Religious organizations faced a perfect storm during the last two decades. Worship attendance across the board fell from 42 percent of U.S. adults attending every week in 2000-2003, to only 30 percent in 2021-2023 (Gallup). That represents a huge 12 percent drop in 20 years.
Then came Covid, when so many congregations stopped meeting in person and tried to worship through a wire. Christians had become soft and pliable over the past two decades, and had no willingness to recover quickly and move ahead. When it was safe to gather in person again, many congregations held on to Covid restrictions for an additional three years.
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What made us so soft and easily manipulated? What caused us to be so willing to justify continuing in this vein? I believe it was because the beachhead had already been prepared by the erosion of our concept of truth.
They convinced us it didn’t really matter.
Paralleling this two-decade time period was the Emerging Church movement, which the late Wayne Jackson called “the stepchild of postmodernism.”
Describing the postmodern mindset, Jackson wrote,
“This ideology contends it is arrogant to believe that one knows the truth; instead the ‘truth’ is that truth is only determined subjectively, being fashioned by culture, not Scripture.”
Thanks to this postmodern mindset and related Emerging Church movement, many young people became convinced that there was such a thing as “your truth” and “my truth,” but not the truth, and between the years of 1999 and 2013 the idea of a fixed authority in scripture died a slow, whimpering death among the masses.
People began to doubt church attendance was needed or required, and that the Bible carried any authority for their lives.
Open rebellion against sound hermeneutics.
The Emerging Church movement was an open rebellion against good sense and logic when it comes to biblical interpretation and scriptural authority.
Desperately seeking answers to declining numbers, many congregations that identified as Christians began to fully embrace postmodernism and the accompanying culture of uncertainty. Or, as one leader in the Emerging Church movement itself fondly termed it, the “hermeneutic of humility.”
Hermeneutics is the science of interpreting a text, in particular the Bible, with the goal being to draw out the actual meaning of the text. But Emerging Church leaders of the period, including Brian McLaren, Doug Pagitt, Tony Jones, and Rob Bell (the “there is no hell” guy) utilized an interpretive approach to the scriptures that stopped short of actually drawing any definitive conclusions about the Bible.
They intentionally did this to avoid offending anyone who had an alternate interpretation, and in this way they expanded their fellowship rapidly.
What past generations termed as ignorance or confusion about the Bible, the Emerging Church leaders called humility. They sought to form a spiritual revolution and rebel against the “traditional church” by adapting their practice to meet the culture, instead of God’s word.
In other words, they intentionally decided to be “of the world,” not just “in the world.” Instead of actually standing for something, they chose to stand for everything, to please as many people as possible, so as to swell their numbers.
It worked. For a while.
Establishments like Cedar Ridge Community Church, Gateway Church, and Solomon’s Porch exploded with growth during the era, but today the movement is largely considered dead, fading for a variety of reasons. Partly the decline was chalked up to an inability to sustain momentum, with movement leaders becoming involved in other pursuits and leaving adherents without direction. Others blamed it on the infection of “deconstructionism,” which is a feature (not a bug) in the Emerging Church methodology.
Others who were involved in the movement said the Emerging Church adherents simply ate their own.
Whatever the case, the waning Emerging Church movement died out around 2013, and the exit from worship attendance accelerated, having left a lot of spiritually excited people ultimately deflated, depressed, and convinced “church” wasn’t for them. Not to mention more confused than ever, and even more distrustful of “organized religion.”
But it hung around, perhaps in your congregation.
Though dead as an official movement, many traits of the Emerging Church philosophy are still present, even among churches of Christ. Have you spotted the Emerging Church trends such as informal worship styles, casual clothing for preachers, focus on social justice issues, and constant talk of “experiential worship” and “community-building?” Have you heard buzzwords like “relational” and “missional” being tossed around? Churches building daycares and even working cooperatively with governments and businesses to build community centers and educational centers? Well, there you go. Though dead, it lives.
Churches of Christ have always been slow to adopt cultural fads, but eventually it creeps in. Even dead trends.
Nearly 10 years ago, some brethren, this writer included, got together to write a critique of the Emerging Church movement as represented by the writings of McLaren, particularly his book A New Kind of Christianity. You see, many of these philosophies promoted by McLaren and others were beginning to make inroads into New Testament churches of Christ, and they just wouldn’t go away.
Most troubling of all among these qualities was this hermeneutic of humility. It is this trait that has especially infected some Christian universities, and churches and Christians under their influence are in serious danger at this very moment.
The Hermeneutic of Humility needs to be ejected from the pulpit.
This spineless method of teaching crept in unnoticed, under the guise of meekness and gentility. The hermeneutic of humility denies that we can know truth, or at least denies that we should let anyone know that we know the truth!
Some preachers began to take on the mannerism that, “Well, I might be wrong” with nearly every teaching, not just the complex ones. Some have even begun to show doubts about the necessity of baptism and who is therefore part of the Lord’s kingdom. They especially took up this mannerism in understanding the silence of scriptures on topics such as instrumental music in the church.
It is good to be humble, but feigned humility is not what we need when it comes to the teaching God’s plan of salvation, which is the wisdom of God! And it is not what we need when it comes to teaching how to worship the Lord in spirit and in truth (John 4:24).
This attitude is a far cry from what the Lord promised the apostles in John 8:31-32. If we don’t know what His word means, how can we abide in it!
And maybe—just maybe—if we don’t know the meaning of the scriptures, we shouldn’t mount a pulpit and assume the role of teacher (James 3:1).
In the end…
The Emerging Church movement has been dead for a decade, but the effects of it linger on in slow adopters like the churches of Christ. We are just now facing the brunt of the fallout of this destructive philosophy as we try to revive crowds lost during the last 20 years.
When you see it and hear it, call it out. Don’t ignore it. Get it out of your pulpits and out of the classroom and out of the colleges before it is too late. If you don’t, your congregation or school, though seemingly healthy and growing at the moment, will eventually succumb to the weight of carrying the dead body of the Emerging Church movement, and you will end up on the smoldering heap of every other religious fad that has darkened the pages of history, having left worshipers exactly where the EC movement left theirs: deflated, depressed, and distrustful.
“But He answered and said, ‘Every plant which My heavenly Father has not planted will be uprooted’”(Matthew 15:13).
