…as we succumb to someone else’s definition of who we are, we lose our sense of true self and of our right relation to the world. It makes no difference whether those projections make us the hero or the goat: when we allow others to name us, we lose touch with our own truth and undermine our capacity to cocreate in life-giving ways with “the other.”
— Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness
There’s been a little dust up recently regarding the status of the Emerging/Emergent Church. Nick from the Nick and Josh Podcast voiced his disappointment here. Josh chimed in here. Tony Jones has a response here.
I don’t begrudge Nick or Josh’s frustration but I think the frustrations are misguided. Nick writes:
My friends and I believed that there was a massive tide of change coming. We believed that everything was going to change. We found more and more people reading books by McLaren or others and we thought the interactions with these books would change the world. We knew that there would be this new kind of Christian. We believed that Christianity was on the cusp of evolution.
I can only speak for my group, but we left the church. We didn’t want to be in the reform game and we decided we would let the change come to the church as we gathered outside, if this wave hit the church, we would rush back in and embrace it, but we couldn’t deal with Christianity in it’s present state and these Emergent Conversations were our only way to hold on to Jesus at all.
We didn’t want Emergent to become the new club, but we wanted it to organize so that through gatherings, cohorts, and online social networks it could create it’s own grouping and lovingly force some voices out into the open. That happened a little. But it seems that recently we have lost hope in the Emergent movement. It took it’s hits from the conservatives and instead of coming out stronger for it, it sort of fizzled.
So with that out of the way, Nick and I had a little video chat about it all and here it is:
I really appreciate Nick’s willingness to chat about it and I’m really glad we were able to do this rather than just me writing about it.
Zach Lind 