A Typology: Part X

The Emergents
Ten entries is more than enough, although I could go on teasing out distinctions, I think it's about time to wrap it up.  I'm going to wrap it up with a little bit about a group that has certainly gotten a lot of press relative to their actual numbers, and a group that I am frankly about as conflicted about as any other on the list (though you might sense that I have some mixed emotions about most of them).
I have mixed emotions about the Emergents because I like so much about what they do.  When I first read Brian Mclaren's A Generous Orthodoxy, it was sort of a world changer for me, at least conceptually. I loved the idea of being post-everything.  I wanted to simply toss a grenade over my shoulder and walk away from everything that annoyed or hurt me about the church, with the slow motion, action movie fireball walk.  It certainly wasn't that I wanted to be done with Jesus, I just wanted to be done with all the frustrating things about his Body.  I was ready to sign up for the Emergent experience.
Except I served a little church in a small town in Western Pennsylvania, and even though I could get a little frustrated with them, I freaking loved them, and they were not emergent, and they were never going to be emergent.  I compare it to coffee.  Many of the established churches are like Maxwell House, solid, familiar, decent enough that they don't taste like somebody burnt dog hair in the process of making them.  I may like my fair-trade, do-gooder coffee from Rwanda (totally the Emergent church thing), but I understand why my little Church in Plumville just wanted to keep their Maxwell House.
This is actually more than just a metaphor, the Emergent church has some great ideas, and inasmuch as they bring those ideas to the larger body, I'm all for it.  What I have become increasingly frustrated with is people who form their little cliques and decide to purify what they see as good.  This is consumerism, this in country club church, this is the protestant reformation's worst legacy and probable nadir.
From a certain perspective, that's what the Emergent church is about: picking and choosing doctrine and practices (you can't really call them disciplines because they're just cherry picked), they meet dressed in jeans and sneakers in a coffee house somewhere and sing old songs, new songs whatever songs the community seems to grok.  They're young, they're hip, they don't have any folks from the way things always were telling them that the music is too loud, or that they don't like the pattern on the comfy couches, they've got the good of church without all the baggage.
I'm more than a little jealous.
But I know my part in this church includes all of those people who are baggage, and who have baggage.  It's not healthy for me to judge them.  It's not healthy for me to hold on to all the ways they can hurt me and others.  It's my job to forgive them, and love them.  That's what being the church is actually about: loving others as God loves them.
Church can be an annoying and maybe even dangerous place, and for that I'm sorry, we need to get better at that, but if you think you can follow Jesus and then decide to just give up and walk away, well you're actually following Pilate, washing his hands of the matter.
This is not just a critique for the Emergents, it's a critique for all of the Church, no matter where think you might be on this list, or if you think none of this applies to you, it totally does, these are the mistakes you can make, that you are likely to make, these are also the gifts you have.
Some writer I read once said (and I really can't remember who it was) that there were only two times Jesus sent a disciple to do something by themselves: when he sent Peter to catch a fish and find a coin in the fish's mouth to pay the tax, which is weird, but Peter was a a fisherman after all and quite capable of piscine coin retrieval.  The second was when he sent Judas out to do what he had to do.
Christian faith is not a lone ranger type activity.  It's got lots of traditions, it's got lots of baggage, and it's got a cloud of witnesses.
Hold it together church... all of you... all of us.