During the first decade of this century, there was an awful lot of noise among the new generation of Christians about the emergent or emerging church. It’s gone pretty quiet lately, but the people and movement behind that label are still doing their thing.
If you aren’t familiar with the term “emerging church” then you might need to read up on it. This is another of those times when I find that Wikipedia gets it more right than wrong. And you still may not understand it. There’s a lot of subtle nuance and a lot of people outside the professional clergy don’t get it.
To be honest, I blame the emergents for that. They did okay explaining themselves within their own circles, those they emerged from, but not to the wider audience of curious folks outside their ecclesiastical traditions. Sometimes they tried too hard, but they were trying too hard to avoid the lock-in that comes with the traditional verbiage.
At any rate, the question has been asked: Is Radix Fidem any part of the emerging church movement?
No. There are some parallels, but the primary difference is that emergents are very distinctly involved in social action on one level or another. Radix Fidem avoids that very thing. We say that the world cannot be fixed; a critical element is to draw a distinction between ourselves and the rest of the world.
How you and I implement that distinction varies with the context. How different is different enough? I refuse to answer that for you. I can offer a range of suggestions, and tell you what I’m doing, but that is in no wise regulatory for anyone else. That’s one of the ways we are like the emergents, though: We reject centralized control.
I suppose at the root of things, the emerging church is still too western for me. The notion of an obligation to engage the world on its own turf is a western misreading of the Bible. Jesus and His disciples engaged their world in rather specific ways, and very few western readers notice that they distinguished between a presumed covenant society and one with no such presumption. Our western society is most certainly outside of any valid covenant. Thus, the way we engage it must be from a far greater distance than the way emerging church folks do.
But then, the emergents aren’t covenantal at all. That’s the real difference. They are emerging from a context, too much of which they still drag with them. From where I stand, it’s still seems just a branch of the same old traditional western churchianity. We are starting entirely from scratch. We do use some of the same religious terminology, only because it’s part of the language itself. The Hebrew minds of the Apostles were being expressed in Greek; Paul did the best job because he could think with both Hebrew and Greek minds. I’m doing my best to restore as much of the ancient Hebrew mind as possible and express it in English.
The emergent leadership often reference the term “postmodern” as the flavor of their efforts. Some of their work is very energetic, and at times almost frantic. Our work is aimed more at pre-modern, even ancient. We don’t believe the human situation has changed that much, only the broad human perception of it. God is not in a panic about things. Still, if you don’t understand them very well, you might think we are close to them.
Maybe now you’ll get the pun in the title.
I went to a few church services for an emergent-type of church when I lived in Philly. It wasn’t terrible. Some good and bad, but the particular one we went to was hell-bent on its social justice action. A friend visiting from out of town went with us once…he was more of our mindset, and he found it rather distasteful.
I just checked their website. Nearly everything is about the big three woke topics: anti-whiteness, anti-male, queer stuff…all in their blog posts and podcasts. Guess they fit God in where they find some leftover space.
There’s a historical thread from the 1800s: sociology, social work, and the Salvation Army model. While the big problem that got everyone’s attention in that chain was alcoholism and its side effects, no one gave much thought to the cultural background that made alcoholism an issue. Nowadays we have people looking hard at other social decay issues and insisting that religion must address them, and still don’t escape the cultural bias that makes those issues arise in the first place. The underlying theory of emergents seems to be aimed at fixing the world instead of learning God’s path out of it.