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.

I have been going crazy trying to figure out how to write a post in response to all the great conversation that was going on in the comments of this last post. Thanks Josh and Andy for having such a thoughtful and even-handed discussion. I was going crazy because I was trying to figure out how to do too much in a single post. Instead, I’ll try to break it up into a few smaller ones.

Regarding the Emerging Church, Josh asked in his first comment, “Emerging from what?”

I would say that the most helpful part of the Emerging Church discussion/movement sees itself as emerging from the shackles of modernity. There are people and communities popping up all over the place who are being awakened to the effects that the Enlightenment, and more broadly, modernity, have had on the church. One of the most influential features of Western modernity was Christendom – a societal state in which the identity of a nation is intertwined with the identity of the Christian church. As our culture in the United States becomes increasingly post-modern and moves toward post-christendom, we are being given an opportunity to reflect on whether or not the church’s adoption of this state of affairs has been a good thing.

I know people in the emerging church movement for whom seemingly impassable dichotomies are being removed and replaced with profoundly liberating ways of thinking and living. Others are finding places of healing and redemption after being wounded by churches which made them feel inferior because either they didn’t conform or because their giftedness wasn’t valued (I am thinking here primarily of artisans). Many more have had a deep longing for more authentic and committed forms of community and they are discovering that in these sorts of churches. Still others had no tolerance for a form of faith that seemed to make no real difference in the way people actually lived their lives. In emerging churches, this is seldom the case. In fact, one of the ways emerging churches are defined is, “communities that practice the way of Jesus.”
A final thing that I hope we are emerging from is colonialism. This is something Brian McLaren (someone I have sat and shared meals with and have a profound respect for – sorry Andy) addresses in a recent article. For hundreds of years we in the West have taken not just the gospel to other countries, but we have taken our imperialistic ideology with it. People were compelled not just to become Christians, but to increasingly become just like Western Christians. We sought to offer people freedom in Christ, but wound up enslaving them to a distorted version of the Christian faith. Make no mistake, it is not coincidence that the people of Rwanda, whose almost entire population had converted to (Western Christianity), could kill each other by the hundreds of thousands.

Perhaps the single greatest feature of what Brian prefers to call “The Church Emerging,” is a state of humility in the face of what the church in the West has done and become.

Not everything that is happening in the emerging church movement or being said in the emerging church discussion is perfect or even helpful for that matter. I am happy to be the first to confess it. But then again, it’s emerging church folks who usually are

“The scandal of the cross is that God’s strength is incarnated in weakness.”

I really want to encourage you to listen to a message by Al Dueck, a professor of psychology at Fuller. He delivered this talk as a Baccalaureate message to Fuller’s graduates just this past week. He offers a strict warning to those who would confuse Christian evangelism with religious colonialism. He also illuminates us to the similarity of our current president to 19th century British statesman, Thomas Mcaulay, who charged his country…

“We the British must at present do our best to form a class of persons, Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”

As a male follower of Christ, I am reminded that in God’s economy it is in making myself vulnerable and meek and not making myself powerful and dominant that I am most like God. Dueck calls out those who would fault the church for being overly feminine by asking them to consider whether or not men are willing to lay aside their culturally enhanced need for dominance and superiority in order to take on the character of Christ.

This is a great corrective to the macho impulse a la folks like Mark Driscoll and John Eldridge who would have us believe that vulnerability and appearing weak go against what it means to “be a man.”