the fetishist shoe of the emergent church

By the way, the violence of justifiable revolution is not violence at all – Zizek

Let’s be naive for a second and assume that there is a black and white difference between the words emergent and emergence. Or what about the nuanced differences between progress and progressive? Is there a major difference? Are these words so distinctly separate that one must be chosen over the other? I would posit that the Emergent Church has become nothing more the fetishist shoe. What do I mean? Freud speaks of a boy who stands in front of the girl and compares her to himself and in the middle of the comparison comes to the conclusion that the girl must biologically lack what he has within himself.

But really what is happening is the boy is attempting to cover-up his own lack. He lacks the ability to be the girl. He can’t be female and that in and of itself is a lack. Something not present. In the middle of this perverse comparison the boy is drawn in by a random object, a shoe.

And so it goes something like this: “I lack what the girl….but…ah…a shoe” – so rather than directlly dealing with the apparent lack, the boy looks for a substitution. A stand-in. Something that isn’t truly distanced from the situation but distances his ability to deal with the lack. The Emergent church under the guise of the term of Emergence or let’s simply say the Church has become nothing more than a distraction from the reality that
the Church as is utterly lacks the ability to fulfill the needs it claims it should be within society.

But I claim this is where we have gone wrong.

We have assumed our role is to fix something. I think our responsibility isn’t to repair the lack, but rather inform people that we are distracted by something that is attempting to fill our lack.

The death of the Emergent Church has to happen so we can wake up to the reality that there is something more here that lies beyond the hipsters, black-rim glasses and nooma videos. There has got to be more to what we offer than simply skinny jeans, hipster quotes, and an obsession with marginalized. As promising as these things are, let’s be honest, there is something deeper than what we are offering right now. This deeper inhabits a place we have yet to venture. But it starts by the confession and realization that we must move forward from where we are…

Those things aren’t wrong in and of themselves, but when we come to a place where we look exactly like the thing we were attempting to reform but only cooler, than we need to do a rummage sale and clean up shop. It is the reality that some have embraced this ideology as the thing that is going to save us from the historical issues we’ve been running from. We must recognize that we have found yet another way to perpetuate a form of neo-tribalism and have simply re-packaged it for a younger generation. I think the future of the Church lies beyond the roles we think we should feel in our culture.

Maybe our role is more simplistic. When Jesus enters the scene he has ideas of what it means to be a
Messiah or Savior, but so do the people who are following him. There is a foundational dialectic occurring
that isn’t recorded in scripture directly. People are wanting something that they are not getting, Jesus is
offering something that his audience does not want. I think our role isn’t to give people answers, but
rather open up a space where people have the creative possibility to engage with the above dialogue.

I think the serious problem is that we believe we are limitless in our social application.

In our relationship to the world there is a tendency for the Church to resort to some obscene messianic role
where we ethically attempt to lead an alternative mode of living which I would posit is the distraction
itself from what the Church could be.

Jesus infers at one point that we can do all the good things:give to the poor, believe the right the things,
pray, give offering, embrace the Kingdom and still not experience God, in fact goes so far to say that God
will get amnesia. We can save the world and God won’t care.

But he then doesn’t fill the next few lines with a handbook. He leaves an absence. A lack. Jesus embraces the lack as the possibility of the best response. But rather than lack, we need a culture of lack that doesn’t deny its own inherent dispensation toward developing substitutes that take its place. Maybe rather than focusing so much on trying to save the world, we need to get better at saving the Church.

In another place Jesus responds to how depressing the world could be and he encourages us to be happy. It would be too easy to transform Jesus into a hippy and dismiss his words as aloof here. He is talking about something that is beyond a chemical high, something that transcends our our bent toward emotionalism – he is speaking of choice. Perspective.

If we remain in the existing Christian order and constantly do nothing more then re-name our movements than what we are doing is moving forward under the guise of moving forward. We must be willing to introspectively examine the next step, which I posit must be lateral from where we are. Much like the tradition of the Emergence movement,

I think it can start in open vulnerable dialogue. One that includes those who don’t even fit in the emergent church mold…