“The Emergent Church: A Methodological Critique” highlights some major elements of the Emergent Church and briefly discusses its leadership. Because the movement grows organically and spontaneously, its participants see little need for “centralized, pastoral leadership.” In fact, some emergent communities have no leader at all. Emergent Tony Jones says that the “church should function more like an open-source network and less like a hierarchy or bureaucracy.” The EC is self-organizing and decentralized its leadership in 2008. While I admire many of the innovative things the EC is doing, I question whether its essentially formless structure is the best way to go. This seems like a good idea when reacting to the complex, often inefficient and ineffective structure of many churches, but does it prove successful in the end?
Not surprisingly, there have been at least two negative consequences of this arrangement. First, it has led to “a serious lack of consistency.” Having started with significant leaders who blazed the path for its followers, the EC has lost its driving forces. Second, this has left it “without clarity regarding its mission and purpose.” The rejection of structure has resulted in aimlessness. Although it initially provided an appealing alternative to the traditional way of “doing church” and engaged in a more holistic and orthodox expression of Christianity, I’m not sure how long it can survive given these current conditions. You can only go so far without clear form, direction, leadership, and purpose, even though these may look different than the norm to which the Church is accustomed.
I would say that I agree with your assessment of how the emergent church has approached the issues of leadership or lack thereof. I understand their motivation of trying to break out of the “traditional” way church is done in attempt to focus more on God as opposed to traditional practices that can become, let’s face it, more of a routine to people. However, a lack of leadership and structure would be something that does have a sense of aimlessness and vision. Also, I think that this lack of leadership opens the church up to the danger of compromising the word of God due to the fact that a lack of leadership and stance on important issues that people may be dealing with and want to know what the word of God says about. This is where a “centralized pastoral leadership” would provide great assistance and helps to ensure that instruction and the discernment of scripture is done in a biblical manner by or under people who are trained in hermeneutics etc. Not to say that it is always done correctly by the other spectrum, but I think that the emergent church lack of leadership does seem to open itself up more to that and lacks the clear direction and purpose the church is accustomed.
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