Emergent
From Neoredemptive
pomotivators
From our writeup on the emerging church:
The emerging church overlaps with, but is not the same as, Emergent. Emerging churches are those taking part in this conversation; Emergent is a brand name owned by Zondervan to describe a subset of the emerging church which it is popularizing through its publishing arm.
Emerging churches tend to be characterized by generous use of and emphasis upon multi-sensory worship, experience as a means of knowing, community, and spiritual formation. Emergent churches tend to carry the same characteristics, but tend to add to these a Post-Conservative theological method and emphases upon community over and against authority, leadership, and structure, experience over and against proposition, and spiritual formation over and against confession and doctrinal agreement.
We're not the only ones who think distinguishing Emerging and Emergent is significant. Mark Driscoll emphasizes the distinction in A Pastoral Perspective on the Emergent Church:
That team [Leadership Network's informal team of speakers on the church in postmodern culture] eventually morphed into what is now known as Emergent. This name has caused much confusion because there is a difference between what is Emerging and what is Emergent.
First, the Emerging church is a broad category that encompasses a wide variety of churches and Christians who are seeking to be effective missionaries wherever they live. This includes Europeans and Australians who are having the same conversation as their American counterparts. The Emerging church includes three distinct types of Christians. In a conversation with Dr. Ed Stetzer, a noted missiologist, he classified them as the Relevants, Reconstructionists, and Revisionists.
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If both doctrine and practice are constantly changing, the result is living heresy, which is where I fear the Revisionist Emergent tribe of the Emerging church is heading.
We are very excited about the conversations being had in the Emerging Church. We're not so hot on the answers that the Emergent wing are coming up with, and are even less hot on some of their champions' evasiveness and refusal to deal in "answers" at all.
Critique
A healthy understanding of the gospel embraces community with leadership, experience informed by proposition, and spiritual formation guided by confession of a shared body of doctrine. We become very suspicious of movements valuing community over and against leadership, experience over and against proposition, and behavior over and against confession; these are all false dichotomies, and the resulting imbalances are generally fatal, both to the rejected value and the preferred one.
It should not escape scrutiny that "emergent" theology and praxis identifies itself very clearly with a humanistic worldview -- post-modernity -- and with its criticisms of the excesses of modernity (and particularly the evangelical forms). In doing so, the movement places itself in danger of precisely the same fault it sees in the "modern" evangelical church -- allowing our thought, speech, and praxis to be defined by the popular intellectual norms of the day (whether they be modern or post-modern). What is needed is not the next trendy secular thought system; rather, we need to measure all things against the "norming norm" of the Gospel, and correct those things which do not agree with it.
