I’m a little late with this, but some of you may not have watched the segment on NBC Nightly News featuring the emerging church movement (more detailed interview with the pastor can be found here). Tom Brokaw (my oh my is he looking old!) did the segment, and after watching it, I have some thoughts and issues. Some others have weighed in on blogs as well: Ed Stetzer, Tadd Grandstaff (pastor of Pine Ridge Church, the church featured), Brian Baute, Andrew Jones and some interesting comments over on the Emergent Village blog.
Tom & NBC: Do your research
First of all, Pine Ridge Church is certainly no “emerging church.” And this is not just my elitist attempt at being able to define what an emerging church is. Pastor Tadd Grandstaff wrote the following on his blog:
“The are only two issues I had with the interview. First, was being lumped with the “emerging” movement. In fact the word “emergent” was never even asked or mentioned in any of the interviews that were taken. I DO NOT consider us an emerging church.” [link]
Despite Tadd’s outright refusal to be lumped into the emerging church movement, there was that great shot of him with Jerry Falwell. I don’t mean any disrespect to the late Falwell, but that is not an image I often associate with the emerging church movement. Pine Ridge Church is trying to be an edgy, contemporary church – a “candles and coffee” church; not an emerging church. I find it especially interesting that Tadd says that the word “emergent” wasn’t even brought up in the interview. Very sneaky NBC.
It’s not a youth movement
Also frustrating is the constant definition of emergent as a “youth movement.” Emergent is not youth group for grown ups, or 20/30-somethings. Sure, there may be some younger people who are drawn to emerging churches, but there are also plenty of emerging churches that exhibit a diversity in the ages, and are clearly not “youth churches.” Brokaw’s careless reporting (or whoever on the NBC staff did the reporting for him) and use of language (calling emergent a “youth movement” and referring to young evangelicals as “young evangelists” at the beginning of the clip) is just sloppy.
Hopefully in the future, there might be some better research being done. Oh, you know. If NBC is doing a story on the “emerging church” – perhaps choose to highlight a church that might consider themselves part of said movement…
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You’re right, I beat you to this story on my blog, but your commentary shows the wisdom of another 24 hours to think and write.
Adding to your Brokaw critiques, I thought the story’s political angle was a bit of a stretch. I suppose he tried to pick up on this NY Times story, “The Evangelical Crackup”. To my mind, emergent is less a response to the current political situation and more a product of post-modernity, an older church paradigm, and faithful people seeking the Spirit’s new guidance.
For a much better coverage than Brokaw’s see a columnist from my local paper that deals with emergent’s hard-to-pin-downess quite well [see here].
I saw the program and even without doing any research could tell that there was nothing really “emergent” about the church. It seemed more like “evangelical cool”, I think Tom Brokaw thinks emergent means wearing jeans and t shirts.
If Mark Driscoll is emerging then you could see how they might get confused. I’ve read three books by McLaren, I read this blog, emergent village, and jesuscreed.ord everyday for almost a year and I’m still not sure I could tell you what an emerging church is. Just saying… One positive is that people will hear that phrase and then maybe go read a book despite the shotty reporting.
great critique adam. it shows that people still don’t get it. i loved that the church blog knocks the article rubbing off the emergent label they received.
Adam, why, in this entire post that criticizes Brokaw for mis-defining the emerging church, do you not offer a definition of what those who saw the report ought to identify as the emerging church?
Also, you may not “associate” the image of Falwell with the emerging church, but in Gibbs’ and Bolger’s Emerging Churches, Eddie Gibbs and Ryan K. Bolger, Emerging Churches: Creating Christian Community in Postmodern Cultures (London: SPCK, 2006), the final section offers biographies of leaders in the emerging movement. Out of the fifty leaders profiled, twenty-six are from North America. Of those twenty-six, eighteen recognize some form of strongly conservative, fundamentalist, or dispensational elements in their background. (Speaking of not doing your research…)
Additionally, on your own blog you point out that you have”come out of a theological background that is pretty consistent with Conservative Evangelicalism. What are some examples of that you might ask? I didn’t know that Catholics were Christian until I got to college…and even then they were still a little questionable. During my senior year of high school, I read “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” and thought it was a pretty good book. The summer I graduated from high school, some friends and I went to Creation Northwest: I think I recommitted my life to Jesus 4x during the festival, and I came home and poured gas over all of my secular CDs and burned them in the driveway (including some amazing albums like, Pearl Jam’s Ten, Metallica’s black album and numerous Live albums).” (http://pomomusings.com/about/)
As I’m sure you know, “conservative evangelical” is another term for “fundamentalist.” (See Roger E. Olson’s The Story of Christian Theology for more on this), and it doesn’t seem to get more “fundamentalist” than to burn one’s non-Christian albums. In fact, it seems, based on your own self-description, that your picture from your younger years could have easily been the one next to Falwell’s. That isn’t a knock against your background, just a highlight of the fact that you need not act so aghast by the portrayal of emergent as disgruntled fundamentalists. Stereotype it may be, but stereotypes exist for a reason.
“Sure, there may be some younger people who are drawn to emerging churches, but there are also plenty of emerging churches that exhibit a diversity in the ages, and are clearly not “youth churches.”" Plenty? How is this “clear”? Examples? Statistics? Demographics? (Speaking of being “sloppy”…)
If NBC “missed the boat” it’s only because there wasn’t a boat to catch in the first place.
What is this statement? That the emerging church/conversation is not worth catching or just that it’s so loose that you can’t catch it?
Tom Brokaw is only about a half step above Dan Rather; remember the Richard Jewel fiasco? It’s disappointing, but not surprising, that they highlighted a church that doesn’t even consider itself emerging.
And it appears that the media will never understand the difference between evangelical and evangelistic. This doesn’t make sense. No media outlet would send a reporter to cover a football game that doesn’t understand the sport — why do they continue to use clueless reporters to cover religion stories?
Taylor,
The latter. Sorry about the lack of clarity.
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