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Today, Tall Skinny Kiwi provides us with Dr Paul Pierson’s criteria for How To Spot a Church Movement.

This strikes me as having some bearing on the timely consideration of whether or not the Emerging Church movement, as a movement, perdures even as, assuredly, it continues as a conversation.

In reviewing Dr. Pierson’s list, it’s interesting to note that, while propositional or theoretical or creedal aspects of a movement are not unimportant, there seems to be a much greater emphasis on the primacy of the participatory and practical and experiential aspects. Thus questions of ecclesiology and pneumatology, or how to be church and respond in the Spirit, are being answered existentially in the way we live and move and have our being. One could not better describe our 20th Century church-emergent.

To the extent theological breakthroughs occur, there are no new discoveries in anthropology, soteriology, Christology and eschatology, providing new propositions about what it means to be human, what is wrong with humanity and how to fix it, Who Jesus is and why our hopes are fixed on Him. Rather, there are rediscoveries of the truths long articulated in our creeds, of the beauties well cultivated in our celebrations of liturgy and ritual, of the goodness well preserved in God’s laws and of the fellowship long enjoyed in our communities. There are corrections in various over- and under-emphases as we then eschew any decay (seemingly inevitable & recurring) of dogma into dogmatism, ritual into ritualism, law into legalism & moralism, and institution into institutionalism. The latest iteration of our church-emergent precisely emulates such retrieval, revival and renewal dynamics.

And there is a reawakened nurturance of creative tensions as we re-cognize that life’s deepest paradoxes remain ours to exploit, transformatively, and will not otherwise yield to our attempts to resolve (dialectically thru synthesis), dissolve (perspectivally thru paradigm shifts) or evade (practically by ignoring) them, reductively, as happens with life’s lesser paradoxes of science, philosophy and metaphysics. Our world remains enchanted and needs re-enchantment, on an ongoing basis it seems, but only in our stance toward reality and not in Nature, Herself, which is enchanted through and through!  When it comes to life’s most important questions, then, the church-emergent du jour precisely resists the fundamentalistic, rationalistic, reductionistic strategies of dualistic problem-solving and nurtures a robustly nondual contemplative stance toward our ultimate concerns. (See this Cathlimergent essay.)

The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo. … … Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor. ~ Soren Kierkegaard

To the extent our anthropologies, soteriologies, Christologies and eschatologies do get rearticulated propositionally, there does seem to be an ongoing and ever-growing universalizing tendency (an ecumenical and inclusivistic catholicity) to affirm the radically egalitarian nature of the Good News as we better come to realize — over against our own marginalizations, hierarchicalisms, colonialisms, patriarchicalisms, clericalisms, sexisms, ecclesiocentrisms, exclusivisms, traditionalisms, institutionalisms, gnosticisms and, finally, even movementisms —  that, sooner or later, the Gospel’s preferential option for the poor will be consolation for every last one of us. To paraphrase Pogo: “We have met the poor and they are us.”

So, as the Spirit moves when He wills, where She wills, how They will, may the Spirit of God’s love, now, move within me and you and all. That’s the fugal movement that perdures even as other movements, most assuredly, do come and go. When we look carefully at what is going on, what we call emergent, in one sense, might be the re-emergence of a reality that, inevitably, gets submerged, time and again. It’s a reignition and conflagration of a Fire lit long ago.

Emergence also has a more generic sense and, in that sense, is inextricably associated with novelty, a reality that will not go away for those of us who buy into telos, an inexorable movement built into the very fabric of creation. What seems radically new is humankind’s conscious appropriation of emergentist dynamics and how they possess an autopoietic (self-organizing, for better or worse) trait, which is to say that we now know we can harness some evolutionary impulses and possibly kedge forward (HT Mike Morrell & Frank Spencer) with a more consciously competent emergence (cf. Jamie Smith’s “Desiring the Kingdom”), shaping and forming, as co-creators (cf. Phil Hefner), the unfolding of the Kingdom that we desire (Ps. 37:4). Conversely, we ignore this dynamic and forsake this movement at our own peril.

Below is Cathlimergent Response to Deacon Hall’s Response to Is the Emerging Church Movement Waning? | Homebrewed Christianity

Such wisdom.

Amen to Emergence broadly conceived vis a vis the Church Universal.

The more narrowly conceived particular movement seems to be an ecclesial reiteration of a constructive postmodernism. This pomo-impetus, in a nutshell, has transitioned science and philosophy, which I like to categorize as cosmological enterprises that are primarily descriptive and normative, from a naive realism to a more critical realism. This changed the way humankind engaged reality vis a vis propositional cosmology making our approach more fallibilist. If in our descriptive sciences our knowledge advances mostly involved standing on the shoulders of our forefathers, in our normative philosophies our perspectival changes have often more so resembled standing on their necks.

There’s a related but distinct dynamism in play when we look at the effect of pomo-impetus on our axiological enterprises of evaluative cultures and interpretive religions, which are less propositional and more relational and existential. I suppose this is to suggest that, if a constructive postmodern approach will change the way we treat ideas, cosmologically, let’s say with an epistemic holism over against either the epistemic hubris of a sterile rationalism with its a prioristic and apodictic certainties or the excessive epistemic humility of a radical deconstructionism with its nihilistic tendencies, then, axiologically, we might expect it to change the way we treat one another.

For example, one way we might change the way we treat one another would be to take my above two paragraphs with their dense and narrowly philosophic prose and to translate them into an idiom that can be engaged by our children and young adults. The conversations we are having in the academy are terribly important and we do not want to proceed without them. At the same time, without translation into a much more accessible and engaging form, they remain regrettably irrelevant.

And I wrote all of this as an example and just to say: WOW !!! The questions Deacon raised and the response they evoked in Jo Ann are so incredibly right-on! To wit, Jo Ann wrote:

“It is possible that it could take on even yet a “new form.” This is all good. Keep people thinking, conversing, writing, communicating through song, dance, loving each other, learning and experiencing God, sharing our stories, etc. All of this is challenging and we must step up to the task. We must be “radicals” in a loving and spiritual way.”

This discussion continues here >>>A “new form” indeed. For example, if I wanted to translate what the pomo-impetus on our faith life looks like, I would say to my children: “You know that 38 Special song, ‘Hold on Loosely’? In the place of the GIRL, substitute your CHURCH.”

You see it all around you
Good lovin’ gone bad
And usually it’s too late when you, realize what you had
And my mind goes back to a girl I left some years ago,
Who told me,
Just Hold On Loosely, but don’t let go
If you cling to tightly,
you’re gonna lose control
Your baby needs someone to believe in
And a whole lot of space to breathe in

It’s so damn easy, when your feelings are such
To overprotect her, to love her too much
And my mind goes back to a girl I left some years ago
Who told me,
Just Hold On Loosely, but don’t let go
If you cling too tight babe,
you’re gonna loose control
Your baby needs someone to believe in
And a whole lot of space to breathe in

Don’t let her slip away
Sentimental fool
Don’t let your heart get in her way
yeah, yeah, yeah,

You see it all around you
Good lovin’ gone bad
And usually it’s too late when you, realize what you had
And my mind goes back to a girl I left some years ago,
Who told me,
Just Hold On Loosely, but don’t let go
If you cling to tightly,
you’re gonna lose control
Your baby needs someone to believe in
And a whole lot of space to breathe in

So Hold On Loosely, but don’t let go
If you cling too tight babe,
you’re gonna lose it
You’re gonna — lose control
yeah, yeah, yeah Just Hold On Loosely but don’t let go
If you cling too tight babe,
you’re gonna loose control

Hold on Loosely, but don’t let go
If you cling too tight babe,
you’re gonna loose control
yeah, yeah, yeah

~ D. Barnes, J. Carlisi, J. Peterik

See: Map-making & Story-telling