Why the Emerging Church Movement Failed
Part 3, When Evangelism Became Deconstruction
As a series reminder, do check out the Emerged podcast hosted by Tony Jones and Tripp Fuller, their oral history of the emerging church movement (webpage here, Apple podcast here, and Spotify here).
So, why did the emerging church movement struggle to establish churches? Why did it become a largely online and conference-centric movement only to disappear into the ether?
What happened to the church in the emerging church?
To be fair, some churches were planted and continue to thrive. And as I pointed out in the first post, many evangelical churches were shaped by the emerging church movement and continue to reflect its enduring legacy. So, the emerging church movement didn't vanish without leaving any ecclesial trace.
Still, beyond these lingering impacts, the "emerging church" largely vanished. Why?
Recall, one of the central features of the emerging church movement was its engagement with post-modernity. At the start of the movement, this engagement had an evangelistic and missional thrust: How can we reach our post-modern culture where suspicions of meta-narratives and institutional authority are prevalent? Simply put: How do we evangelize in a post-modern culture?
However, very quickly it became apparent that many of the leaders within the emerging church weren't really thinking about evangelizing a post-modern culture but were, instead, proclaiming a post-modern Christianity. An example here would be the trajectory of the work of Peter Rollins. At the start, Peter's work in his book How (Not) to Speak of God was a very helpful intervention in helping us talk and think about God in a post-modern context. (I loved that book.) But as Peter's work progressed deeper into Christian a/theism it became what he called, "pyrotheology," a call for the wholesale deconstruction and demolition of Christian faith. A "burn the house down" approach to faith. All metaphysical convictions had to be jettisoned.
As I described in Part 1, the emerging church conversation began by trying to help GenX and Millennial Christins live with doubt, and even leverage those doubts toward good outcomes. But "learning to live with doubt" eventually morphed into what we today call "deconstruction," the active tearing down of previously held convictions and beliefs.
To be sure, as I've shared many times, deconstruction is a healthy and vital process in our faith development. We all have to leave behind beliefs which are broken, unhealthy, or immature. But it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that it's very hard to plant and grow thriving churches around a bunch of people who are deconstructing. This isn't rocket science. There has to be some positive belief and conviction at the heart of your church. A church built upon negation isn't going to be around very long. Feel free to evangelize people into nothingness. Go ahead and burn it all down. But while people might buy books or pay money to come to a conference centered on deconstruction, as a general rule people don't show up on Sunday mornings to worship a void.
In hindsight, the outcome was predictable. When evangelism was replaced with deconstruction within the emerging church movement any attempted ecclesiology was going to fail. You can't build churches upon deconstruction.
What deconstruction can and did create were spiritual seekers. In fact, many leaders and followers of the emerging church movement would today be much more comfortable describing themselves as a "spiritual seeker" than as a Christian. But when "Christians" became "spiritual seekers" nothing interesting or distinctive was going to be left of the movement. Spiritual seekers are dime a dozen.
So, that's another part of why the emerging church movement failed. The emerging church deconstructed itself out of existence to dissipate into the haze of our "spiritual but not religious" culture.
I think it gets tricky to evaluate success and failure of a movement. By definition, a movement is a choice of a group of people to, well, move. And unless one's destination is capable of infinite approach, at some point, motion will by definition need to stop. Did the Western expansion of the United States "fail" because people didn't drive their Conestoga wagons into the sea?
In my professional discipline of software development, there was a period of ascendency called the "Agile movement". Many people who were involved consider it to have failed. The conferences it spawned have largely died down. The books written are generally not must-reads in the 2020s. The term Agile itself has been so co-opted by panacea-selling consultants that most people consider it a bad sign if it shows up on a planning slide. And yet, when I tell my coworkers, many of whom are now younger than the first Agile blog posts, what software development was like before Agile, they don't believe me. The wackier ideas of the movement have taken up refuge in the fringes. But the ideas that held real solutions to real problems have become so embedded in "how we do things" that there's no longer a need for a special label, or special teachers to show us how it's done.
In the Pietist Option, there's a great turn of phrase: "Pietism has disappeared not because it failed, but because it succeeded."
It may still be possible that the correct answer is that the emerging church failed, that it wasn't a new pietism. But I think so far this series undercounts the number of people who found community and calibration around the books and blogs of some of these people, both online and in person. This allowed us a third option; when both our church and the world told us our only options were an angry Christ obsessed with power or hedonist dissolution, finding journey companions made it just a little safer to dare to think that one could keep following Jesus while leaving James Dobson behind.
Most of those people, I suspect, have not left their current churches to found successful new ones. For one thing, churches need money, and money tends to like the status quo. But to say "if the movement succeeded, it would have looked like this" shuts down the curiosity to ask "what good things happened, and which opportunities were missed?"
Instrumental for me was the writing of Michael Spencer, the so-called "Internet Monk," who died in 2010. His work described a "post-evangelical" outlook. Your writing has also been a more stable place than Rollins (I read Insurrection a few times, but I couldn't follow his eventual trajectory). Specifically your work with the circumplex model of faith and your writing on George Macdonald. You wrote something once that has stuck with me for years about how post-everything christians need to be courageous enough to say something substantive. That has been a kind of "north star" for my ideological development.