Emerging Church

From Neoredemptive

Not so much a movement as a "mood" or a "discussion" (depending on who you ask), the "emerging church" is an effort to do for the church in post-modern culture what the seeker movements of the late 20th century tried to do for the church in modern culture: find ways to reform it to minister more effectively and faithfully in its immediate social context.

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Synopsis

Like the post-modern culture it sees itself as a response to, much emerging thought and practice is driven by reactions against perceived excesses of the Evangelical movement and the philosophical modernism which formed its cultural context.

Mark Driscoll characterizes emerging/missional churches as follows (in part):

Missions is every Christian being a missionary to their local culture.
The church accepts that it is marginalized in culture and holds no privileged position of influence but gains influence by serving the common good.
The primary culture to reach is postmodern and pluralistic.
Theology ranges from ancient orthodoxy to heterodox liberalism built on postmodern denials of true truth and known knowledge.
Churches are the people who love Jesus and serve his mission in a local culture.
Churches grow as Christians bring Jesus to lost people through hospitality.
Community means the church is a counterculture with a new kingdom way of life through Jesus.
Faith is lived publicly together as the church and includes all of life.
Worship services blend ancient forms and current local cultural styles.
Church buildings are sacred, as is all of God's creation.
(Confessions of a Reformission Rev, p.19-20)

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 used to market a subset of the emerging church with a particular left-of-center theological persuasion. For example, 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 add to these a Post-Conservative theological method, which often leads to valuing community over and against authority/leadership/structure, experience over and against proposition, community over and against confession, and spiritual formation over and against doctrinal faithfulness.

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Bibliography

The literature on the emerging church is voluminous and variable in its accessibility and transparency, in part because it is such a diverse "mood" consisting of a multiplicity of disagreeing individuals and no small number of individuals who can't even reach agreement within themselves. It is perhaps appropriate that it is hard to get a "big picture" of this mood when one of its only mantras is "incredulity toward metanarrative" (Lyotard's phrase, meaning disbelief in any sort of overarching theory, model, doctrine, or story as "true"), but this elusiveness can also make it easy for the uninitiated to wade into the emergent waters without realizing how quickly they are being swept downstream.

Having said that, a useful survey of both the sympathetic and the critical literature would probably provide the clearest insight into the current hot christian publishing trend. An excellent starting point would be The Church in Emerging Culture, which (in my humble opinion) presents the best of the "pro" and "con" thinkers engaging with one another's ideas and arguments (although one does wish that Brian McLaren would suppress his need to have the first, last, and every other word on virtually every subject).

Sympathetic