emerging church part one: a patron saint

it has been a summer of post-modernism and emerging church for me.  duh.  it's in the water.  no one will actually claim to know what either of those phrases means, but everyone uses them anyway. 

i'm going to ignore defining "post-modernism" for the moment, but i will suggest a take on the emerging church.  it seems that the emerging church most importantly is protestants realizing that protestantism was a mistake.  again and again i have heard stories from people who have grown up in some splinter of protesantism who have come to reject "christianity" as it had been presented to them, but who have come back to the "big church" whether they had thought out the theological nuances of that move or not.  (sometimes who have come back are lapsed roman catholics, but perhaps the orthodox understanding of roman catholicism as profoundly similar to protestantism is correct.)

if that's true, then  i would like to suggest that the patron saint (a patron saint) of the emerging church might well be john henry newman.  it is interesting to me that of the oxford movement tractarians, it was usually the ones who had started in some dissenting sect, as had newman, who "went over" to rome.  those who had been baptized in the anglican church tended to remain in the anglican church.  to make newman the patron saint of the emerging church muddies what i said above about roman catholics, and makes my own broad acceptance of the "big church" as encompassing eastern churches "orthodox" or "nestorian," western churches "roman" or "merely" catholic.  but then consistency is still something i haven't received.

but newman's journey remains as that of a bright-shining (that's what brilliant means, isn't it?) pioneer on a path towards recovery of the great tradition paul speaks of ("what i have received from the lord jesus christ, i pass on to you") that many seem to be taking.