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Maybe this is a legacy of my blue-collar upbringing. Maybe it’s even tinged with a hint of sour grapes. Maybe I’m just plain jealous. But a couple of years ago, I read with some interest The Quarterlife Crisis by Alexandra Robbins and Abby Wilner, concerned with “the unique challenge of life in your twenties” (as the subtitle billed it). I hated the book: partly because of its rabid individualism, but more because of its obvious socio-economic location. Story after story went something like this: “After Ashley [sic!] graduated from Stanford, she just wasn’t sure what to do with her life, so she explored her options by finishing an MBA at Harvard. Now that’s come to a completion and she’s facing ‘the real world.’ Sure, it would be fine for her to become the vice-president of her father’s multi-million dollar corporation, but she’s looking for more than that. Now she’s beset with postmodern Angst.”
Yeah, life’s a bitch when you’re a Stanford grad with a Harvard MBA. What’s a poor girl to do?
Recently I’ve been bothered by a similar socio-economic suspicion regarding the “postmodern” or “emerging church.” Don’t get me wrong: I’m with the program and in deep sympathy with the vision that’s been sketched by folks like Brian McLaren and Robert Webber. But I have this nagging question: “What’s the median income of a ‘new kind of Christian?’”
Before trying to grapple with that question, let me try to motivate my concern from another angle. For the last few years, our family was a member of an inner-city church in Los Angeles: a community of incredible ethnic and socio-economic diversity with an effective outreach to former gang members from crews like Lennox 13. Since moving to Grand Rapids, we’ve joined another urban congregation with an intentional focus on diversity, racial reconciliation, and community empowerment (in a very disempowered neighborhood). And our family has chosen to live in the community with hopes of being agents of redemption. What does the emerging church have to say to these communities—with horrible public schools (and so little if any postsecondary education) trapped in cycles of family disempowerment because of drugs and incarceration? I’m just not sure that my neighbors, or those that live in the vicinity of our church, are asking the question that, up to this point, the emerging church has been trying to answer. They don’t subscribe to Regeneration Quarterly (and couldn’t afford to if they wanted); and—as a very important indicator of class—they don’t have internet access in their homes. So they’re not reading The Next Wave or The Ooze. While the emerging church wants to be “urban,” in my town it largely ministers to the young urban professionals living in the hip new condos downtown on the riverfront. But how can the emerging church reach those folks living on south Division or at Eastern & Franklin—places those people in the condos won’t drive after dark?
Even if they could log on to The Next Wave or pick up a copy of a pomo magazine, I don’t think these outlets would speak to the communities on south Division. These postmodern outlets are asking questions that are largely the province of college-educated middle class America. That’s why I think, in the vein of my earlier question, we need to ask ourselves: “How bourgeois is the emerging church?” Or better, and with more hope, let’s formulate the question this way: “What can we do to prevent the emerging church from being simply another bourgeois institution?”
Before suggesting how that might be done, I think it’s important to appreciate how we got to be where and who we are. There is some sense in which the very posture of questioning is a bourgeois privilege. (This is why I constantly remind my students that, while they might not think so, it is a privilege just to be able to sit in a freshman philosophy class and ask the kinds of questions we do. Large segments of the American population never have the chance—let alone vast portions of the global population.) We have the opportunity to think through the kinds of questions that Dan Poole grapples with in A New Kind of Christian only after (and because) more fundamental questions—like how to pay the rent, how to keep our children safe, who will pay for groceries—have already been settled. Further, insofar as Dan’s questions are occasioned by a prior knowledge, the questions actually follow from a fairly solid, and generally post-secondary, education. If the emerging church is really “postmodern,” then it’s at least had the chance to be modern; or in other words, the “new kind of Christian” sketched by McLaren has had the chance to grapple with skepticism only because she’s had the opportunity and privilege to ask the questions. Skepticism is a luxury. In this respect, the new postmodern kind of Christian is not as different from Descartes—that paragon of modernity—as she might think. Indeed, the picture we get of Descartes in his Meditations is one of privilege and luxury, for here’s a person who can take five or six days just to think about—albeit important—intellectual challenges. That only happens with a healthy endowment, or the patronage of a wealthy prince—and servants taking care of the mundane aspects of survival. The servants, of course, don’t get the opportunity to meditate on the possibility of evil deceivers.
So the emerging church has the privilege of being postmodern because it’s had the privilege of having been modern. But how will the postmodern church reach those who’ve been on the underside of modernity? What will the emerging church have to say—or better, what will it have to ask—for those who haven’t enjoyed the benefits of Descartes’ legacy? I would briefly suggest a two-pronged agenda that grows, I think, out of some of the core values of the emerging church.
If one of the key tenets of the emerging church is the centrality of embodied, incarnational witness, then one of the places we need to embody the redemption purchased by Christ on the cross is in the disempowered neighborhoods in our cities. Thus the first part of my suggested program is to merge the concerns of the postmodern church with the concerns of “new urbanism;” in other words, new kinds of Christians should be passionately concerned with building new kinds of cities—which will mean that they should be passionately concerned with impacting the socio-economic structures that systematically disempower parts of town like south Division. Our cities are largely the production of very modern forces, and their decay is a testimony to the underside of modernity. What could be more postmodern than redeeming these urban spaces and city-dwellers, informed by a vision of the kingdom whose telos is a city (Rev. 21:2)? This project for a new urbanism also resonates with another central tenet of the emerging church: its opposition to “Constantinian” Christianity as civil religion. The economic structures which have created the south Divisions of our country are largely the product of classic American liberal polity which the church as civic cult has been all to eager to defend. The postmodern, counter-cultural church as witness will find no better space for exercising its alternative vision than in our cities’ neighborhoods.
If the first arm of the program I envision is urban, the second arm is global. This is because my concern about the bourgeois character of the emerging church is intricately bound up with its still being what appears to be a largely American, or at least North Atlantic phenomenon. If the emerging church so far has had little to say on south Division, it’s had even less to say to Latin America. Thus I want to suggest that the discussion around the emerging church needs to be globalized by being merged with discussions concerning what Philip Jenkins has described as “the next Christianity.” As Jenkins has argued, the axis of the Christian world is quickly shifting to the south. If the postmodern church wants to speak for the church of the 21st century, it better buy a plane ticket—because the church of the next century will find its “new center” not in Colorado Springs, Washington, or even Seattle, but somewhere on the African continent. This doesn’t mean that emerging church discussions have nothing to say to global Christianity. On the contrary, I think the post-secular outlook of the emerging church can offer a critical perspective in a global context. But we must see ourselves as servants to global Christianity, utilizing our gifts and resources to think with our global sisters and brothers rather than coming with pre-packaged answers to “postmodern” questions they’ve never asked.
Jamie Smith is a professor of philosophy at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI and the author of The Fall of Interpretation (IVP) and Speech and Theology: Language and the Logic of Incarnation (Routledge). He is currently completing a book entitled Demythologizing Postmodernism: Critical Direction for the Emerging Church. He and his wife Deanna have four children.
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This is something I was just thinking about. Alot of times is that the more we "educate" ourselves, the more we disconnect ourselves from reality. In this case, reality is South Division.
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This is something I was just thinking about. Alot of times is that the more we "educate" ourselves, the more we disconnect ourselves from reality. In this case, reality is South Division. Posted by J.A. | Posted at 12/25/2006 12:18 PM