The Deconstructed Church, by Gerardo Marti and Gladys Ganiel

In The Deconstructed Church, two veteran sociologists of religion give us our most extensive, comprehensive, and revealing ethnographic study of the worldwide phenomenon known as the emerging Christian movement, or as they abbreviate it, the ECM. Though so-called emerging Christians despise definitions and generalizations about themselves, the authors begin with a helpful definition: “The ECM is a creative, entrepreneurial religious movement that strives to achieve social legitimacy and spiritual vitality by actively disassociating from its roots in conservative, evangelical Chris­tianity.”

Through participant observation, focus groups, in-depth interviews, surveys, and reading in the burgeoning literature of the emerging Christian movement, Gerardo Marti and Gladys Ganiel studied the worldwide network of thousands of emerging congregations and their participants (emerging Chris­tians don’t like to be called members of congregations—sounds too boringly institutional). Though ECM congregations do not yet account for a significant segment of Christianity, they may be the most fascinating, fresh development in the church in our time and our area of Christendom.

The key lens through which Marti and Ganiel view the emerging Christian movement is that of deconstruction. While there is much diversity, one thing unites: a conviction—in a movement suspicious of convictions—that the church in its big, mainline, evangelical, and Roman Catholic forms is not right. Emerging Christians are living out Jacques Derrida’s comment that “Chris­tianity is the only mad religion” and that it “survives by deconstructing itself.”