I got the chance to study the emerging church movement during my last year at Emmaus. I had never really heard much of it before then, but it seemed that a lot of my classes dealt with it in some capacity, and I ended up doing a lot of research and reading a few books on it.

It was exciting. I had been “emerging” a lot in my own spiritual life, and it was really neat to hear about this “reinvention” of church, this tearing down of two thousand years’ worth of tradition and building something new on the same foundation. Some of the spotlight leaders had some wacky theology (like Brian McLaren), but most of them had their heads on straight (like Dan Kimball). It felt like there was finally something I could identify with.

Then I had the opportunity to go to the National Youth Workers Convention in Nashville. The convention was an awesome experience, and I definitely learned a lot, but I began to notice some things that rattled my cage a bit.

For starters, Emergent™. The emerging church movement had adopted a brand name, the first sign of problems. They pretty much ran the convention, and nearly all of the speakers were Emergent card-carriers. The bookstore carried the whole line of Emergent-branded books, which has the Emergent logo on the spine so that you know which ones are actually emergent and which ones aren’t. On top of that, Zondervan was pushing the TNIV pretty hard at the convention, giving out nice thinline leatherbound TNIV Bibles to everyone at the convention, and calling it “the official translation of the emerging church.” (Not that I have issue with the translation itself, but the Bible doesn’t need endorsements.)

The whole convention seemed like a sales pitch for their club, and they made it sound like it was something that all the cool people were doing, and you’re either in or out and you have to make a decision by the end of the convention. It was just backwards. (And it wasn’t that the convention didn’t have a good representative sample of emerging church; many of the big-name leaders were present, such as Tony Jones, Dan Kimball, Doug Pagitt, and a few others.) The emerging church is supposed to be a decentralized non-entity, not a club.

Man-made movements will always have flaws. It’s usually the ones that look the best on the outside that end up having the biggest problems on the inside, stuff you only find once you’ve moved in. Just goes to show that we shouldn’t swear fealty to any movement, church, or person. Our loyalty belongs only to Christ.