Following on from the "pros" of Cape Town’s InVia Emergent Church launch, here is what I experienced as two “cons”: 1. The Church claimed to be “inclusive”, “crossing borders”, “releasing the Church across culture ... across all domains”. It was not about “a privileged inner circle”, and so on. Yet attendance appeared to be 100% White Afrikaans-speaking, and, by far, made up of affluent young adults (see the photos -- and InVia’s website at http://www.invia.org.za/). For an impression of society as I know it, see this blog. And 2. InVia’s self-description was one of “inclusiveness". It rejected “exclusion” and “in/out” dualisms (including Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Jew). Yet at the same time, InVia rejected other Churches’ “obsessions”, people’s “laughable” outlooks on life, denominational conceit, and so on, with much of the censure being too vague to make out precisely who was intended, e.g. “religion”, "pseudo-truth", “exclusivity”. This was a strong accent of the launch. OBSERVATION: Personally, I felt confronted with too many contradictions here. This "real" Church seemed to be too "unreal" for me -- yet nobody seemed to notice.
3 comments:
Interesting. Did they actually use "emergent" as a self-descriptive term? Many of us from the old emergingafrica crowd are currently discussing some terminology, but emergent isn't even a possibility for a descriptive for ourselves.
Thank you, Cobus. The buzzwords which InVia uses are Emergent, and the Church is described as Emergent here: http://www.emergentafrica.com/blog/2009/03/27/invia-kaapstad-emergent-gemeenskap-skop-af-. Although e.g. McLaren claims that the debate bores him, there would seem to be a fairly clear distinction between Emergent and Emerging.
You'll notice that the site name has changed to "emergingafrica". It was partly some conversations I had with Roger that caused that change.
Terminology might bore some, but if semantics isn't important, what are we busy with.
Anyhow, I enjoy the writings of those who are labeled Emergent, but in our conversations we decided to rather stick to the overarching "Emerging", and work on contextualizing it in South Africa, than link too strongly with the Emergent conversation, which might just end up becoming an American clone...
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