The Elitist Diction of the Emergent Church

The Emergent (or Emerging) Church.

"The emerging church (also known as the emerging church
or the emergent church movement) is a controversial
21st-century Christian movement whose participants
seek to engage postmodern people, especially the
unchurched and post-churched." -Wikipedia.org

Emergent. Church.

Sometimes I think we like the sound of those words together
just to make ourselves seem a little wiser and involved in
some sort of cutting edge movement that will make us
loser Christians feel hip and 'with it'.

There are many problems with churches everywhere. Let's
just accept that fact and move forward.

I think, though, that some of the main problems with
the ideal of the Emergent Church lie in its language.
We use words like Postmodernism.
De-construction.
Re-construction.
Post-churched.
Un-churched.
Relativism.
Epistemology.
Evangelism.
In a way, I think the Emerging Church movement lends
itself to a very philosophical and deep-thinking
audience. Some of the terminology is very thick and
only attracts a fairly educated following. Don't
get me wrong - education is great - but it can seem
like the Emerging Church speaks certain words to
certain people and those words can often be translated
into 'We only want smart people.'

Would I invite some of my friends who are tradespeople
to an Emergent Church? I don't think so. No offense
to Brian McLaren but our language speaks volumes about
who we are.

The problematic nature of this movement lies in
one major notion; The emergent or emerging church
relies upon postmodern thought in order to exist.
Now, I don't know if you've read the newspapers
(or maybe even a Douglas Coupland novel) but
Postmodernism is no cake walk. In fact, the idiot's
guide to postmodern thought would be only three words:
It doesn't exist. Seriously. I'm not kidding.
Postmodernism actually relies on the de-construction
and re-construction of...well...let's see...yeah,
pretty much everything.

So if I need to be involved in a church that is
about the de-construction and re-construction of
everything, that is gonna be one massive nightmare
of a church when it's time to vote on whether or
not the offering needs to go towards a leaky roof
in the sanctuary:
CONGREGATION: Yes but, we need a new roof. It's
leaking water on to everyone who enters the building.
POSTMODERN CHURCH LEADER: Yeah but this building...
this building is an establishment, man. It's just
gonna be torn down eventually, anyway.

This could go on forever - let me get to the point.

I firmly believe that in order for any sort of
teaching to be effective, the speaker/teacher
needs to relate some sort of personal experience
to make all of the head knowledge seem real to his
or her audience and community. So here is mine:

My wife and I haven't really had a thriving church
community for the 4 years we've lived in the Niagara
region. The one shining star of any semblance of a
good, Christ-like community we were involved with
was a homespun homechurch that met in 3 different
homes on 3 nights a month. The main people involved
were all interested in checking out this dude who
started a church around here (in the Greater
Toronto Area) named Bruxy Cavey. We all wanted to
check out this church but none of us lived in real
close proximity to one of the sites (all in local
movie theatres). That's where the benefit of the
internet came into play. We all started downloading
old sermons from his church website,
discussing them in our meetings and it grew from there.

At its apex, there were maybe only 8 or 9 people
involved but there was interaction between a variety
of personalities (some lifelong Christians and some
never setting foot in a narthex) and evident growth.
We ate together, we exchanged ideas, we gave each
other sweaters, we laughed, we cried but most of
all we dissected Bruxy's sermons, we read scriptures
and we prayed together.

Unfortunately, due to the homes being a good 40
to 50 minutes apart, the homechurch died out after
a year and a half. So what do I know about lasting
involvement? I didn't start Willow Creek, Saddleback
or Mars Hill - but I was involved in something real
and something that was centred around Jesus and his
teaching. I hope to duplicate that again someday
as my wife and I are most likely moving in a few
months and re-locating to a more permanent locale.

Sometimes, even in our most selfless and Godly
efforts, our language isolates us from others.
In our greatest desire to achieve good things for the
sake of God's kingdom and move forward, we need to
always remember our audience: Everyone...Everywhere.