1.5 Protest

1.5 Protest

That protest is mainly aimed at modern traditional evangelicalism, but also at the seeker sensitive church and the megachurch (mainly in the U.S.) as Carson accurately evaluates.[1] And this protest is very present in most of their books. In Emerging Churches for example Gibbs and Bolger often choose for headings that indicate a move away from one thing towards a ‘new’ and ‘better’ way. (E.g. Moving from a Spiritualized Gospel to an Embodied Gospel, Moving from a Dualistic to a Holistic Gospel, Moving from Privatized Faith to Public Faith etc.)
‘You can’t emerge without first submerging! What we have today is dead. We need much more than a reformation.’[2] ‘We need major change, qualitative change, revolution, rebirth, reinvention, and not just once, but repeatedly for the foreseeable future.’[3] Strong language like this is prevalent throughout all their literature.
The Emerging Church often sees the postmodern culture as a utopia of unprecedented opportunity. Working with the Hegelian idea of thesis, antithesis and synthesis Sweet and McLaren write ‘We … see pre modernity as the thesis, modernity as the antithesis, and postmodernity as an attempt at synthesis.’[4]

[1] D.A. Carson, Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church, p.36
[2] Eddie Gibbs, Ryan K. Bolger, Emerging Churches, p.42
[3] B.D. McLaren, The Church on the Other Side, Doing Ministry in the Postmodern Matrix, Revised and Expanded Edition of Reinventing Your Church (Grand Rapids: Zondervan 1998, 2000)
[4] Leonard Sweet, Brian D. McLaren, Jerry Haselmayer, A Is for Abductive p.242