When last we left futuristguy, he was hemming and hawing (rather than lemming and clawing) over the taxonomies and toxemics of emergence. What will today’s post bring?!

RECAP AND RESPONSE

My last post suggested two main problems that we intercultural people (and perhaps other groups) likely find in attempting to fit ourselves into any proposed taxonomy system of “emerging.”

  • First, we may not really find our own situation in ANY of the proposed categories.
  • Second, we may not really fit into any one of the proposed categories alone, because we actually fit into MANY (or all) categories simultaneously.

Those two sentences took me less than a minute to type in the original post. The rest of the 1,600-plus words took several hours. But then, that’s one of the differences in trying to create something that is quickly read and more easily consumed, versus something that leaves a virtual learning trail and perhaps sparks production of producers – it requires a bigger investment of time. However, that’s okay by me. I’ll go for the latter instead of the former, as I think it’s more possible to help someone learn how to do it themselves … in the long run, at least. Also, I’m more concerned that readers comprehend the process of my thinking than that they agree with my conclusions.

All that said, it’s on to the next section of this stream on the taxonomies for the movements of emergence. This second post goes another layer or two deeper into detail, suggesting the kinds of issues we need to observe, analyze, and interpret in order to create categories. My intent for the post(s) after that is to give a tutorial that lays out an even more detailed system that can be used for do-it-yourselfers who feel ready to give it a try on their own home turf, and then share some of my own findings and probably some of my story. (I suppose I could be a poster-boy for farther-edge emerging things that are not readily on the radar … but then, if you are an Interpolator, you’ve likely already been to the current acknowledged edge – and beyond!)

CONSTRUCTING CONSTRUCTIVE TAXONOMIES

Creating a taxonomy of categories is tough work. To find an elegant solution to sort out all relevant data for a question requires sufficient familiarity with the particular field. Plus you have to ensure that you have a representative pool of cases to work with. Then you have to detail the case studies, analyze them, and interpret them from multiple perspectives.

The task of familiarizing yourself with a large enough set alone could take years, if you’re working with in a huge field. What I plan to present in the next few posts has actually taken me over a dozen years of active, intentional processing of my wide range of church experiences. So it’s not quite so tough to put an overview together in just a few days. Still, yuh gotta give props to anyone who attempts to interpret such wide-ranging data as is available for the movements in “emergence.” Doesn’t matter whether you’re highly intuitive, highly analytic, highly pattern-oriented, or whatever – it still represents a huge amount of work!

So I don’t take it lightly when I feel the need to present a critique of the process, and here is the essence of it: Those of us who have put together a taxonomy for the emergence phenomena don’t always unveil the assumptions we used to do our research, or make clear the questions we asked to catalyze our categories. So, it takes our readers a lot of effort to try “reverse engineering” how we reached our conclusions, helpful as those conclusions might be.

Should we expect them just to take our work on faith? Or does that actually contribute to conditioning them NOT to think for themselves? How can we present our findings in ways that are constructive, especially in activating passion and discernment in next generations of culture readers and interpreters?

APPLES VERSUS ORANGES

Also, I would suggest, our conclusions and resulting categories aren’t always as helpful as they could be, because they seem to try comparing apples and oranges. For instance, sometimes the causes for leaving one type of church are stated in terms of its supposedly deficient spiritual formation practices, but what draws people to the newly emerged landing site church is its theology. Or perhaps the system analyzes features of the methodological model in some categories of existing and emerging churches, but not in all categories – so how does that make the different categories have some kind of equivalency?

Let me get a bit more specific here. In preparing this series of posts, I skimmed through DJ Chuang’s article on Many Kinds of Emerging Church, the 50 or so pages of other blog articles he links to, along with another 40 pages of comments on those articles, and whoa! There’s a whole lotta variety in how we’re “supposed” to categorize the emergence in the Church!

For instance, one kind of system for emergings movement emphasizes EPISTEMOLOGY or THEOLOGICAL issues, another MINISTRY STRUCTURE issues. Another person’s system focuses on STANCE TOWARD CULTURE, or CONTEXTUALIZATION, or TEACHING or WORSHIP or GATHERING styles. Some categories are based on what VALUES people are for, others on what they are against. Some focus on what they want to PRESERVE, others on what they want to TRANSFORM. Some get into nuances of HOW TO conduct social preservation or transformation.

So what does that make … ummm … about a dozen factors to consider? And – horror of all horrors! – are those the only factors to consider? (Too often in my amateur research work, I’ve found that the factors missing from consideration often prove the most important!) So, are there more issues to examine, or should we settle on fewer factors to define our categories?

So, another problem for me (and so, perhaps for others) is that the boundaries on some categories are too loose. If I feel I fit into EACH of the proposed “different” categories, surely that can’t be a reasonable system, can it?! Not looking for perfection here, but something workable for the real level of complexity involved.

All this seems to mean that we need to consider more factors, more stringent boundaries, more categories, more …well, more … something!

Makes me feel like my brain’s gonna bust! Taxonomies are supposed to help us think more clearly, not be overwhelmed with confusion … so what’s going on?

THE MAIN PURPOSE OF TAXONOMIES

Wish I had noted the details and the source, but I was in a hurry. Unfortunate, indeed … however, I’m going to write about this anyway. A few days ago, I was making preliminary selections of cultural artifacts on paradigm analysis sourcing (i.e., “shopping for books”) when I ran across a quote that expressed our typical solution to a problem. Basically, it said:

We use taxonomies or typologies – systems of categorizing – in order to organize information in meaningful ways. If we did not create taxonomies, we would go into information overload.

Categories reduce the necessity to deal with all the details that relate to an academic domain or a field of research. Categories give us meaningful ways to talk about patterns that connect the details across this field of study. Especially in these days of info-glut, we could easily drown in data, were it not for our natural tendency to create categories, which is something that everyone – repeat, EVERYONE – does.

So, while taxonomizing eloquently may simplify things enough to keep us from “infoverload,” I believe it can create the opposite problem: confusion due to undercategorizing. That would be where we reduce the “data smog” too much by creating too few categories to describe a huge dataset.

 (Not so side-issue of a sidenote: If we read widely enough, we’ve already seen what happens when someone creates too few categories about emergence. Undercategorization to the extreme is what’s happened when some influential speakers/authors have created a postmodern “straw man,” then slashed and dashed it apart, and then act as if they have done something valorous for the Kingdom. In fact, they have not even listened to or typologized the real thing well. They’ve created a caricature which exaggerates the most prominent negative features of SOME “postmodern” or “emerging” individuals, churches, and organizations. Basically, they created just two categories: US and THEM. That is intellectually dishonest, spiritually contemptuous, and emotionally inflammatory. And that all serves to damage the reputation of Christ, giving plenty of people more evidence for potentially creating a caricature of the church.)

Anyway, these days, I’m wondering:

  1. Have we oversimplified our taxonomies for talking about the “emerging church” movement, and need more categories in order to be both accurate and comprehensive?
  2. And even if the current typologies are relatively accurate, are they close enough to the actual edges of emerging culture to predict and/or explain whatever emerges next?

I suppose I wouldn’t be asking the questions in these ways if I didn’t already sense the answers were “yes” to the first question and “no” to the second. Which raises a third question: Is there a system that can correct both of these problems I’ve perceived? (And actually, the third answer fuels the passion that energizes me to bother blogging about stuff like this in the first place!)

If you’ve read my blog for a while, you’ll know that phrases like “observe, analyze, and interpret” pop up regularly. We must use their related skills extensively when we create taxonomies. Let me see if next I can post an overview/tutorial on those three stages of research, and some do-it-yourself sections, and see how it goes… Then perhaps I’ll post my own taxonomy of emerging at least a few days after that.

Jump forward to Taxonomies of Emergence, Part 3 – Tutorial and D-I-Y on Observation.

Jump back to Taxonomies of Emergence, Part 1 – Where Do We Fit?