“Faith is for sissies who daren’t go and look for themselves.”
- Alan Moore

I’ve been hearing this term on and off for a while now: the “Emerging Church” or the “Emergent Church.” A reader a while back sent me some links on it as well. But for whatever reason, I never actually started looking into it until just now. And I have to say, it’s actually really interesting.

Like with many things, my search began at Wikipedia, on their Emerging Church entry. Interestingly, the discussion started by diving into Modernism and Postmodernism, and their effects on religious thought. Though a very loose term, Wikipedia says that the Emerging Church generally follows a more postmodern approach:

This has led to a climate where many individual Christians are deconstructing each area of their Christian faith and analysing it piece by piece. Each individual experiences his or her own unique journey through this deconstruction process. One observed phenomenon is that many Christians subsequently start to reconstruct their Christianity thus finding a faith that, while basically Christian, is often distinct from the more established churches. One definition of the Emerging Church is that it is the collective noun for the individuals who are emerging from this process of deconstruction and reconstruction of Christianity, or those who have joined groups being led by such individuals.

From that alone, I’m already very intrigued by the whole thing. It sounds exactly like the process that occultists, New Agers, Wiccans, Neo-Pagans and others have been following for years. Maybe this means there will be more dialogue between these groups and Christians. Of course, the major issue will become the uniqueness of the Christ story. In either case, it seems like a GIGANTIC step forward from us-versus-them rigid reactionary fundamentalism. I only hope this movement gains ground against the Dominionists and Reconstructionists so we can take back our country and culture.

Speaking of reactionary though, one of the other central components of the Emerging Church seems to be to go back and look at the origins of Christianity, and try to get in touch with a more “vintage,” “primitive” or “authentic” sense of what being a Christian and a member of a Christian community was really all about back in the day. This seems like a good kind of reactionary though, because they are focusing on recapturing the “living experience” of the early church, rather than just simply reverting to an old-outdated system of rules and laws.

This is also closely related to what is called the “House Church” movement (also called the “simple church” or “organic church”). House churches tend to meet in people’s houses (obviously), often over a meal and prayer session. This is intended to duplicate the original structure of the Christian worshippers before the Church became a rigid hierarchical institution.

Oddly enough, this is exactly like a Catholic group that my parents are part of called the Charismatic Renewal. It arose in the 60’s and 70’s and focused on the gifts (charisms) of the Holy Spirit, and the renewal of the larger church through the formation of “small Christian communities.” Personally, the way I always understood the Charismatic movement was that it was the Catholic answer to being a hippie. “Cool” priests suddenly popped up who played guitar and people “got high” on Jesus instead of drugs. (Incidentally, this didn’t just happen in the Catholic church - also check out people like Arthur Blessit)

Wikipedia has a bunch of links and additional resources on the Emerging Church. One of the cooler aspects of all this is that much of this movement is happening online - with the conversation being carried on across blogs, wikis, and other types of social websites. Besides just being an interesting use of technology, it’s also cool because it demonstrates the non-hierarchical network-oriented nature of the Emerging Church movement. There doesn’t seem to be any centralized leadership, doctrine, or even definition of what a “church” needs to be.

Religion News Blog has some good reprinted news articles about some people involved in this movement.

1. Hip New Churches Pray to a Different Drummer
2. Reinventing church
3. New churches emerging as Gen X comes to terms with faith
4. Growing: Movement is new form of evangelism

Some of these groups seem “better” (in my eyes) than others. Many unfortunately just seem to be set up by bigger regular churches as traps to convince young people that “faith is cool” by referencing pop culture. But I think the joke will be on them though in the end. Whenever you tell somebody its okay to step outside the bounds of your institution, and invite them to think for themselves, engage God directly, and enter into discussion and questions, you’re going to see ossified institutions wither and die unless they can radically change.

In a lot of ways, there also seem to be a lot of parallels to gnostic Christianity among some segments of the Emerging Church. Especially in their insistence on the importance of questioning, the need to “find out for yourself” and the dismantling of hierarchical mediated approaches to the divine. Elaine Pagels talks about this a whole lot in her excellent book, the Gnostic Gospels. An excerpt from that:

The gnostics understand Christ’s message not as offering a set of answers, but as encouragement to engage in a process of searching: “seek and inquire about the ways you should go, since there is nothing else as good as this.” […]

But non-gnostic Christians “do not seek” … Those who merely believe the preaching they hear, without asking questions and who accept the worship set before them, not only remain ignorant of themselves, but “if they find someone else who asks about his salvation,” they act immediately to censor and silence him.

Even over the course of just a few months, I’ve seen gnostic ideas take a huge leap forward into mainstream culture. It seems only inevitable to me that it’s going to meet and significantly impact the Emerging Church movement - and vice versa. Gnostics are going to have to figure out (and more importantly articulate) just what it is that makes their tradition unique and valuable as a voice in the coming reorganization of Christian thought.

Not coincidentally, my Story-Systems website actually approaches this same topic from a different and slightly broader perspective. Shortly after I put it up, the introduction page was cross-posted by somebody into an Emerging Church forum/blog site. So there is obviously a big area of overlap. The main difference between my approach and theirs seems to be that I believe that almost any story-system can provide our lives with meaning - not just one that is centered around Christ. It’s more of a bhakti yoga approach, wherein the divine may be worshipped in any and all forms and that you should choose one which for you is most exciting and fills your heart with love and mystery.

One more awesome parallel I just found… There’s a book about the EC on Amazon, called “The Story We Find Ourselves” by Brian McLaren. In the summary of the book, one of the characters is quoted as saying:

“Sometimes, I think the Bible is more of a question book than answer book; it raises questions that bring people together for conversation about life’s most important issues”

This is exactly the same thing I’ve been saying on my Story-Systems site and elsewhere about the need to re-imagine religion as a “search engine technology” that trains us to ask questions. It’s also almost a word-for-word duplication of UFO research Jacques Vallee’s thoughts:

To me that’s why puzzles like UFOs are interesting. I don’t have a personal theory to “explain” them, but I see them as an opportunity to pose new questions. If it’s true that information resides in the questions we ask, coming up with novel problems may be more important than having answers, at this stage of our very limited understanding of the universe.

This is a perfect example of how I think that we can use any type of story-system, whether it’s about Jesus or aliens as means of exploring and expanding who we are and what we know.

In any event, its very exciting to me that people of all different denominations and story-systems are now asking very similar questions, and coming up with very similar shapes for culture and religion to come. I will most definitely be following and reporting on this Emerging Church stuff in the future.

Here’s a small sampling of other EC resources I came across while preparing this, and otherwise. Seems like there’s a million and one of these out there, but these are just some I happened across. I’d be happy to receive links of others!

1. Open Source Theology
2. Vintage Faith: Exploring the Emerging Church and Vintage Christianity
3. The Emergent Church
4. Emergent Village
5. Emergent CHBC
6. E~mergent Kiwi
7. I Am Paradox (emergent culture blog)
8. Off the Beaten Track (blog)