On Saturday night at CCDA I was excited to hear from Soong-Chan Rah, a Korean-American professor at North Park University in Chicago (stinkin everybody at CCDA was from Chicago!) and he did not disappoint.
Soong’s main topic was the changing face of global Christianity. No longer a majority Western religion, Christianity is growing fastest in the global south and more than this, as the United States and other Western countries become increasingly multi-cultural, these non-Western believers are reshaping the future of the church.
What I was perhaps most interested in was Soong’s good critique of Emergent and the Emerging Church. Namely, that this group and its related conversation/movement are failing to reflect the seismic shifts of which he spoke. This is most notable, says Soong, in that the leaders and the majority of EC supporters are white and Western educated. Soong is right, there is little doubt about it. However, I would be quick to respond with 2 caveats. First, this critique is hardly limited to the EC folk. The vast majority of the streams of western Christianity are dominated by white, western educated folks. Second, a huge part of the EC conversation/movement has to do with pushing past forms of Christianity held captive by narrow perspectives and traditions. What better soil could one imagine for the changes Soong himself describes?
Interestingly, I just noticed today that Ryan Bolger and Eddie Gibbs’ book, “Emerging Churches: Creating Christian Community is Postmodern Cultures,” was just translated into Korean! Now, it may not be Asian theology, but talk about a great avenue to really get cross-cultural dialogue started.
In another shocking bit of news, Tony Jones, the national coordinator for Emergent Village announced today that he was stepping down from the position as Emergent undergoes some changes precisely to
allow more voices into the conversation and allow the network to grow in a more organic way.
As a final sort of corrective to this critique of the EC, I’d like to point others to Brian McLaren’s article, “Church Emerging,” (pdf) and draw attention to this quote
More importantly, though, I’ve become convinced that the conversation about modernity and postmodernity is the ‘tails’ side of the coin, and the ‘heads’ side is a related but different conversation. So I am hereby giving notice that I’m not interested in arguing with anyone about modernity and postmodernity, but I would very much like to engage in honest conversation about colonialism and postcolonialism.
As he goes on he draws from and quotes the work of Dr. Mabiala Kenzo, a Twa theologian from the Congo – a great example of one of the foremost leaders of the EC discussion seeking to listen and learn from those outside our own context in an effort to provide a corrective.
Soong was great – he made me wat to go back to school and take his courses. More than this, his critique of the EC was a good one, but could have been levied against a larger population. This was just the sort of talk that seemed unique to the CCDA confernece and I was glad to have been a part of it.
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i appreciate Rah’s concern and would love to read what he said. the emerging church is a lot more international than publishers are willing to say. as a contributer to gibbs/bolger book, i chose to limit what i said to just UK and USA for the purposes of a focused book, rather than share my experiences with the global emerging church as i have experienced it in over 40 countries.
is there a link to the talk by Soong-Chan Rah?
Andrew, I thought given your experience you might have had more to add here, thanks. I haven’t seen a print version of his talk available, but the DVD ($15) or CD ($8) can be purchased here.