Learning to Walk in the Dark: Because Sometimes God Shows Up at Night

by Barbara Brown Taylor

While the dark night of the soul is usually understood to descend on one person at a time, there are clearly times when whole communities of people lose sight of the sun in ways that unnerve them. This seems to be what is happening to a lot of church people right now, especially those in denominations that are losing members at an alarming rate. While they experiment with new worship styles and set up Facebook pages, most of them know that the problem runs deeper than that. The old ways of being Christian are not working anymore, not even for those who are old themselves. Something in the ways has died, or is dying—truly cause for great sorrow, even among those who know the time has come—and yet at the same time something is being born. Many people refer to the new ways as “emerging Christianity,” though there are so many varieties of it that it defies description. The one thing most emerging Christians will say is that the faith they inherited from their elders is all worn out.