Philip Johnson has posted some rather pointed criticisms of the pro vs anti emerging church debate:
"The world outside couldn't care less about pro and anti EC debates. The spiritual ethos of today's non-Christian seekers has moved them into consumer-driven habits of DIY religion. The questions they have are not appearing on the ecclesiastical radar screens of either the anti or pro EC debates..."
"In street-life reality hardly anyone has heard of Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard and Rorty. Academic pomo is irrelevant to the daily routines of most people..."
"...DIY spirituality, magick, folk religiosity-divination, Wicca, Neo-Paganism, New Spirituality (new age), commodified neo-Buddhism, Sufism, Bahai, and dozens of new religious movements. What do these spiritualities say back to the church?"
Philip is right on the money with this. The emerging chuch conversation is focussed way too much on engaging Derrida philosophy and not nearly enough on engaging Da Vinci Code spirituality.
To be blunt, in my experience the average emerging church leader is only slightly more engaged than establishment chuch leaders on the questions raised by New Spirituality. Yet these questions are where the rubber really hits the road with street level post-modernity. If the emerging church is truely to emerge then it needs to take its head out of the philosophy department sandpit.
My advise to any emergent leaders reading this: stop viewing post-modernism so myopically through Derrida and youf culture and visit a New Spirituality festival or pick up a Yoga magazine from your newsagent.
Sacred Art
Spirited Satire
Emergent Blogs
Emergent Websites
- thin places
- jesus.com.au
- rejesus
- maranatha yoga
- the OOze
- sacred tribes journal
- the areopagos
- cafe church
- ember days
- sacred space
- alternative worship
- small fire
- n t wright
- the wheel and the tree
- open source theology
- graceway
- emergent village
- martin roth
- reality magazine
- brian mclaren
- emerging church info
- ginkworld
- online labyrinth
- vintage faith
- jesus: green man
Red Pill Section
4 comments:
Matt, thanks for dropping by my blog and leaving a comment. The "slowing down" made such a difference. Also wanted to agree with your post and quoting of Philip Johnson. The interface between Christian Spirituality and so-called "New Age Spiritualities" is a real area of interest and we (churches) should be entering into the conversation a lot more. The EC versus traditional church is really important to some people but it's very "in-house." Also, I really LOVED the Aboriginal Icons further down on your blogsite. I was looking for that kind of thing when in Melbourne a coupe of months ago. Didn't find anything. Peace.
I don't think you can paint with so broad a brush Matt.
Not everyone is actually into new spiritualities. Working class Aussie blokes certainly are one example and I live in a street full of them.
Derrida or Deepak Chopra? Doesn't matter to them - life's big questions are Emu Export in bottles or cans?
Hamo,
A few comments in response:
1/ Your arguement doesn't contradict my central premise, ie that the popular online debate is too narrow with its focus on literary theory, Derrida, etc, etc.
2/ I acknowledge that Aussie blokes are not all into new spiritualities. But that's only half the population. The uptake amongst women has been phenomenal. Other bloggers have noted how the emergent conversation can be a boys club. Let's not forget the fairer sex.
3/ Even so, I have come across male engineers and IT technicians discussing the Da Vinci Code in telephone exchanges and other venues. Don't forget - number one on New York Times best seller list for countless months. I would argue that the Da Vinci Code is not as irrelevant as you think, even to the Aussie bloke.
It might also be worth noting that among the occult communities and networks in Australia, that Perth (the state capital city of Western Australia) has been known for several decades as "The City of Light". It is a host to various spiritualist groups, alternative healing networks, neo-pagan and wiccan groups, theosophical gatherings, and "Conscious Living" magazine (a new age periodical with a subscription rate of some 30,000) is based there.
Add to that the Conscious Living Expo, which has been around since 1986, is an annual Perth gathering; and the Margaret River region is in many respects WA's counterpart to NSW's Byron Bay-Nimbin region and Qld's Woodford-Maleny region.
Alternate spiritualities are alive and bopping in WA.
And yes alongside that exists a beer and skittles man's man culture.
Also there are men who are prominent in neo-pagan networks, especially those based on Norse traditions; and there are plenty of male occultists who are alchemists, tarot readers etc. In my home suburb (multi-cultural middle-class) resides a prominent white male practitioner of magick, in the midst of Lebanese Muslims and East Asian Buddhists.
In a DIY context, the expression of interest in spirituality is informal, not connected to any institutions, and may occur in the privacy of a home, surfing the net, etc. So it is not quantifiable by an NCLS and census taking. And many who say "no religion" are not irreligious but simply refuse to be pigeon-holed, see religion as the opposite of spirituality, or want to see themselves as combinationalists (Christo-Pagan, Wiccan-Buddhist etc none of which are catered form on survey forms).
The worry I have though is that there is a bit too much of a fad going on in some church networks of talking about how they are so hip about pomo (sometimes reflecting half-digested pieces about Derrida), meanwhile insufficient attention is paid to the burgeoning of pop cultural alternate spiritualities, especially in DIY religions.
And a small but personally interesting yardstick of how hip and aware Christians really are: our own efforts in dialogue/outreach in Mind Body Spirit festivals have largely been sustained by a half a dozen individual donors. There has been no congregations, and no official denominational help offered to us to sustain the costs of a voluntary outreach.
And I might add that after having met at Lausanne 2004 in the Issue Group dealing with alternate spiritualities (with 30 delegates from 10 nations), the delegates all are concerned at the manner in which the issue of alternate spiritualities is sidelined or sidestepped in mainstream church quarters.
There is a slow emerging network in the UK showing interest in this courtesy of my co-author John Drane. But we really are a long way off from seeing the cutting edge EC people make a sustained and concerted effort to obtain training in contextual missions with alternate spiritualities.
And (my personal gripe) with 2 of my co-authored books released in 2001, the original print run for both titles shows no signs of being "sold out". Plus another book to which I contributed 3 chapters, that was released a year ago, the sales are dismal. Yet in the case of the latter collaborative work, there is some really creative case study work presented by writers other than myself, and some highly complimentary reviews have been made by missiologists, apologists and theologians. No wonder I want to whinge!
Cheers.
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