Next Wave: The Submergent Church

04/24/2008

By Matt Mikalatos
Illustration by Michael Walker

LAGUNA BEACH, CALIFORNIA--
Pastor Peter Eidenburg decided his church needed a change, so he began to study the "emergent" movement for some ideas. What he found shocked him.

"Our church needed an infusion of cool," he said. "We lacked in style. We had Jesus and the Holy Spirit, sure, but our Power Point slides sucked and we never had candles.

"But the emergent movement surprised me because it was full of old people. For instance, Brian McClaren is considered some sort of leading voice in the emergent movement. I remember back when he was the bastion of modernism. I mean, he's still a bastion and everything, but he's like fifty years old. So I decided, if he can do it, so can I."

Eidenburg went on to form his own "movement" of churches, which he is calling the "submergent" church.

"Here's the basic idea. What if we had church ... under water?"

Using this question as a spring board, Eidenburg has had considerable success both in creating new theologies and in building a thriving underwater community. "We started with just a couple of guys meeting in a swimming pool. But now we're at the community center, and we've started raising the $47.6 million dollars we need to build our first open-ocean cathedral."

There are challenges, of course, to this new church movement. "We're having a real hard time interacting with the poor, because just to get in the door you have to own scuba gear, or at least some snorkeling equipment. Our church is full of young, upwardly mobile people who like the way they look in skimpy bathing suits. On the positive side, baptisms are easier than ever Š and we've never had the 'sprinkling vs. dunking' debate."

Additionally, now that fears of global warming have become a reality even to Republicans, Eidenburg notes that his church is really the only religious institution on the planet equipped to deal with the very real issue of rising sea levels.

However, critics point out that the movement seems silly, and that although the church is full of young hipsters, they are invariably both water-logged and wrinkled by the end of a service. Eidenburg doesn't have much patience for this sort of talk. "If there's one thing I've learned from McClaren, it's that you don't have to meet your criticisms head on. I mean, in his books if someone asks a hard question he just distracts them with some sort of plot device. Whoa! Was that a clown fish?"

In the end, Eidenburg asserts that the challenges are far outweighed by the Biblical evidence that he is right and all the "land lubbers" are, um, all wet. "It's all about the Bible at the end of the day, and what I see in the Bible is that Jonah met with God in the belly of the fish. Which was underwater. And David says that even if he were to flee to the deeps, God is there. The apostle Paul said that neither height nor depth could separate us from God. In the end, the people of First Christian Church of Atlantis (Laguna Beach) are the only people doing what Jesus would really want."

Emergent guru Brian McClaren has responded to Eidenburg's new movement by saying, "The waters near El Cajon are much too cold for clown fish."

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