The "emergent church": is it a reality? (Main Forum)

by Brian Coyne , LINDEN, NSW, Saturday, October 22, 2011, 20:39 (577 days ago) @ Angela

Angela, Tom Roberts from NCR wrote a series called "The Emergent Church". It has recently been released as a book "The Emerging Catholic Church" and he sent me a copy a few days ago which I've begun reading and now handed over to Milly to write a review. In a way it is similar to our "exit stories" or the series run in America Magazine. This may be what your daughter is referring to.

Personally I think the institution is now kaput. We're watching the formation of "an irrelevant remnant" largely peopled by those who get their rocks off on certain styles of liturgy, language and rubric, or who work themselves up into knots about rules and authority figures. I don't have a sense that there will be "an emergent church" in the sense that Tom Roberts envisages. If anything those feelings were reinforced by attending the American Catholic Council. Those who were excited and motivated by Vatican II — who might have been the nucleus for "an emergent church" — are now aged or ageing and the call was simply not passed on to our children. The new generations basically see most of their parents as mad for still persisting. (There are always exceptions of course to these generalisations.) The information published today of what is happening in Brazil only reinforces this general picture. My sense is if there is such an animal as "an emergent church" it's still a long way into the future and its shape will be discerned and formed by generations which are probably not even born yet. As pessimistic as it might seem, I think we're witnessing the final collapse of the Holy Roman Empire. It's collapsing just as the Middle Ages eventually gave way to the Enlightenment and the modern age; collapsing like the old Ancien Regime, feudalism, even the totalitarian empires of Nazism and Communism.

We'll try and get the review of Tom Robert's book done in the next week and publish it. I've uploaded information about the book to the Amazon pages of the Marketplace:
http://www.catholica.com.au/marketplace/amazon/1570759464.php
It is also available from Fishpond:
http://www.fishpond.com.au/product_info.php?ref=1368&id=9781570759468
or
http://www.fishpond.co.nz/product_info.php?ref=1556&id=9781570759468

Brian Coyne
[Editor & Publisher]