# Giving Up On Emergent?
There’s been a little dust up recently regarding the status of the Emerging/Emergent Church. Nick from the Nick and Josh Podcast voiced his disappointment here. Josh chimed in here. Tony Jones has a response here.
I don’t begrudge Nick or Josh’s frustration but I think the frustrations are misguided. Nick writes:
My friends and I believed that there was a massive tide of change coming. We believed that everything was going to change. We found more and more people reading books by McLaren or others and we thought the interactions with these books would change the world. We knew that there would be this new kind of Christian. We believed that Christianity was on the cusp of evolution.
I can only speak for my group, but we left the church. We didn’t want to be in the reform game and we decided we would let the change come to the church as we gathered outside, if this wave hit the church, we would rush back in and embrace it, but we couldn’t deal with Christianity in it’s present state and these Emergent Conversations were our only way to hold on to Jesus at all.
We didn’t want Emergent to become the new club, but we wanted it to organize so that through gatherings, cohorts, and online social networks it could create it’s own grouping and lovingly force some voices out into the open. That happened a little. But it seems that recently we have lost hope in the Emergent movement. It took it’s hits from the conservatives and instead of coming out stronger for it, it sort of fizzled.
So with that out of the way, Nick and I had a little video chat about it all and here it is:
I really appreciate Nick’s willingness to chat about it and I’m really glad we were able to do this rather than just me writing about it.
June 6th, 2009 at 8:40 pm
Zach, thanks for the chat. Thanks for letting me vent, but also providing critique.
June 7th, 2009 at 5:39 am
Thanks for doing this, Zach. One of the problems with the Interwebs is that it gives the mic to woefully uninformed persons. EV didn’t give event insurance to someone?!? What? There’s just a lot of rumor and innuendo in some of Nick’s comments.
And he says he’s no longer interested in being involved in emergent at the national level, but as far as I know, he never was. It’s strange that someone who’s never volunteered for or given money to the national organization would be disillusioned with it.
Regarding the critique that EV is too church-focused and not enough intentional-community-focused, I don’t get it. First, I could point you to many non-ecclesial communities who have affinity for emergent, and second, there are probably 10,000 churches in America for every “intentional community.”
By the way, can we all please stop using the phrase “intentional community”? It’s nothing more than a euphemism.
Bottom line: The problem for those of us who has led EV is that we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t. If I’m the national coordinator and we raise money, people are pissed that we’re becoming a denomination and that we’ve sold out for having publishing partnerships. But if we flatten the organization and give it back to the people, then we’re fizzling out and aren’t fulfilling the promise.
June 7th, 2009 at 5:43 am
But let me also say that, while I probably sound overly defensive in my previous comments, I’ve always liked Nick. I just find this whole meme very odd. It’s like me being really disappointed that Larry Fitzgerald didn’t get the Cardinals a Super Bowl ring, even though I don’t follow the Cardinals and I’ve pretty much given up on the NFL as nothing more than a business that sells sex, alcohol, and violence.
June 7th, 2009 at 6:35 am
Good chat Zach. I think you’re right about slow change, our world is so concerned with efficiency, e.g. texting and twitter, but the Gospel is by no means efficient. It’s like a mustard seed, it’s slow and patient.
I nominate Nick as the new coordinator of Emergent. I actually think his passion is exactly what is needed.
June 8th, 2009 at 4:51 am
[...] To be fair, Nick has further clarified his feeling in a later post, and perhaps best in a video chat with Zach [...]