I have had a kind of love/hate relationship with the emerging church movement since about 2002, when I first became aware of this conversation younger pastors were having. I originally learned about the movement when I read Dan Kimball's The Emerging Church, a book that challenged alot of people's thinking (mine included) with regard to the way modern churches are equipped to reach a postmodern, post-Christian world. Around the same time, Brian McClaren introduced his character "Neo" in his fiction book A New Kind Of Christian, and the subsequent trilogy. It was a book about a pastor wrestling with (you guessed it), how to be a Christian in a postmodern world.
Over the past 7 years, other books have surfaced, pushing the envelope and spreading the conversation in a viral, under-the-radar grassroots manner. Many of those conversations were had through blogs (like
Scot McKnight's popular blog) and a new publishing house and organization called
Emergent Village. Of course, Emergent Village and others in the "emerging" conversation had it's fair share of critics from bastions of Evangelicalism like
D.A. Carson and many others. It seems that as the criticisms grew, more and more people wanted a proper definition of the Emerging Church, or the Emer-
gent chruch, or Emergent Village, or whatever this thing's called. People wanted to know what it's leaders actually believed about things like Jesus and God and the Bible. . . Some leaders started making others in the movement alittle nervous; they were either stirring controversy because of their extremely conservative theology (like Driscoll, although I'm not sure his theology is the source of his controversy as much as his unrelenting mouth), or because of their very undefined and provocatively progressive views of theology (like
Tony Jones), which to some, crossed the lines into heresy. And more and more people within the conversation tried to draw lines of definition that bound everyone together in some sense, but also divided them up in a way that would clearly identify who's with who. There was an analogy of "
5 streams" of the emerging church, and you might be in one stream but some people in some streams strongly distinguish themselves theologically and ecclesiologically from other emergers in other streams. People would say, "I'm ermerging, but
not Emergent."
And at that point, the whole terminoly of "emerging" and "Emergent" began to suffocate under the weight of it's own parsing. And so in recent months, recognizing how silly and confusing the language of emerging has become, many of those original leaders have been contemplating the usefullness of the "emerging" term in continual conversations. In fact Scot Mcknight and Dan Kimball have already sort of pulled the plug on their use of the term, and they're branching off to do their own thing, which is not clearly defined just yet. Tony Jones, the main dude in Emergent Village is also talking about the usefulness of the name. It's interesting. It took us about 50 or 60 years to kill the title "evangelical," and only 7 years to kill the term "emerging." Here's Scot McKnight's post on his blog about his new plans and his own take on what's happening in the land of emerging.
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