The New Evangelicalism Review-1

I'm reading Soong-Chan Rah's book, The New Evangelicalism:Releasing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity. As you can probably guess from the author's name and the title, this is about how the Third World way of doing Christianity can come into the Western "white" church - in other words, real diversity and true multi-culturalism. I will be reviewing this book all next week, but I just had to quote some excerpts on his chapter on the emergent church. I've been yelling here alot lately about how I don't feel the emergents understand the difference between empowering the poor and regulating them with white (mostly liberal Protestant-type) methods and programs. Rah repeats this theme somewhat in his emergent chapter. Rah is invited to participate in many conferences including emergent ones. He finds that it is not diverse at all. I would term it this way - the emergents' talk about social justice and helping the poor is not getting input from the very ones who they wish to help. That is what I am calling regulating instead of empowering. Here are some excerpts from that chapter. He opens by describing an emergent conference he attended.

So there I was, sitting in another workshop led by yet another blonde-haired, perpetually twenty-nine, white male with a goatee....the workshop leader was focusing on church planting among postmoderns and the documentation of "pomo" churches throughout the United States. As he was listing these exciting "pomo" ministries, I noticed that not a single church on his list was a nonwhite church. In my nonconfrontational, Asian Amercan way, I raised my hand.
"Excuse me, but could you talk about some of the pomo churche plants in the
Asian, Latino and African American communities?"
The workshop leader didn't miss a beat in his answer.
"We have found that there are no Black, Asian or HIspanic pomo churches of any significance."

Rah goes on to say there are 50 emergent books out there written by an almost white authorship but only 150 emergent churches in the USA. In his opinion there is way too much influence from these emergent leaders for the number of churches they have. He then relates that there are between 300 and 700 Asian churches that are ministering to second-generation Asian Americans in the USA but just a handful of books, none of them under the "emergent rubric."

Rah talks about the conversation emergents like to have, but it is usually between whites (mostly males), thus shutting out other races of emergents. A few years ago he was asked to be on a panel of emergents discussing globalization. He relates that the all white panel (except for him) got into a heated discussion for about 20-30 minutes about the emrgent's church's role in globalization. The moderator noticed Rah had been silent and asked him for his take on this situation. I just love what Rah responded...here it is:

White people talking to other white people about a problem white people created in the first place -- why would I care about that conversation?

And then he writes,
I personally find the use of the term "emerging church" offensive. I believe the real emerging church is the church in Africa, Asia and Latin America that continues to grow by leaps and bounds.

He asks why these white emergents, being disgruntled in Baby Boomer churches, didn't join African American or immigrant churches instead of clustering together in a "white" club. Good question for those who supposedly seem to "celebrate" diversity.

In studying this movement over the past three years, I have found so much dishonesty (read that inauthenticity) and intolerance as well as horrible doctrine that will hurt people up the line, that I am absolutel amazed that Christian colleges and seminaries are panting after this so passionately.

In the next posts I will continue reviewing Rah's book. Right now I am half way through it and am looking forward to the last part where I think he will be telling us how Christianity here in the USA must change to fit a multi-cultural way of doing church, not the diversity tokenism that we see now and Rah takes to task in this very seminal book.