Well, it's happened. I've been pulled in (not involuntarily, mind you) to a conversation about the em church. I'm not sure if em churchers would consider my previous posts as a "conversation" in the sense they like to speak of (though having gotten autobiographical in yesterday's post, I think I'm getting close). But I am at least engaging in a series of comments and responses. Perhaps it will soon approximate a conversation.
You can see some reaction to my first post at the Open Source Theology blog, in yesterday's The Emergent Response. Andrew, an em church respondent to that first post of mine, and to whom I more fully responded in this post, faults persons like myself who are critical of the em church for not being more open and for being too judgmental. Perhaps. Or perhaps its just that, as I pointed out yesterday, some of us have "been there, done that" and are warning others away from the very real and present dangers.
Let me say that this post will unfold in two parts, the first of which will be a strong, perhaps even felt to be harsh, response to some of the reaction to my first post. I respond in this way to demonstrate how this reaction only serves to further justify the criticisms folks like myself level against em church believers.
But after this first response, I want to get constructive. So, if my readers wish to skip the first part, they can scroll down.
I think it safe to say that my first post didn't seem to engender any concomitant open self-reflection on the part of em churchers. "PastorPete" in the aforelinked post highlighting the emergent response to the Pontificator's and my critiques, writes:
As the emerging church continues it’s upheaval, which I’m sure we all feel is a good thing, it will be important for us to remember that we’re shaking people’s foundations. That’s a scary thing. Condemnation and/or demeaning are rather common defense mechanisms.
This, of course, presumes that our response is merely a psychological one. This is simply laughable. Without having done any legitimate psychoanalysis on any of us, this reduces--and thus dismisses--our criticisms as psychological defense mechanisms and thus inherently irrational. And if it is irrational, then it need not be seriously entertained. Therapeutically healed, perhaps, but discountable.
It is also insufferably self-important. The author takes on the self-righteous role of prophetic reformer--which assumes that Orthodoxy, for example, needs any reform. He thinks that the em church--which is wholly a late modern, Western, white and mostly affluent, Protestant phenomenon--is somehow unsettling the Roman Catholic Church or the Eastern Orthodox Churches. Forgive me, but I do not think His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI or any of the Orthodox Patriarchs have gotten the memo.
That specific Roman Catholics like Al Kimel, or specific wannabe Orthodox like myself--both of whom come from late modern, American, white and mostly affluent Protesantism--know about the em church and reflect critically on the phenomenon does not mean the em church is more widely known or feared.
With regard to the Orthodox and Catholic (and Reformed, Methodist, Baptist, if they got wind of this) it seems to me, they f