A new acquaintance from the blogosphere, Jonathan Brink, recently posted on his blog a conversation on the meaning of emergence, why people are staying in or leaving the traditional churches, and what other options they have. He welcomed comments, and his invitation happened to arrive at a time when I’ve been working on several relevant projects simultaneously:

  1. The Golden Compass (to demonstrate how I do cultural case studies).
  2. Willow Creek’s Reveal self-study (to demonstrate how I do a paradigm analysis).
  3. “Taxonomies of emergence” (processing DJ Chuang’s recent post on various approaches to interpreting categories, layers, or streams in the emerging church).

Umm … it appears God’s providence has struck again and shifted my tentative plans, and I’m now writing about item #3 instead of polishing my final post on series #1, although this material will relate to both items #2 and #1. Ah, well … this is a surprise, though certainly not unwelcomed! (Remember: Switching things up IS God’s prerogative, eh?)

So - how can I put together something meaningful on categorizing what’s happening in emergingness, but one that also leads readers through my thinking process instead of just gives my conclusions to consume? So many options … it may take a couple posts … and … hmmm …

… okay. For whatever reasons unknown to me (at the moment, at least), I think I’ll give my reactions to Jonathan’s list first (which led to my core questions about such systems). Then probably give my basic conclusions on taxonomies (sets or systems of categories) up front, show what my system is for coming to those conclusions, and tell at least a bit about how I developed that system. Maybe I’ll have a chance later to give my own story about involvement with that cluster of the phenomena known as emergence, emerging, emerging church.

Sounds good, but let’s see how this unfolds …

Where Do I Find Myself in Their Systems?

So - here’s the core of Jonathan’s system of emergence categories that he and friends were talking about. Jonathan currently sees four distinct categories about the feelings people have about the church. [The four following descriptions are cut-and-pasted from his website.]

  • Traditionals: This group lives and breathes the traditional church paradigm. They are very happy with traditional modes of church, participate when they can at various degrees, and have no tension with the way church is organized or run. My estimation is that this group is about 70% of the current Christian community.
  • Tweeners: This group is experiencing some form of tension about the way church is organized. They are stuck in the in-between. They perceive something is wrong but they may or may not be able to verbalize it (for an infinite number of reasons). They tend to church shop, hoping that the new church will produce some kind of new experience (not just entertainment). What they likely encounter is the same paradigm in a slightly modified form (different mode of worship, different student ministries, new building, etc). My estimation is that this group is about 20% of the current Christian community.
  • Exiters: These people have reached a point of tension where they no longer participate in the church, as it is currently organized. They are looking for some alternative and have not yet found it. My estimation is that this group is about 5% of the current Christian community.
  • Explorers: This group is looking to solve the tension by actively exploring new forms of church ecclesiology (outside of the traditional forms). These could include monastic, house church, exclusive discipleship groups, organic church, etc. My estimation is that this group is about 5% of the current Christian community.

I find some helpful things in this four-category approach. It focuses on what people are committed to, the fact that they may feel tensions about certain features of traditional churches, and gives several possible ways to resolve that tension. I think I could even agree with the approximate percentages, just based on an intuitive thinking through of numbers based on my own cultural setting (which reportedly has the smallest percentage of Christians of any county in the U.S.). I suspect the Traditionals are maybe more like 75-80% and the Tweeners are 10-15% instead.

However, some feelings gnawed away at me … it seems conceptually okay, but still, something just wasn’t quite right …

What was it? And would I have a similar sense of not fitting in any of the other approaches? And did I know anyone else who didn’t fit into these systems?

So, I looked again at some of the other taxonomies of emergence in DJ Chuang’s post on the subject. Here are the sets used in the blog posts he links to. (And I’ll just list here the links to taxonomy systems, not to critiques or comments - helpful as many of them are.) (Who knows, maybe I’ll run an analysis on these various toxomonies in a future post …)

Scot McKnight - Five Streams of the Emerging Church

  • Prophetic (or at least provocative)
  • Postmodern
  • Praxis-oriented
  • Post-evangelical
  • Political

Ed Stetzer - Understanding the Emerging Church (three categories, with the fourth added by Mark Driscoll - Conference Examines the Emerging Church)

  • Relevants
  • Reconstructionists
  • Revisionists
  • Relevant Reformed

Wess Daniels - Four Models of Emerging Churches

  • Deconstructionist
  • Pre-Modern
  • Open Anabaptist
  • Foundationalist

Darrin Patrick - Streams of the Emerging Church

  • Emerging Conversational
  • Emerging Attractional
  • Emerging Incarnational

Finally, I got it. Actually, there were two kinds of disconnect for me with various systems.

First, in Jonathan’s system and some of the other approaches, I could not really find my own situation in ANY of the categories.

  • I’m not a Traditional by beliefs or practice, but served a Traditional church for the past five years.
  • I’m not a Tweener; though I feel the tension and dissatisfaction, I lived in it consciously because of calling.
  • I’m not exactly an Exiter; I’m already quite clear on what my preferences are and are not when it comes to traditionally organized churches, but I have for many years maintained an alternative through processing everyday life with a non-organizational cluster of disciple-friends/soul-friends.
  • I’m sort of an Explorer because I have involved myself for significant amounts of time in residential communities, house churches, decentralized discipleship groups, organic church models, pioneering church plants and ministries, etc. - BUT that doesn’t account for involvement in multiple forms simultaneously, including a Traditional church, which would constitute “exploring” the known, not the unknown.

(Sidenote on some details: I recently completed a five-year gig, consulting with paid staff and volunteer leaders in a primarily traditional/pragmatic church where the leaders wanted to understand emerging generations and ensure they developed younger generation leaders to pass their legacy to. I let the senior pastor know up front that I did not share a commitment to their Pragmatic paradigm, attractional/seeker-sensitive methodological model, with minimal community outreach. My preferred approaches are far more in the Holistic paradigm, organic/multiplied discipleship model, with intentional cultural contextualization. [See The Younger Evangelicals by Robert Webber for in-depth descriptions of Traditional, Pragmatic, and Holistic/Younger Evangelical Paradigms.] However, I persevered with them for that time, because that was a calling and a commitment - not because I felt at home. So, I was highly dissatisfied at the same time I was highly involved. Go figure … the usual conundrum for those of us who are paradoxical and intercultural - but that simply means this particular system didn’t fit someone like me very well. And if that is so, what other kinds of people can’t find their situation in a system for  taxonomies of emergence?)

Second, in some of the other systems, ironically, I found myself in the opposite problem: I did not really fit into any one of the categories alone, because I fit into MANY (or all) categories simultaneously.

According to some composite of these categories, I guess I must be a relevantly Anabaptist and praxologically prophetic post-lib-servative post-evangelical, who is intentionally misionally conversation while being incarnational, and who is not really a reconstructionist while still being a reconstructivist, yet not a political or apolitical but certainly into the social transformational but not by syncretizing culturally nor isolating contextually.

Ummm … what’s my one category again, please?

Oh, yike-a-bee!

Because I actually integrate significant features from so many different categories, that probably means that those systems were set up as linear and the divisions were meant to be mutually exclusive. But such rigid boundaries doesn’t work - at least, not for people like me who are holistic and intercultural. This is the same basic gut-level response I had when first viewing the Spiritual Continuum chart in Willow Creek’s Reveal self-study. Who am I - according to their system - if I have some areas in my life where I’m exploring God’s Word and work, other areas where I’m growing, others where I already feel relatively close to God, and others where we’re really tight with where He and me are at. (Okay, I know that was bad grammar … I do have an ESL degree, after all … but grubby grammar still makes for good rhymes sometimes. Also, if you totally live by degrees, you can die by degrees!)

To fit into someone’s too-linear system, I either have to overlook parts of my being that I consider important, or try to conform to a system I know doesn’t really fit, or create a system that at least fits we who are intercultural people. (For more about what I mean by the elusive terms intercultural people, see my futuristguy blog page on Interpolators.)

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, well … it ain’t much of a stretch to figure out which option I’ll go with!

Stay tuned … a couple more posts to go to on this subject before shifting back to The Golden Compass and/or Willow Creek’s Reveal self-study … now gotta go read other people’s comments on Jonathan’s categories …

Jump forward to Taxonomies of Emergence, Part 2 - Key Problems, Important Possibilities