Becoming Conversant with Emerging Church

Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church
Copyright © 2005 by D. A. Carson
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Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Carson, D. A.
Becoming conversant with the emerging church : understanding a movement and
its implications / D. A. Carson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
ISBN-10: 0-310-25947-9 (pbk.)
ISBN-13: 978-0-310-25947-3 (pbk.)
1. Postmodernism--Religious aspects--Christianity. 2. Non-institutional
churches. I. Title.
BR115.P74C37 2005
262--dc22 2005000360
CIP
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PREFACE
A simplified form of the substance of this book was first delivered as three
Staley Lectures at Cedarville University in February 2004. I would like to
thank the president and faculty who welcomed me so warmly, and the
numerous students who went out of their way to engage thoughtfully with
what I was saying.
As I attempt to make clear in the opening chapter, the "emerging (or
'emergent') church" movement, though scarcely a dozen years old, exerts
an astonishingly broad influence. An entire literature has sprung up, with
those on the inside quoting and supporting one another in publications
and conferences. In other words, a self-identity has already been established.
Nevertheless, the diversity of the movement, as well as its porous
borders, ensure that I have not found it easy to portray it fairly. I have tried
to be accurate in description and evenhanded in evaluation. Even so, I must
underscore the fact that when I am forced (for the sake of avoiding endless
qualifications) to resort to generalization in order to move the discussion
along, one can almost always find some people in the movement for
whom the generalization is not true, and others who do not think of themselves
as belonging to the emerging church movement who nevertheless
share most of its values and priorities. (Also, let it be noted that some of the
leaders feel that this has not yet reached the dimensions of a movement
and prefer to call it a "conversation.")
I have tried to avoid too much technical discussion. The flavor of the
lecture series has not been entirely removed. In reality that means this book
will probably frustrate some readers in opposite ways: some will find the
treatment of postmodernism to be too elementary, and perhaps others will
find parts of it heavy going. The notes will help the former, and I hope that
rereading will help the latter. But the book is several times longer than the
manuscript of the lectures. The brevity of the latter meant that I could not
indulge in detailed documentation or introduce a lot of nuances and exceptions.
Owing not least to the fact that some emerging church leaders have
criticized the lectures, in various blogs, for such omissions, I have tried in
this book to fill that gap as much as possible.
Whenever a Christian movement comes along that presents itself as
reformist, it should not be summarily dismissed. Even if one ultimately
decides that the movement embraces a number of worrying weaknesses, it
may also have some important things to say that the rest of the Christian
world needs to hear. So I have tried to listen respectfully and carefully; I
hope and pray that the leaders of this "movement" will similarly listen to
what I have to say.
I would like to thank Jonathan Davis and Michael Thate for compiling
the indexes.
Soli Deo gloria.

D. A. CARSON
Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
10 BECOMING CONVERSANT WITH THE EMERGING CHURCH
Chapter 1
THE EMERGING CHURCH
PROFILE
What Are We Talking About?
When I have mentioned to a few friends that I am writing a book on the
emerging church, I get rather diverse reactions.
"What's that?" one of them asked, betraying that his field of expertise
does not encourage him to keep up with contemporary movements.
"Are you going to focus primarily on Acts, or are you going to include
the Pauline and other epistles?" queried another, presupposing that I am
writing about the church as it "emerged" in the first century--since, after
all, I teach in a New Testament department at a seminary.
Another colleague, known for his worldwide connections, asked, "How
did you become interested in the difficult and challenging questions surrounding
the emergence of the church in the Two-Thirds World?" After
all, the last hundred years have witnessed remarkable stories of "emergence"
in Korea, many parts of sub-Saharan black Africa, Latin America,
certain countries of Eastern Europe (especially Ukraine, Romania, and
Moldova), and elsewhere.
The responses are sensible enough, since "emerging" and related terms
are words that have been applied to these and other circumstances,2
including some fairly esoteric discussions in the philosophy of science.
But during the last dozen years, "emerging" and "emergent" have become
strongly associated with an important movement that is sweeping across
America, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. Many in the movement use
"emerging" or "emergent" (I will use the two words as equivalents) as the
defining adjective for their movement. A dozen books talk about "the
emergent church" and "stories of emergence" and the like.3 One website
encourages its patrons in "emergent friendship," which turns out to refer,
not to friendship that is emerging, but to the importance of friendship in
the movement--thus confirming that "emergent" is, for those in the
movement, a sufficient label of self-identification, so that "emergent
friendship" is formally akin to, say, "house church friendship" or "Baptist
friendship."
At the heart of the "movement"--or as some of its leaders prefer to call
it, the "conversation"--lies the conviction that changes in the culture signal
that a new church is "emerging." Christian leaders must therefore adapt
to this emerging church. Those who fail to do so are blind to the cultural
accretions that hide the gospel behind forms of thought and modes of
expression that no longer communicate with the new generation, the
emerging generation. The National Pastors Convention and the Emergent
Convention were held simultaneously in San Diego in 2003; of the three
thousand pastors who attended, 1,900 chose the more traditional forum,
the NPC, while 1,100 chose the other.
Before attempting to outline its emphases, I should stress that not only
is the movement amorphous, but its boundaries are ill-defined. Doubtless
many (I have no idea how many) of the thousand pastors at the Emergent
Convention did not (at that time, anyway) consider themselves part of the
emerging church: they were exploring, aligning themselves perhaps with
some aspects of the movement but not with others. By contrast, one reason
why the movement has mushroomed so quickly is that it is bringing
to focus a lot of hazy perceptions already widely circulating in the culture.
It is articulating crisply and polemically what many pastors and others were
already beginning to think, even though they did not enjoy--until the leaders
of this movement came along--any champions who put their amorphous
malaise into perspective.