It's the era of exvangelicalism. As we leave, or work to restructure church practice, I think it's important to take stock of exactly *what* we're abandoning or reforming—because if we simply react against symptoms without identifying root causes, we're in for trouble. 1/12
Watching American evangelicalism crumbling & storming all around me, clearly making way for a New Thing (or maybe an updated Old Thing), I'm reminded of the "emerging church" movement as it took shape during my childhood & teen years. 2/12
Validly frustrated by genuine issues within "traditional" evangelical churches, this movement had Big Plans. For example, they worked to replace lofty, inaccessible leadership with "relatable" leadership, & to swap strait-laced sex-negativity for "biblical" sex-positivity. 3/12
But we all know how that went. The movement gave birth to leaders like the highly-toxic Mark Driscoll—men who wielded their considerable influence to silence dissenters & weaponized sex-positivity against women, treating them like mere receptacles for male sexuality. 4/12
Today many once-hip "emerging churches" are plagued with scandal, & young people are leaving them in a mass exodus, often to align themselves with mainline churches or other more traditional iterations of Christianity. So. What went wrong with the emerging church movement? 5/12
This topic is of course complex, & there are many threads we can tug on, each taking us in a different direction. But one thing seems clear to me: the disappointing failures of the emerging church movement are the result of a failure to understand *what* needed reforming. 6/12
For example, replacing inaccessible leadership with relatable leadership is nothing but a shift in aesthetic unless it is accompanied by a thorough understanding of how power dynamics function to foster environments governed by fear & the expectation of conformity. 7/12
Similarly, "biblical" sex-positivity is no less oppressive than sex-negativity (in fact, it turned out be a great deal worse!) unless it is accompanied by a post-misogynistic vision for sexuality founded on mutual respect, equality, & enthusiastic consent. 8/12
Likewise, my Black & brown siblings-in-Jesus have many stories of their own about how the vision for "racial diversity" put forward by the emerging church movement of the '90s & 2000s failed to reach a complex understanding of structural racism & ultimately failed *them.* 9/12
Now I'm not here to bash the emerging church movement of my youth or to drag up any old debates. I'm not here to talk about motives or culpability or even the fall-out of these failures. None of that is the point. 10/12
My point is this: when we react against something that is wrong without doing the long & probably very painful work of determining what *makes* it wrong, we build a new movement with the same structural shortcomings as the old one—just coated in a different color of paint. 11/12
Because that work *has* to be long. It probably *has* to be painful. It has to be an identity-level examination, a full-scale deconstruction. Anything less simply will not yield a sound building or a safe house for the people God made & likes a lot. 12/12
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