The Emergent Church & the iPod
 BY SHANE ROSENTHAL [POSTED ONLINE:  JULY 18, 2005]

I’m very fond of my iPod. I pretty much have my entire music collection stored on my little 40gig device, and it can mix all my tunes up randomly, so that it basically becomes my own little radio station. But I have to be the first to admit that there is a downside to this new emerging technology. And that is this: because all my music is available, I have become somewhat less patient with individual songs and I often find myself reaching for the “skip to the next song” button. Why? Because listening to a song all the way through sometimes gets boring.  Skipping to the next “randomly picked track” is always exciting.

I think the Emergent church movement is sort of like my iPod. Think of it this way: the various traditions of Christendom are the music genres, and the various features of those traditions are song tracks. Now, most Christians have music libraries predominantly from one particular genre (such as Lutheran, Methodist, or Pentecostal), but emergent folks have very ecclectic collections spanning numerous genres, and all this is stored on an iPod set to “random play.” This is why one Emergent church will look and smell completely different from a sister congregation. With random play, you’ll never get the same playlist twice.

I get the sense that Emergent folks are dealing with the same issue that I am having with my iPod. Because they have the entire church tradition at their fingertips set to random play, the thing that has been exalted more than anything is the human will. What will be allowed in today’s playlist? Why are we skipping past this track in favor of the next?  Perhaps it’s not the really the “music” itself, but “change” that we’re ultimately after. Or maybe we simply love being the authors of our own playlists.

One final observation. The Emergent church iPod does appear to come pre-loaded with various music genres (Anglican, Evangelical, Medieval Catholic, Anabaptist, Reformation, Eastern Orthodox, etc), but for some reason, who ever owns the device appears to have a propensity for playing Anabaptist and Medieval tracks all the way through, while often skipping straight past Reformation tunes. Go figure.

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The original article can be found HERE.