Tikkun Magazine, May/June 2008

RETHINKING RELIGION

The Emergent Church

Christianity in America is Changing 

by Tony Jones

In late February, The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life released the groundbreaking results of a massive survey of religiosity in America. Asked to sum it up in a word, Pew Forum research fellow Gregory Smith told the USA Today, "Churn. Churn. Churn. The biggest news here is change." In other words, Christians have less and less allegiance to their denominations every year. When asked, people no longer affiliate themselves strongly as "Presbyterian" or "Methodist." Instead, they choose their congregations based on myriad factors, like the children's ministry or the worship music. Like most other things in the free market economy that is America, people have lots of choices, and they're happy to oblige the market by taking advantage of those choices.

Into this landscape of flux has risen the "emergent church movement," a conversation among younger Christian leaders who are reconsidering both the practices and the beliefs of Protestant Christianity. In my new book, The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier (Jossey-Bass, 2008), I do my best to articulate the characteristics of this nascent movement.

Emergent Christianity is hard to pin down because it's fluid, and because it has not developed along the bureaucratic lines of denominationalism but within the open source structures of the Internet. There is no ideology, except maybe an ideology that gives no quarter to ideologies. In other words, you won't find a doctrinal statement of the emergent church, nor will you find a headquarters.

A decade ago, some evangelical leaders were looking for the next generation of mega-church pastors. They looked to men (yes, it was almost all men) ten or fifteen years their junior who could attract the missing GenXers to their suburban churches. But instead of being interested in making big churches bigger, the emergents were interested in a shifting theological conversation—what was alternatively called postmodernism or pluralism or globalization. Others called it the "rise of the cultural creative class" or the victory of the right-brainers.

New churches started to spring up in urban areas around the United States. Pews were pulled out and couches were moved in. An old Lutheran ideal, the "priesthood of all believers" is radically practiced, and the sacred duties of serving communion and preaching sermons were opened to everyone in the community. And, notably, justice has become a major concern among the emergents.

So here's the rub: the emergents practice their faith like liberals (they're activists), but they believe like evangelicals (they're biblically orthodox). Mainliners become uncomfortable at all of the Jesus talk around the emergent movement, and conservatives don't like the politics. And if both sides are frustrated, then the emergents are happy.

The problem with American religion, at least from an emergent perspective, is that both "sides" are so utterly predictable. We know just where the lefties and the righties will fall on the topic of Israel or abortion legislation or the inerrancy of the Bible. Those positions have been staked out and claimed by a generation of religious leaders. It's the new questions that animate the emergent movement, the questions of globalization and technology and church structure. To the Episcopal quandary about a gay bishop, an emergent will ask, "Why have bishops?" There's very little talk in emergent circles about TV preachers on the Right or the Jesus Seminar on the Left. These seem, quite honestly, to be arguments that are out of gas.

But there is one thing that stands out: emergents have what Christian theologians call a "hope-filled eschatology." That is, contrary to many American evangelicals, emergent Christians don't tend to think that the world is getting worse and worse until it gets so bad that Jesus has to come back. Instead, emergents think that God's Spirit is moving in the world, and our job as Christians is to cooperate with what God is up to. So you're less likely to hear emergents arguing about the hot topics of the day, and more likely to find them hard at work, trying to participate with God, so that it might be "on earth as it is in heaven."

Answers have been the order of the day in modern Christianity. But for emergents, it's the questions that count.

Tony Jones is the national coordinator of Emergent Village (www.emergentvillage.org) and the author of The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier. You can reach him at www.tonyj.net.

Jones, Tony. 2008. The Emergent Church: Christianity in America is Changing. Tikkun 23(3):10-11.