Why they're not emergent

Kristen Scharold is an Evangelical Christian who lives in Brooklyn, is something of a hipster. So...

Shouldn’t I be craving a new kind of Christianity that will undo my traditional evangelical upbringing while satisfying my newfound love for diversity, social justice, and, of course, soul searching?

Not at all. Despite my hipster leanings and stale Christian pedigree, I am not emergent, if emergence is defined by its theology instead of just its ethos. And after reading this book ["Why We're Not Emergent" by Kevin DeYoung and Ted Kluck], I am even more grateful that I never jumped onto the emergent bandwagon. I am not the only young Christian who appreciates many aspects of postmodern culture but who also yearns for the absolute conviction that DeYoung and Kluck present.

“Some of us long for teaching that has authority, ethics rooted in dogma, and something unique in this world of banal diversity,” DeYoung writes. “We long for Jesus—not a shapeless, formless good-hearted ethical teacher Jesus, but the Jesus of the New Testament, the Jesus of the church, the Jesus of faith, the Jesus of two millennia of Christian witness with all of its unchanging and edgy doctrinal propositions.”

This Jesus is the Jesus of traditional doctrine, the Jesus of yesterday and today and forever. He is not a Jesus who will go out of style along with skinny jeans, tight cowboy shirts, and aviator sunglasses.

Throughout the book, the authors make the case that the emergent church is simply a fad. In fact, the emergent church seems to be going down the same accommodationist path as the mainline, bourgeois, modern churches that they are reacting against. And, like the baby boomer’s megachurches, the emergent church is sweating to make the gospel entertaining and comfortable to their generation. “The mainline church bent over backward to accommodate modernism, and its members have budget crunches and shrinking churches to show for it. Will the emerging church go down the same nondoctrinal path as the mainline church relative to postmodernism?” DeYoung asks. In an attempt to “reimagine” the gospel, emergent teachers have merely repackaged the modern, seeker-sensitive approach.

Because they are reacting against the suburban, middle-class churches of their parents, the emergent ideal is an urban breed of Christianity. Yet the largest church in the cosmopolitan center of the United States, New York City, is Redeemer Presbyterian Church. Redeemer—which, coincidently, is primarily attracting twenty- and thirty-year-olds, many of whom are artists—is a church of rigorous expository preaching that is anchored in the Westminster Confession of Faith. Tim Keller, the senior pastor at Redeemer, understands that it is important to contextualize doctrine but that you cannot change doctrine. Even while preaching absolute truth, propositions, sin, and hell, Keller will quote the Apostle Paul in the same breath as a quote from Bono, and all to make a point meaningful to his congregation, not to win cool points. Redeemer is a church that is ministering to a young, urban congregation because of—not despite–the fact that it is dedicated to historical Reformed theology.

Discuss.