Isms

I’ve been doing a lot of reading recently from all sides of the current “Emerging Church Movement” debate. It seems that those who oppose the Emerging/Emergent Church Movement have one primary concern/complaint. It is this:

The emerging church is headed toward syncretism. As they embrace/engage the post-modern, post-Christendom, emerging generations, all in an effort to contextualize the Gospel for the culture, they actually lose the Gospel itself, and become indistinguishable from the culture.

I find this critique highly amusing and terribly sad all the same time. Why? Christianity, as it is most often practiced today in the west, is a highly syncretistic brand of Christianity. So much so, that the average Christian in the average church is nearly identical in values and behavior from the average non-Christian. We are all given over to materialism, consumerism, greed, and selfish meism. Talk about syncretism!

The warning to emerging churches is a good warning, but it’s coming from a segment of Christianity that needs to remove a plank from it’s own eye.