Emerging church

The emerging church (also known as the emerging church or the emergent church movement) is a Christian movement of the late 20th and early 21st century whose participants seek to engage postmodern people, especially the unchurched and post-churched.

Dr. R. Todd Mangum, Associate Professor of Theology and Dean of Faculty at Biblical Seminary, describes it this way:

“Emergent” is a loosely knit group of people in conversation about and trying experiments in forwarding the ministry of Jesus in new and different ways, as the people of God in a post-Christian context. From there, wide diversity abounds. “Emergents” seem to share one common trait: disillusionment with the organized, institutional church as it has existed through the 20th century (whether fundamentalist, liberal, megachurch, or tall-steeple liturgical). Its strengths: creative, energetic, youthful, authentic, highly relational. Its weaknesses: somewhat cynical, disorganized, sometimes reckless (even in the theological ideas willing to be entertained), immature

Proponents of this movement call it a "conversation" to emphasize its developing and decentralized nature as well as its emphasis on interfaith dialogue rather than verbal evangelism.

Membership

Emerging churches can be found throughout the globe, predominantly in North America, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Africa. Some attend local independent churches or house churches labelled emerging while others worship in traditional Christian denominations.

Values and characteristics

While practices and even core doctrine vary within the emerging church "conversation," many exhibit the following characteristics:

Postmodern worldview

The emerging church movement arose as a response to the perceived influence of modernism in Western Christianity. As sociologists noted a cultural shift to postmodern ways of perceiving reality in the late 20th century some Christians began to advocate changes within the church to respond to these cultural shifts. These Christians began to assert that the church was culturally bound to modernism and contoured their practices to postmodern culture. The emerging church movement contains a great diversity in beliefs and practices, although a preoccupation with sacred rituals, good works, and political and social activism became the most common identifying features of the movement. Much of the Emerging Church movement have also adopted the approach to evangelism which stressed peer-to-peer dialog rather than dogmatic proclamation and proselytizing.

Emerging Christians began to challenge the church regarding its use of institutional structures, systematic theology, use of propositional teaching methods, a perceived preoccupation with buildings, attractional understanding of mission (trying to bring people into the church rather than improving their world), professional clergy, worship lacking in medieval spiritual practices and the perceived preoccupation of conservative Christians in the political process. Some in the movement believe it is necessary to deconstruct and reconstruct Christianity in order to engage post-Christian Western culture in a two-way "conversation" rather than proclaim a message that is alien and irrelevant to the prevailing culture. Others in the movement embrace the missiology that drive the movement in an effort to make the Christian message intelligible to those they believe are "lost"

Postmodern hermeneutics

A plurality of Scriptural interpretations is acknowledged in the emerging church movement. Participants in the movement exhibit a particular concern for the effect of the modern reader's cultural context on the act of interpretation echoing the ideas of postmodern thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Stanley Fish.

Narrative theology

Narrative explorations of faith, Scripture, and history are emphasized in some emerging churches over exegetical and dogmatic approaches (such as that found in systematic theology and systematic exegesis), which are often viewed as reductionist. Others embrace a multiplicity of approaches.

Generous orthodoxy

Some leaders in the movement publicly welcome open discussion with other religions regarding the definition of Christian faith. Others in the movement label the practice differently, calling the interfaith dialog a means to share their narratives as they learn from the narratives of others. Self-proclaimed emergent author Marcus Borg, for example, notes that individuals who have read the same Bible "literally" may have different accounts of the message of Christianity, which are often mutually exclusive. Borg claims that many aspects of people's lives, including their political beliefs and their surrounding culture can provide a "lens" that can distort the Bible and influence which parts of the Bible they take literally, and which parts they may ignore. Some Emerging Church Christians believe there are radically diverse perspectives within Christianity that are valuable for humanity to progress toward truth and a better resulting relationship with God, and that these different perspectives deserve Christian charity rather than condemnation

Additionally, many participants in the movement assert that dogma has led to the tragic events in history such as the Salem Witch Trials, genocide occurring during the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, and many other unfortunate events. Recognizing this, many Emerging Christians reject such dogmatism, preferring liberty in Scriptural interpretation on many issues deemed "non-essential".

Authenticity

The movement favors the sharing of experiences and interactions such as testimonies, prayer, group recitation, sharing meals and other communal practices, which they believe are personal and sincere over propositional, dogmatic presentation of the Gospel. Teaching in the Emerging Church tends to view the Bible and its stories through a lens which they believe finds significance and meaning for their community's social and personal stories rather than for the purpose of finding cross-cultural, propositional absolutes regarding salvation and conduct.

Conversation

The movement's participants claim they are creating a safe environment for those with opinions ordinarily rejected within modern conservative evangelicalism and fundamentalism. Non-critical, interfaith dialog is favored over dogmatically-driven evangelism in the movement. Those in the movement do not engage in aggressive apologetics or confrontational evangelism in the traditional sense, preferring to allow persons the freedom to discover truth through conversation and relationships with the Christian community.

Missional living

Participants in this movement assert that the incarnation of Christ informs their theology, believing that as God entered the world in human form, adherents enter (individually and communally) into the context around them, aiming to transform that culture through local involvement in it. This holistic involvement may take many forms, including social activism, hospitality, and acts of kindness. This beneficent involvement in culture is part of what is called "missional living." This approach leads to their focus on temporal and social issues, as opposed to a perceived Evangelical overemphasis on eternal salvation.

Emerging communities participate in social action, community involvement, global justice and sacrificial hospitality in an effort to experientially know and share God's saving grace. At a conference titled The Emerging Church Forum in 2006, John Franke said “The Church of Jesus Christ is not the goal of the Gospel, just the instrument of the extension of God’s mission”. “The Church has been slow to recognize that missions isn’t a program the Church administers, it is the very core of the Church’s reason for being.”

Unstructured ecclesiology

Proponents of the movement communicate and interact through fluid and open networks because the movement is decentralized with little institutional coordination. Participants avoid assumptions about the role and nature of the church, attempting to gather in ways specific to their local context. In this way some in the movement share with the house church movements a willingness to challenge traditional church structures/organizations though they also respect the different expressions of traditional Christian denominations.

Creative spirituality

This can involve everything from expressive, neocharismatic style of worship and the use of contemporary music and films to more ancient liturgical customs and eclectic expressions of spirituality, with the goal of making the church gathering reflect the local community's tastes.

Re-discovered spirituality

Emerging church practitioners are happy to take elements of worship from a wide variety of historic traditions, including Anglicanism, Roman Catholicism, the Orthodox church, and Celtic Christianity. From these and other religious traditions emerging church groups take, adapt and blend various historic church practices including liturgy, prayer beads, icons, spiritual direction, labyrinths, and lectio divina.

Morality

Many emerging church participants do not subscribe to the moral standards of Evangelicalism and Christian Fundamentalism such as abstaining from alcohol, profanity, and watching movies with explicit sexual content. Those who identify with the emerging church movement are not likely to be dogmatic about private, moral behaviors which do not hurt others or the environment. Others in the movement seek to expand the range of moral concerns to include issues of social justice alongside personal moral behavior as they understand it.

Use of new technologies

Emerging churches use the Internet as a central medium to facilitate global friendship and to converse about theology, philosophy, art, culture, politics, social justice, etc. through various blogs, websites, and online videos.

Postmodern terminology

Many of the movement's participants use terminology that originates from postmodern literary theory, social network theory, narrative theology, and other related fields.

Justice

Many people in the movement express concern for what they consider to be the practical manifestation of God's kingdom on earth, by which they mean social justice. This concern manifests itself in a variety of ways depending on the local community and in ways they believe transcend "modernist" labels of "conservative" and "liberal." This concern for justice is expressed in such things as feeding the poor, visiting the sick and prisoners, stopping contemporary slavery, critiquing systemic and coercive power structures with "postcolonial hermeneutics," and working for environmental causes.

"Emerging" versus "Emergent"

Although some emergent thinkers such as Brian McLaren and other Christian scholars such as D. A. Carson use "emerging" and "emergent" as synonyms, a large number of participants in the emerging church movement maintain a distinction between them. The term emergent church was coined in 1981 by Catholic political theologian, Johannes Baptist Metz for use in a different context. "Emergent" is sometimes more closely associated with Emergent Village. Those participants in the movement who assert this distinction believe "emergents" and "emergent village" to be a part of the emerging church movement but prefer to use the term "emerging church" to refer to the movement as a whole while using the term "emergent" in a more limited way, referring to Brian McLaren and emergent village. Many of those within the emerging church movement who do not closely identify with "emergent village" tend to avoid that organization's interest in radical theological reformulation and focus more on new ways of "doing church" and expressing their spirituality. Mark Driscoll, an early leader associated with the emerging church conversation, now distances himself from the "emergent thread." Some observers consider the "emergent stream" to be one major part within the larger emerging church movement. This may be attributed to the stronger voice of the 'emergent' stream found in the US which contrasts the more subtle and diverse development of the movement in the UK, Australia and New Zealand over a longer period of time. As a result of the above factors, the use of correct vocabulary to describe a given participant in this movement can occasionally be awkward, confusing, or controversial. Key voices in the movement have been identified with Emergent Village, thus the rise of the nomenclature "emergent" to describe participants in the movement. Some people affiliated with the relational network called "Emergent Village" do not identify with the label "emergent".

Comparisons to other movements

It is sometimes useful to compare the emerging church movement with other Christian movements, which emphasize a similar approach to Christianity and inner experience.

The Taizé Community in France parallels the emergent experience in many ways. Traditional symbols in this community such as candles and crosses have intensified importance in creating subjective feelings. Taizé places a greater emphasis on meditation and the experiences derived from the monastic life than they do upon Scripture. They also embrace a religious pluralism that discards notions of eternal judgment. Within the wider Emerging Church there is a growing exploration of a similar kind of monasticism, known as new-monasticism. Communities such as "Moot" in the UK and "COTA" in the US are examples.

The Religious Society of Friends ("Quakers"), although not born from a conflict with modernism, has nonetheless influenced the emerging church movement through mystics such as Richard Foster. This influence is often seen in the mystical tendencies of emergent worship and devotion. Some emerging churches mirror the Quaker rejection of church hierarchy while valuing the sacred as a personal, subjective experience, others utilize their particular denominational structures for church leadership.

The house church movement, which has been partly influenced by the Jesus Movement of the 1960s and 70s, is considered to be a “cousin” of the emerging church movement because of its lack of structure. Most of these house churches, however, are quite different from those in the emerging church movement as they are conservative in their theology and structure.

All four of these groups seek fellowship with likeminded groups and value some subjective traditions and experiences. The emerging church movement stands out by its postmodernism as well as its pluralistic dialog with the surrounding culture.

The emergent methodology which relies upon community activism before propositional evangelism has been advocated by many liberal theologians who find propositional evangelism to be a form of arrogant "theological colonialism." These theologians tend to reduce the Christian mission to an effort to create a more just world (often through socialism) that is environmentally responsible. In 1917 Walter Rauschenbusch presented a lengthy rationale for this approach to Christian mission in his book A Theology for the Social Gospel.

Theologically, the emerging church movement bears many striking similarities to the theology of neo-evangelical Christians such as Langdon Gilkey and David Tracy, shares many beliefs with the more liberal post-Vatican II Catholic theologians such as Karl Rahner, and can trace much of its roots to the teachings of "postliberals" such as George Lindbeck. In many ways emergent thought resembles that of the iconoclastic Stanley Hauerwas. Eschatology in the movement closely resembles that found in theologians such as Jürgen Moltmann who advocate the "theology of hope." The emergent approach to interfaith dialogue is similar to earlier discussions of this kind of dialogue as found in authors such as John Hick as well as the "federalist/universalist" approach to pluralistic theology of Ninian Smart. Some emergent thinkers have also been deeply influenced by postliberal authors such as Walter Brueggemann and Lesslie Newbigin. Newbigin, especially, along with fellow missiologist David Bosch, offers alternatively nuanced understandings of dialogue which, nevertheless, do embrace a relativistic epistemology. Emergent ecclesiology is reminiscent of the "religionless Christianity" proposed by some twentieth century thinkers.Dietrich Bonhoeffer was probably first to use this phrase(Bonhoeffer,D. "Letters and Papers from Prison",1997).(See also,for example"Jesus for the Non Religious"by Bishop S.J.Spong,2007 NT Wright's eschatology, missiology and ecclesiology have also influenced emerging church theology.

Criticisms

The movement is diverse in nature, making the distillation of emerging theology down to basic tenets a difficult and controversial process. In spite of this, many Fundamentalist Christians have expressed concern about a few common (though not universal) elements of emerging thought:

Non-constructive focus on protest

Some Christian scholars, such as D. A. Carson have characterized the emerging church movement as primarily a movement of protest in which participants are reacting against their more conservative heritage. These critics generally claim that emergent books and blogs are more preoccupied with this protest than they are with any genuinely constructive agenda.

Denial of certitude of faith

Some Christian scholars criticize the movement for maintaining that certainty in faith is not achievable, and for rejecting the view of historical orthodoxy regarding the perspicuity of Scripture. The movement's perceived rejection of epistemological foundationalism and reliabilism, as well as bounded-set theology (borders for orthodoxy) has caused similar concerns within Fundamentalism. Such critics complain that when these factors are combined with the postmodern tendency to deconstruct traditional terms and biblical texts, with the emphasis on deriving "truth" through group consensus dialectic and transformational thinking, the result is the emerging church movement's toleration of doctrinal and moral positions that some Fundamentalists consider non-negotiable.

Unorthodox theology

While many evangelical Christians have been open to some of the criticisms that the emerging church movement has offered, most seem to have rejected the emerging church movement's views of several key theological themes within their soteriology and eschatology as well as the openness of some in the emerging church movement to alternative lifestyles. Many of these critics seem especially concerned about unorthodox views in the emerging church movement on doctrines such as blood atonement,salvation by faith, hell, and the sovereignty of God.

The "emergent thread" of the emerging church movement has been harshly criticized by Mark Driscoll and the Acts 29 movement that consider themselves "emerging but not emergent:"

In the mid-1990s I was part of what is now known as the Emerging Church and spent some time traveling the country to speak on the emerging church in the emerging culture on a team put together by Leadership Network called the Young Leader Network. But, I eventually had to distance myself from the Emergent stream of the network because friends like Brian McLaren and Doug Pagitt began pushing a theological agenda that greatly troubled me. Examples include referring to God as a chick, questioning God's sovereignty over and knowledge of the future, denial of the substitutionary atonement at the cross, a low view of Scripture, and denial of hell which is one hell of a mistake.

— Mark Driscoll

Propositionless evangelism

Some Christians contest one of the emergent perspectives on evangelism. These critics believe that the emerging church's view of God's kingdom is too narrowly limited to improving social conditions while ignoring eternal matters. One finds the distinction between the evangelical and emergent approaches to evangelism in some emerging Christians' rejection of propositional evangelism which Fundamentalist Christians insist complements friendship and good works in order to impact both the mind and heart of others.

Syncretistic spirituality

Some Fundamentalist Christians express concern that postmodern spirituality is more syncretistic than scriptural. These Christians have questioned a variety of mystical techniques found in the emerging church movement such as contemplative prayer (although this term is used with various meanings) and labyrinths; and they express concern regarding the premodern (as exhibited in the medieval mystics) and Eastern approach to "spirituality" found in the movement.

Criticisms persist despite diversity in the movement

Several critiques of this movement have been written recently by Christian scholars D. A. Carson and Millard Erickson. In September of 2006 an open conversation was held in Perth between D. A. Carson and two Australian emerging church leaders, Andrew Hamilton and Geoff Westlake. This meeting restated the proponents and critics positions. Critics have long recognized the great diversity within the movement which makes it difficult to critique with too broad of a brush. This conversation served to highlight that issue, as Carson affirmed that the 'brand' of emerging church he was observing in Australia seemed different from that which he critiqued in his book. J. P. Moreland refelects the beliefs of many evangelical critics:

Faced with such opposition and the pressure it brings, postmodernism is a form of intellectual pacifism that, at the end of the day, recommends backgammon while the barbarians are at the gate. It is the easy, cowardly way out that removes the pressure to engage alternative conceptual schemes, to be different, to risk ridicule, to take a stand outside the gate. But it is precisely as disciples of Christ, even more, as officers in his army, that the pacifist way out is simply not an option. However comforting it may be, postmodernism is the cure that kills the patient, the military strategy that concedes defeat before the first shot is fired, the ideology that undermines its own claim to allegiance. And it is an immoral, coward’s way out that is not worthy of a movement born out of the martyrs’ blood. -- J. P Moreland.

See also

• Postmodernism
• Postmodern Christianity
• Alternative worship
• Contemplative prayer
• Tony Campolo
• Doug Pagitt

External links

• The Emerging Church - Modern Reformation column by D. A. Carson
• The Emerging Church, Part One July 8, 2005, PBS Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly. Retrieved July 29, 2005.
• The Emerging Church, Part Two July 15, 2005, PBS Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly. Retrieved July 29, 2005.
• What is the Emerging Church? - 2006 guest lecture by Dr. Scot McKnight at Westminster Theological Seminary
• Five Streams of the Emerging Church - Christianity Today article by Scot McKnight
• The Emergent Mystique - Christianity Today feature by Andy Crouch
• What Should We Think of the Emerging Church? Part One - Christian Post column by Albert Mohler
• What Should We Think of the Emerging Church? Part Two - Christian Post column by Albert Mohler