What’s killing Emergent

Highlights of a post by Jen Lemen:

celebrity culture we’ve got it bad. nothing could be worse for us, and we reinforce it constantly. we set up chairs in little rows in rooms with a podium in the front and invite men (mostly) to talk at us. men whose lives have drastically altered our own through their books, their talks. or so we think. mostly, they’ve rearranged our brains. and we still tend to think that that’s the most important place to be impacted. we still believe that the new idea will change us. fundamentally. how will we be made new?… i think information is great. i can suck in content with the best of them. but lots of knowledge can also make you think you are smarter than you are. it can trick you into thinking you know something–anything–that actually makes a difference. the best kind of input makes you feel quiet and small. not because the giver is so clever, but because you understand that your soul needs rearranging, not your brain, and let’s face it. none of us know how to do that on purpose… maybe at this juncture in the life of emergent, when we find ourselves on the downward slide into the evangelical sub-culture, it’s time for a different kind of information. not the kind that helps us do something or understand something, but the kind that helps us become. prophetic voices of strangers from the outside of our conversation. who can speak to our most pressing temptations: consumerism/materialism indifference to the poor a living out of the gospel that excludes strangers/outsiders power unexamined success framed by modernity obsession with personal progress

There’s so much in this post that is worth thinking about. It applies in so many contexts, including church. (Some of these factors are what led Soularize to move away from sessions with an expert talking head at the front.)