Why the Emerging Church Movement Failed: Part 3, When Evangelism Became Deconstruction

As a series reminder, do check out the Emerged podcast hosted by Tony Jones and Tripp Fuller, their oral history of the emerging church movement (webpage here, Apple podcast here, and Spotify here).

So, why did the emerging church movement struggle to establish churches? Why did it become a largely online and conference-centric movement only to disappear into the ether? 

What happened to the church in the emerging church?

To be fair, some churches were planted and continue to thrive. And as I pointed out in the first post, many evangelical churches were shaped by the emerging church movement and continue to reflect its enduring legacy. So, the emerging church movement didn't vanish without leaving any ecclesial trace. 

Still, beyond these lingering impacts, the "emerging church" largely vanished. Why?

Recall, one of the central features of the emerging church movement was its engagement with post-modernity. At the start of the movement, this engagement had an evangelistic and missional thrust: How can we reach our post-modern culture where suspicions of meta-narratives and institutional authority are prevalent? Simply put: How do we evangelize in a post-modern culture?

However, very quickly it became apparent that many of the leaders within the emerging church weren't really thinking about evangelizing a post-modern culture but were, instead, proclaiming a post-modern Christianity. An example here would be the trajectory of the work of Peter Rollins. At the start, Peter's work in his book How (Not) to Speak of God was a very helpful intervention in helping us talk and think about God in a post-modern context. (I loved that book.) But as Peter's work progressed deeper into Christian a/theism it became what he called, "pyrotheology," a call for the wholesale deconstruction and demolition of Christian faith. A "burn the house down" approach to faith. All metaphysical convictions had to be jettisoned.  

As I described in Part 1, the emerging church conversation began by trying to help GenX and Millennial Christins live with doubt, and even leverage those doubts toward good outcomes. But "learning to live with doubt" eventually morphed into what we today call "deconstruction," the active tearing down of previously held convictions and beliefs.

To be sure, as I've shared many times, deconstruction is a healthy and vital process in our faith development. We all have to leave behind beliefs which are broken, unhealthy, or immature. But it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that it's very hard to plant and grow thriving churches around a bunch of people who are deconstructing. This isn't rocket science. There has to be some positive belief and conviction at the heart of your church. A church built upon negation isn't going to be around very long. Feel free to evangelize people into nothingness. Go ahead and burn it all down. But while people might buy books or pay money to come to a conference centered on deconstruction, as general rule people don't show up on Sunday mornings to worship a void.

In hindsight, the outcome was predictable. When evangelism was replaced with deconstruction within the emerging church movement any attempted ecclesiology was going to fail. You can't build churches upon deconstruction. 

What deconstruction can and did create were spiritual seekers. In fact, many leaders and followers of the emerging church movement would today be much more comfortable describing themselves as a "spiritual seeker" than as a Christian. But when "Christians" became "spiritual seekers" nothing interesting or distinctive was going to be left of the movement. Spiritual seekers are dime a dozen. 

So, that's another part of why the emerging church movement failed. The emerging church deconstructed itself out of existence to dissipate into the haze of our "spiritual but not religious" culture.