The End of the Emerging Church?

Will church historians look back at 2010 as the end of the emerging church? TSK seems to think so, although Tony Jones disagrees with him in some regards.

The emergent church eludes many religious leaders in the same way that Al Qaeda eludes many political leaders, they simply don’t understand the new fangled way that organizations work. There has come a rather quick death in the past ten years of centralized institutions, and a quick rise of splinter cells in almost every realm of modern society with the rise of the internet.

In other words, I think the emerging church has the vantage point of being able to adapt to and change more quickly than any other movement in Christian history. Within minutes or days of any major “event,” these leaders can comment on the events theologically and can dialogue with one another about the in’s and out’s of the particular issues regarding that event. Thus, the emergent church has such a rapid capacity to change (and, indeed, it has changed), and the ability for new people to enter that conversation via the blogosphere makes the overhead costs of joining extremely low.

Thus, I have no doubts that the emergent church will continue to adapt and change.

The main question, however, is whether some of main foci of the ECM are, in fact, taking root in flesh and bone communities, and whether the “revolutionary” nature of what originally defined the emerging church is not “commonplace.”

With that said, I would like to predict what the so-called “second-generation” emergents might look like who will continue to fight against the institutional church:

1) Unlike those like Brian McLaren, who call for a kind of non-talking about homosexuality, this second-generation will be less ambivalent about the gay marriage issue and come out in full-fledged support of monogamous homosexuality. I that this will be a major turning point in the movement and those who do not accept the majority opinion will be considered “behind the times” or “dogmatic.”

2) There will be more acceptance of a Christocentric view of universalism and it will lead to more dialogue between Christians and those of other religions. The next generation of white students, especially Americans, will have totally lost the idea of the pre-eminence of America and will probably learn more than one language in school fluently. They will live in fully globalized world and will be more likely to live in a country outside the United States.

3) This group will not be as worried about ending poverty so much as living with the poor. So many of the campaigns that they have seen in their early lives will have failed and they will have realized that the point is not to make the poor rich, but to live among the poor.