Emerging church
The emerging church is a Christian movement of the late 20th and early 21st century. Emerging churches can be found around the globe, predominantly in North America, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Africa. Members come from a number of Christian traditions. Some attend local independent churches or house churches while others worship in traditional Christian denominations.
The emerging church favors the use of simple story and narrative. Members of the movement often place a high value on good works or social activism, including missional living. Proponents of the movement believe it transcends labels such as "conservative" and "liberal"; it is sometimes called a "conversation" to emphasize its developing and decentralized nature, its range of standpoints, and commitment to dialogue. Participants seek to live their faith in what they believe to be a "postmodern" society. Disillusionment with the organized and institutional church has led participants to support the deconstruction of modern Christian worship and evangelism, and the nature of modern Christian community.
Definitions and terminology
Participants in the movement may be Protestant, post-Protestant, Catholic, or evangelical post-evangelical, liberal Christian, post-liberal, conservative, and post-conservative, anabaptist, adventist, reformed, charismatic, neocharismatic, and post-charismatic. Proponents, however, believe the movement transcends such "modernist" labels of "conservative" and "liberal," calling the movement a "conversation" to emphasize its developing and decentralized nature, its vast range of standpoints, and its commitment to dialogue. Participants seek to live their faith in what they believe to be a "postmodern" society. What those involved in the conversation mostly agree on is their disillusionment with the organized and institutional church and their support for the deconstruction of modern Christian worship, modern evangelism, and the nature of modern Christian community.Some have noted a difference between the terms emerging and Emergent. While emerging is a wider, informal, church-based, global movement, Emergent is sometimes associated specifically with the Emergent Village, co-founded by Brian McLaren, and has also been called the "Emergent stream".
Key themes of the emerging church are couched in the language of reform, Christian praxis-oriented lifestyles, post-evangelical thought, and incorporation or acknowledgment of Christian political and postmodern Christian elements. Many of the movement's participants use terminology that originates from postmodern literary theory, social network theory, narrative theology, and other related fields.
Stuart Murray states:
Ian Mobsby observes:
Similar labels
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, Johann 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 and Scot McKnight have now voiced concerns over Brian McLaren and the "emergent thread." Other evangelical leaders such as Shane Claiborne have also come to distance himself from the emerging church movement, its labels and the "emergent brand".
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. In the US, some Roman Catholics have also begun to describe themselves as being part of the emergent conversation. 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.
Marcus Borg defines the term "emerging paradigm" in his 2003 book The Heart of Christianity. He writes Borg provides a compact summary of this "emerging paradigm" as:
History
Although the history is little known in the US, there was a strong current of emerging churches in the UK and elsewhere that preceded the US Emergent organization. This began with Mike Riddell and Mark Pierson in New Zealand from 1989, and with a number of practitioners in the UK including Jonny Baker, Ian Mobsby, Kevin, Ana and Brian Draper, and Sue Wallace amongst others, from around 1992. The influence of the Nine O'Clock Service has is generally unacknowledged—perhaps owing to the abuse by its leader which led to the group's demise—yet much that was practised there was influential on early proponents of alternative worship. The US organization emerged in the late 1990s.What is common to the identity of many of these emerging church projects that began in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, is that they developed with very little central planning on behalf of the established denominations. They occurred as the initiative of particular groups wanting to start new contextual church experiments, and are therefore very 'bottom up'. Murray says that these churches began in a spontaneous way, with informal relationships formed between otherwise independent groups and that many became churches as a development from their initial more modest beginnings.
Values and characteristics
Trinitarian-based values
Gibbs and Bolger interviewed a number of people involved in leading emerging churches and from this research have identified some core values in the emerging church, including desires to imitate the life of Jesus; transform secular society; emphasise communal living; welcome outsiders; be generous and creative; and lead without control. Ian Mobsby suggests Trinitarian ecclesiology is the basis of these shared international values.Mobsby also suggests that the emerging church is centred on a combination of models of church and of contextual theology that draw on this Trinitarian base: the Mystical Communion and Sacramental models of church, and the Synthetic and Transcendent models of contextual theology.
According to Mobsby, the emerging church has reacted to the missional needs of postmodern culture and re-acquired a Trinitarian basis to its understanding of church as worship, mission and community. He argues this movement is over and against some forms of conservative evangelicalism and other reformed ecclesiologies since the enlightenment that have neglected the Trinity, which has caused problems with certainty, judgementalism and fundamentalism and the increasing gap between the church and contemporary culture.
Post-Christendom mission and evangelism
According to Stuart Murray, Christendom is the creation and maintenance of a Christian nation by ensuring a close relationship of power between the Christian church and its host culture. Today, churches may still attempt to use this power in mission and evangelism. The emerging church considers this to be unhelpful. Murray summarizes Christendom values as: a commitment to hierarchy and the status quo; the loss of lay involvement; institutional values rather than community focus; church at the centre of society rather than the margins; the use of political power to bring in the Kingdom; religious compulsion; punitive rather than restorative justice; marginalisation of women, the poor, and dissident movements; inattentiveness to the criticisms of those outraged by the historic association of Christianity with patriarchy, warfare, injustice and patronage; partiality for respectability and top-down mission; attractional evangelism; assuming the Christian story is known; and a preoccupation with the rich and powerful.The emerging church seeks a post-Christendom approach to being church and mission through: renouncing imperialistic approaches to language and cultural imposition; making 'truth claims' with humility and respect; overcoming the public/private dichotomy; moving church from the center to the margins; moving from a place of privilege in society to one voice amongst many; a transition from control to witness, maintenance to mission and institution to movement.
While some Evangelicals emphasize eternal salvation, many in the emerging church emphasize the here and now. In the face of criticism, some in the emerging church respond that it is important to attempt a "both and" approach to redemptive and incarnational theologies. Some Evangelicals and Fundamentalists are perceived as "overly redemptive" and therefore in danger of condemning people by communicating the gospel in aggressive and angry ways. A more loving and affirming approach is proposed in the context of post-modernity where distrust may occur in response to power claims. It is suggested that this can form the basis of a constructive engagement with 21st-century post-industrial western cultures. According to Ian Mobsby, the suggestion that the emerging church is mainly focused on deconstruction and the rejection of current forms of church should itself be rejected.