This friday, Sojourners will release its May issue, and it certainly has more anticipation built up than I can imagine is typical for the monthly magazine. That’s in part in great part to the cover art, which is a pretty powerful (if not fair) piece of art.
The article hasn’t been released yet, although it will presumably continue the blistering critique the author, Soong-Chan Rah delivered in The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity. (Use Amazon’s “look inside feature, search for “emergent” and read chapter five for a taste.)
Tony Jones has posted a fascinating set of responses to the yet unpublished article, ranging from admittedly defensive to candid and thoughtful. It’s interesting even if you don’t care about emergent ecclesiology, just as a case study for some of the latent issues surrounding race and religion. Although Tony was clearly ticked off by the initial news of the article, and still probably is, his later posts reveal that it’s not because he doesn’t think there’s a problem. It’s more because it’s an issue that he’s already aware of, and has probably been frustrated by trying to solve. In other words, does the emergent movement have a race issue? Probably so, but it’s not because the movement is intentionally excluding people. It sounds like Tony is really working to keep that from happening, but with limited success. Reading his posts, I’m very sympathetic. But, reading Rah’s argument, I think it’s clear that he has a point as well. I’m curious how that plays out in the Sojourners article, but I’m interested enough to at least order the book and listen a little more. While the article is focused on the emergent community, the critique in the book extends to evangelicalism as a whole. It’s not just the emergent Church getting called out here.
Part of me wants to investigate that a little bit more because I’m all too aware that I’m (at best) clumsy on race issues. Furthermore, the stakes are high for the church, as race issues probably factor more than we realize in the church’s witness to the world around us. Of course, I’m more and more aware of that personally now that Kelly and I have daughters who are black.
I have so many hopes for the generation of the church that they will grow up in, but little of it will happen unintentionally. Rah’s critique hurts, but it might be the kinds of medicine we need.
