with friends like this...

On Sojo's God's Politics blog, Shane Claiborne, an (maybe former) emergent in good standing, has thrown the emergent church under the bus. It's quite a mess, as he employs all the 'bad language' against it that they like to hurl against everyone else. Emphases mine.

A decade or so ago, a bunch of young, mostly white evangelicals started seeing similar conversations beginning to spark all over the place about the reshaping of evangelicalism, the rethinking of missions, and reimagining what it really means to be the church...

Nonetheless it has always been evident that this is not the whole conversation or renewal happening in the church — and the fact that the dozens of books and cover stories done on the “emerging church” hailed mostly faces of white men shows the many forces of colonialism, privilege, and all the other principalities and powers that still threaten to hold our faith captive...

...In my opinion, “the movement” became a bit narcissistic, and often became little more than theological masturbation:...

Some “emerging church” folks have repeated some of the mistakes of fundamentalism (only with more tattoos), and others have repeated the mistakes of liberalism (only with more wit).

So all that to say, I find the “emerging church” language, at least the Emergent™ brand, utterly unhelpful. So I will not spend much energy, beyond this note, to try and defend, or for that matter destroy, what seems to me little more than a brand name for a product no one can identify.

And, of couse, Claiborne engages in a bit of, shall we say, covering his own backside.

In fact, much of the time I find myself agreeing wholeheartedly with critics who thought they were critiquing me but really were only critiquing “the emerging church.” I was merely guilty by association, and an association with something I could not even identify, much less align with.

With FoEs like that, emergent almost doesn't need people like me.