Emergent Church

On Shelfari there is an Emergent Church discussion group. The person who started the group asked participants, of which I am one, to introduce themselves and say what they liked about the EC movement, which books linked to the movement that they liked, and what any possible dangers they saw connected with the movement. I spent a heck of a lot of time on my response, and so I repost it here.

I live in Saudi Arabia as an English teacher at a college. I consider myself deeply Christian but felt the need to come experience the Muslim world first hand. So I went "straight into the beast" as one friend said. I am a very committed Episcopalian, but now do the daily office (the prayer and sacred reading cycle) in conjunction with the Muslim prayer times. I regularly enter dialog with Muslim clerics and am planning on pod casting some of my recordings. I believe there is something "emergent" about what I am doing, but who really cares about a label that will probably have disappeared in a few decades?

I was very much influenced by the Catholic Worker movement and the call for Social Justice and what is known as personalism in that movement, all of which strikes me as very much in line with the EC movement. I have also read Shane Claibourne's books. I also have been reading Ebo Patel's Acts of Faith, which is spectacular, as is what he is doing. I wish I could get my hands on books by McLaren, Stanley Haurwaus or Doug Pagitt and Tony Jones. But it's not easy in Saudi Arabia to find Christian books.

What really gets me excited about what I see in connection with EC movement, and keep in mind that I am a bit out of the loop because of where I live, is two things. One is a movement away from what we see with Evangelicals that the only historical Christianity worthy of our attention is what happened in the first century (or our image of what happened there) and the century in which Luther and Calvin lived. The deeply spiritual medieval period, not just in the Roman Catholic sense but also the Greek, Syrian and Coptic Orthodox churches, which are still alive and thriving today, have something, a lot actually, to teach us folks. Second, and following from the first, is an embrace, because of post modern relativistic (and that can be a good word) epistemology. A Christianity that cannot admit we have very very valuable things in common with Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims is simply not a Christianity that I want any part of. I think I see some thawing of the ice here. This might not be because of the EC movement, but I think the EC movement is feeding off of these currents and is offering a way to find new avenues for more and better interfaith dialog

Dangers stemming from the EC idea? As has said before, we cannot gain the world only to lose our own souls. Interfaith dialog and an embrace of relativistic epistemologies require a spiritual maturity and self awareness that can be very dangerous without knowing who we are first before we attempt to embrace the world. I could make some suggestions, but that might take about nine more paragraphs.

But let me just say that to anyone who has spent time in academia, and especially in the Humanities and social sciences, you will know that the ways of talking and thinking that have come out of Postmodernism and Cultural History have become so prevalent that you can hardly escape them, or in my case and many others', even think without them. In the late 19th century when Hegel was all the rage, every Christian theologian worth his salt had to come up with a version of reality that dealt with Hegel. Hegel, and a few other thinkers, were so prevalent that Christians could hardly think without them anymore. But those days have passed, for the most part. I imagine the same thing will happen with EC. That is not to say this isn't an important part, a crucial part, of the evolution of our faith.

Pax/salam