Dream on, worldmag

As someone who genuinely grappled with the Emerging Church (ECM) and, in doing so, found helpful stepping stones and a kind of refuge in books like A New Kind of Christian (Brian McLaren), I found this sweeping article from World to be pretty obnoxious.

"The theological lines have been drawn and are settled," writes Anthony Bradley, a theology professor at King's College in New York City. "We have all moved on. We know who fits into evangelicalism, post-liberalism, Anabaptism, Calvinism, and so on." The only reason to consider the ECM any longer, Bradley says, is as a "recent historical one" that has died.

Ultimately the ECM has not proved to be a tradition with which I can sufficiently identify (I'm still too much of a recovering modernist, I think, to be willing to term my fairly agnostic disposition a "new kind" of Christianity). But the questions ECMers have asked and are asking are the same kinds of questions I've been compelled to ask, especially concerning religious exclusivity (Jesus as the "only way"). And those questions are not even close to going away.

Of course Bradley and others who see the open-ended ECM as primarily negative are anxious to dismiss its spiritual impacts. And of course they will interpret the cited Rob Bell apology (that his church congregation has ended up "a big institution that wounded people in similar ways" to more typical Christian groups) as a sign of the movement's demise rather than evidence rather to the contrary. They won't want to consider that that kind of institutional self-reflection is distinctive and rare in Christianity. They'll just try to brush it off as a moment of yay-we-win.