emergent is a growing generative friendship among missional Christian leaders seeking to love our world in the Spirit of Jesus Christ

Maybe I need to hear Jason Clark when he says that Emergent and the emerging church are not the same thing.

Maybe we should all read Paigett on unraveling emergent  in RELEVANT MAGAZINE as a starting point.

Maybe as Kester brewin suggests in The Complex Christ we need to realize that the emerging church different from the Emergent church

We need to distinguish carefully between talk of the emerging church and the emergent church…. My problem with the many of these merging Church projects is they are still attempting to bring the church up to date by "train spotting" some aspect of culture and and making church fit it… in the emergent church the emphasis will be on being the train rather than train spotting; rather than trying to import culture into church and make it cool, we need to become wombs of the divine and completely rebirth the church into a host culture.

Maybe we can’t know anything about the emerging church because it really isn’t anything. Maybe the best thing to do is just live out the values  as God moves is our hearts and somewhere down the road it will all make sense.

Here is what others are saying:

Jerry Jue (professor at Westminster Seminary asks what’s emerging in the church? In article for Reformation 21 magazine he writes.

What McLaren and other Emergent leaders and scholars have failed to do is carefully examine the historical sources as well as the writings of other historians who have contested the neo-orthodox historiography

Is it going to do  a crash and burn as Ron Gleason at challies.com suggests: 

It’s my settled opinion that the ECM will eventually crash and burn. I’m saddened, however, by the spiritual destruction that will left in the wake of the ECM juggernaut. Not only will we be left with the biblical ignorance caused by decades of catering to the whims of unchurched people from the Baby Boomers, but now we’ll also have to contend with the Gen-Xers who are equally bereft of any serious biblical knowledge.

So where is the emerging church going? it your turn to sound off

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