Regarding the Vineyard movement in decline… I can see how it might seem that way based on the relatively poor Vineyard representation on the interweb. Case in point, the wikipedia entry is about 15 yrs outdated. I don’t know any leader in the movement who would characterize the movement as “a neocharismatic evangelical Christian denomination…has been associated with the Signs and Wonders movement, the Toronto blessing, the Kansas City Prophets and a particular style of Christian worship music”. It’s like giving a toast at a person’s wedding & talking only about their first 5 years of life… the juvenile stories without context of the whole life are incomplete.

It would be ok if it was in decline, but my experience tells me otherwise.. the signs of life are evident in the collective disaster response (vineyardusa.org), leading toward reconciliation with the muslim world (whydoyoufearme.com), breaking down “stained glass barriers” of following jesus vs christiandom (notreligious.org), intentional actions against human trafficking as well as church planting, teaching people to “do the stuff” (Wimber’s desire all along)…

All that to say, I agree that movements do die out, especially those that act as bridges forging the way (like the ECM & the Vineyard did). The question is do they find their second wind, or are they meant to be a one act play?

However, I wish to raise a serious methodological objection.

The natty theoretical wrap-up invoking Marx and Weber to explain what the ECM, Calvary and Vineyard are, evince an ahistorical interpretative presumptiveness that is clearly misplaced. As some of the comments above indicate, there is a great deal of life and thought in all these movements. Presumably Jones’ dismissal of such is the part of the revolutionary dialectic where the progeny tries to eat its parents?

Clearly Weber and Marx are valuable interlocutors in building a historiographical method to consider these movements (Calvary, Vineyard, and ECM). However, using them off the cuff in such a linear and uncritical manner, particularly on such classic but contested points as the revolutionary reproduction of culture or the routinization of charisma, is a really, really bad idea. There is enough critique of both proposals, from the point of view of critical theory, cultural history, and hermeneutics, that these grand theories must be appropriated with care. To trundle them out as supposed supporters of a positive point about the ECM or a negative point about Vineyard or Calvary Chapel strikes me as fundamentally dishonest, designed to impress all who have not taken an introductory course in social theory.

If anything about this post is “offensive” in the positive sense that TJ seems to want to apply to the fecund future of Emergent, it is the simplistic intellectual hucksterism that drives its analysis.