Where Is It Going?
There is a certain temerity, if not outright arrogance, in thinking that any of us can answer before the fact such a question as where a cataclysmic shift in human affairs ultimately is going to go. There is an equal foolheartedness, however, in not trying to discern the near future of our lives, both as citizens of a polity in upheaval and as believers in an organized religion that concomitantly is in upheaval as a result. So answer the question we must. But to answer it with as great an accuracy as we can muster, we need first to remind ourselves of the restrictions laid upon this conversation.
The Great Emergence, like the Great Reformation or the Great Schism or the time of the Great Gregory or the Great Transformation, is a generalized social/political/economic/intellectual/cultural shift. Like its predecessors, this one too is a phenomenon initiating in the Western experience; though unlike the preceding reconfigurations, the Great Emergence is not limited to the Western world in its expectations, expression, or exercise. It suffers also from an unfortunate confusion of terms that its predecessors did not have to surmount.
The Great Reformation was clearly a historical period that, in resolving itself, eventuated in the hegemony of a new form of Christianity bearing the distinct and distinguishing name of “Protestantism.” This time around, the Great Emergence has given rise to a form of Christianity called, not apart from itself, but rather after itself. The result is an all-too-ready intermingling of context with content and vice versa. That is, we use the term the “Great Emergence” to name a movement within Christianity as easily and as often as we use it to name the larger context in which the shift in Christianity is occurring and to which it is responding. The result is that to engage in any meaningful discussion of “The Great Emergence,” one must be very clear about which part of the thing one is trying to describe. In the instance here and for the rest of this conversation, unless otherwise indicated, we are talking about the Great Emergence in terms of its religious integrity or presentations.
We are also talking here about the Great Emergence in terms of emergent or emerging Christianity while, at the same time, being very mindful that first-world Judaism is undergoing shifts and accommodations more or less analogous to those occurring in Christianity. We must likewise remind ourselves again that we are looking at emergent and emerging Christianity from the North American, and primarily the United States, perspective. Yet emergent Christianity in this country does not exist in isolation, either geographically or culturally.
The United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and several parts of Africa and Asia are experiencing shifts in Christian thinking and sensibilities similar to those we are undergoing. More to the point, emergence in the UK was clearly active, discernible, and describable at least twenty years before it was nearly so visible and coherent in this country, making observation of what is happening in England, Ireland, and Wales a very useful and sometimes predictive exercise for North American observers. Even more to the point is the fact that the major leaders and strategists of the Great Emergence in this country are engaging more and more intentionally in ongoing exchanges between themselves and emergent leaders outside of the US. This intentionality has had the additional benison of allowing emergents from cohorts outside the United States to influence and participate in what is happening in North American Christianity.
One of the hallmarks of the Church’s semi-millennial rummage sales has always been that when each of the things was over and the dust had died down, Christianity would not only have readjusted itself, but it would also have grown and spread. Never has that principle been more operative than now. In the hands of emergents, Christianity has grown exponentially, not only in geographic base and numbers, but also in passion and in an effecting belief in the Christian call to the brotherhood of all peoples.
Given all of these things, what now can be said of this new configuration of Christianity that is taking us in North America, lock, stock, and church door, to some other way of living out our faith in an equally reconfigured secular context? Several things, in fact, the first of which is to say that we have a fairly clear understanding now of the currents on which we are riding. We have a fairly clear picture, in other words, of what emergent Christianity is made up of and of why and how its constituent parts have come together to form a new whole.