I wonder if the emerging church movement has become too intellectual for its own good.

After World War II the evangelicals - Barth, Bonhoeffer, Moltmann - came to fore with a new contextual theology that grew out of their experiences of atrocity and betrayal in Europe that told them that rational does not always equal moral, that strong faith really does require suffering, and at the centre of all experience was the Triune God. The discoveries and challenges of these thinkers were welcomed by the Church of the day, in the midst of a continent trying to rebuild itself.

So these thinkers were offered seats in our universities, given the space to develop their thoughts to pass on to students who would become academics who would teach more students who, in turn, would teach and write and develop new interpetations of faith in the world, new theories.

And while we remember with admiration the struggles in which these theologies were forged, we also recognise their irrelevance or inaccessibility today, where we sit on the margins of academic, systematic, rationalised theological discourse, and we look for a new contextual theology - something that gives life and meaning to living today on the fringes of both church and society.

Are bloggers of the emerging church movement headed towards the same fate? Those who see themselves on the fringes of the established church and looking for a new way of living in faith in this world, engage in the development of a new contextual theology, born out of being “postmodern”, of living in a secular and pluralist world. But are bloggers becoming trapped by their own blogopshere, where their experiences of emerging church are being seen through the lens of other bloggers, where the list of subscriptions on their RSS reader becomes the main context in which their contextual theology is developing?

Web 2.0 has been successful, so far, in bringing theology out of the seminary. Are we in danger of trapping it in the blog, where the printed word is still the dominant medium, and where the most authoritative bloggers are tertiary educated, well read, and not afraid to engage in intellectual debates?

I’ve been doing some interviews with bloggers over the past few days and have found a reluctantly positive answer to this question in our conversations. Some find EC bloggers their only experience of the emerging church, and the most reliable source of tools with which to make sense of their offline world. Some accept that the emphasis on text makes some blogs too intellectual for a wider audience, while others still are put off by most EC blogs, too involved in themselves and their creation of buzz words and concepts that are “cool” but irrelevant to local (emerging) church life.

If those in the EC see the steady decline of mainstream church (Church 1.0) attendance as a sign that something new will rise, perhaps we will see similar challenges happening in Church 3.0. Maybe we can expect a “post-emerging” expression of religion?

Or can Web 2.0 offer a more malleable, responsive and attentive relationship with the EC offline than the academy had for churches in the late modern era?

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