Abstract
I recently had a student who had started to visit a church in Minneapolis called Solomon’s Porch. The student approached me to ask whether I had heard of this congregation or of the “emerging Christianity movement” to which the congregation belonged. Unfortunately, I did not have much to share with this student, as I was not particularly familiar with either the congregation or the movement. It is fortuitous, then, that The Deconstructed Church, Gerardo Marti and Gladys Ganiel’s thorough and thoughtful examination of the Emerging Christianity movement, should appear.
The task Marti and Ganiel faced in their research is challenging simply because they are trying to make sense of congregations, individuals, beliefs, and practices that actively resist boundary-creation. This makes it surprisingly difficult to answer the basic question, “What is the emerging church movement?” The first step is understanding the individuals who are driving this movement. Generally speaking, Marti and Ganiel present the emerging Christian as an individual who was raised in a conservative Protestant community but then became disaffected with the intolerance for religious inquiry found in these communities and with their conservative politics, especially surrounding gay and lesbian rights.
Given this profile, one would assume that such an individual would simply switch to a mainline Protestant community or just drop out of religion entirely. However, Marti and Ganiel effectively explain why neither of these options is satisfactory for an Emerging Christian. The former does not work because Emerging Christians view mainline churches as spiritually stale and not serious about religious development. This is the crux of the issue. While these individuals’ religious upbringing might have soured them on certain forms of religious practice and authority, Emerging Christians really want to discuss and develop their faith. It is for this reason that simply dropping out of religion would not be satisfactory, either.
Instead, so-called Emerging Christians turn to creating or joining Emerging congregations. Although Marti and Ganiel point out that there is a great deal of variety within these congregations, they are generally characterized by a flat authority structure, an emphasis on discussion and conversation, and an intentional embracing of doubt and diversity of views. Emerging congregations often make use of non-traditional venues, such as bars or coffeehouses, or at least arrange their meeting places so that they feel like similarly informal spaces. In short, Emerging congregations actively try to avoid looking or acting like the type of authoritarian, hierarchical, lecture-based congregations that Emerging Christians have rejected.
Emerging congregations present an apparent contradiction in Marti and Ganiel’s analysis. The authors argue that at its core the Emerging Christianity movement is one of individualization. That is, Emerging Christians view their faith as important, but they do not want anyone telling them what they should believe or what they should do with their faith. Such a position would seem inherently antisocial. And yet, Emerging Christians are still creating and participating in congregations with other people. Marti and Ganiel resolve this apparent contradiction by arguing that Emerging Christians need to participate in these “highly open relational spaces that welcome self-asserting, critically reflective attitudes” because “any religious self, even a critically oriented self, cannot thrive without a community of others” (pp. 34–35, emphasis in original). In other words, a defining feature of being an Emerging Christian is serious debate and conversation about religion, and this requires conversational partners.
One aspect in which the reader is not entirely persuaded is in Marti and Ganiel’s attempt to counter stereotypes about what an Emerging Christian looks like. Specifically, we are told that Emerging Christians are often associated with a certain profile: wearing “hipster glasses,” drinking “fair-trade soy lattes,” quoting postmodern philosophers, putting quotes around words like “salvation” or “truth,” and so forth. The authors dismiss such “[s]implistic caricatures,” but many of the individuals and observations they present throughout the book seem to match that profile exactly. This reader would have liked more analysis of how such appearances and behaviors are tied to the Emerging Christian phenomenon. Is it a function of the larger individualization process that they point to? That is, are these Emerging Christians simply “individualizers” in all aspects of their lives, whether that is in the type of coffee they drink or the religion they follow? And how is this tied to the social-class base of the Emerging Christian movement?
While the authors do excellent work when explaining the Emerging Christian movement, at least from the perspective of the participants, there are times that some more analysis and critique might have appealed to a more sociological audience. Marti and Ganiel provide a sample of such an analysis in their discussion of how inclusive religious groups like Emerging Christians face challenges in constructing boundaries. How does a group become a “group” if it is unable or unwilling to say precisely what qualifies one as a member, as the Emerging Christian movement avoids doing? This is an interesting question, but the book does not provide much analysis beyond saying that by emphasizing engagement with different beliefs the Emerging Christian movement is able to create boundaries that successfully include diversity. This is not an entirely satisfying answer in the face of much research on member commitment and retention showing the problems with diverse, weakly bounded, low-demand groups.
Another question that the reader is left wondering is “what exactly is emerging from this Emerging Church movement?” The authors quote several leaders in the movement who make allusions to the Emerging Church movement being similar to the Reformation. The authors seem to acknowledge that this might be an overstatement, noting that they “are not especially concerned if ECM is growing or sparking” some revolution within Christianity. At the same time, though, they argue that the Emerging movement’s importance is that it is an extreme product of the individualization of religion that is shaping members and congregations of more traditional communities, although in more subtle ways than what is seen in the Emerging movement.