Response to yestreday's blog

4 comments | Aug 10, 07:58 PM | emergent best-of-earl | by Tim Bednar

My friendAdam Long is a sociologist of religion working on a PhD and an alum of AGTS. I asked him to respond to yestreday’s blog, but he ran into some tech troubles so I’m posting his thoughts here:

1) We need better empirical research on the movement. The problem is designing a research tool to measure its impact. Perhaps someday I will convince Mark Chaves to include a question or two about the emerging church in his National Congregations Study.
Until then, we can only track things like book sales, convention attendance, etc. All ideas are welcome!

2) As much as the EmChurch leaders stress racial and ethnic inclusiveness, full-scale integration remains to be seen. This reminds me of the problem that Marxists have (had?) with recruiting workers to their ideology�even if that ideology is designed to “liberate”
workers. Lenin’s “vanguard” concept of elite intellectual leadership certainly applies here.

3) When people mention the “emerging church,” they are almost always talking about a very specific demographic: race = white, age = young, and class = middle. Ignoring the inroads of the “Hip-Hop” church movement will be our downfall.

4) It is possible to view the EmChurch movement as the response of religious entrepreneurs to the shifting demands of specific religious consumers. That is, the EmChurch leaders are designing religious firms that provide spiritual services to white, middle class, post-evangelical, aesthetically inclined, intellectual, bourgeois bohemians. In this scenario, cultural shifts drive the religious innovation. The EmChurch leaders, of course, want you to believe that they are responding to a seismic philosophical shift, not a loss of market share.

5) The EmChurch claims to be against “Modern” religion. There are at least three theoretical problems here. First, such leaders often portray Modernity as a monolithic cultural process, often in quite Weberian terms. This ignores theories of multiple modernities, which might solve our problems in understanding the uneven progress of secularization. Second, arguing that contemporary conservative approaches are necessarily Modern is anachronistic. For example, any even-handed reading of the Acts narrative will admit that Luke portrays tongues speech as a sort of “evidence.” (Whether or not that applies to today is another question.) Third, very few people who claim to embrace postmodern theories actually do so. Most of them are critical realists whether we know it or not.

6) The EmChurch is very similar to other US religious movements in its denial that it is a movement. Just as the A/G tried so hard not to be a denomination but ended up being one, so the EmChurch movement will have to institutionalize if it hopes to accomplish anything. (Hence Emergent.) As long as they want to be merely a “conversation,” they will lack the apparatus needed to gain genuine traction.