Emerging Movement

What is emerging? Lately I have been engrossed in thought and conversation about a new type of Christian living. Many of my ideas have so gripped my heart but many Christians simply set me aside as fanciful. It was then I stumbled across the emerging discussion and found that my ideas are shared by many tens of thousands more people across the globe. This is known as the emergent conversation.

I want to give you some extracts from emergent thinkers that I have encountered so that you will gain a better understanding of this. First I will begin with a definition from wikipedia.

The emerging church or emergent church is a diverse movement within Christianity that arose in the late 20th century as a reaction to the influence of modernism in Western Christianity. The movement is usually called a "conversation" by its proponents to emphasize its diffuse nature with contributions from many people and no explicitly defined leadership or direction. The emerging church seeks to deconstruct and reconstruct Christianity as its mainly Western members live in a postmodern culture. While practices and even core doctrine vary, most emergents can be recognized by the following values:

• Missional living - Christians go out into the world to serve God rather than isolate themselves within communities of like-minded individuals.
• Narrative theology - Teaching focuses on narrative presentations of faith and the Bible rather than systematic theology or biblical reductionism.
• Christ-likeness - While not neglecting the study of scripture or the love of the church, Christians focus their lives on the worship and emulation of the person of Jesus Christ.
• Authenticity - People in the postmodern culture seek real and authentic experiences in preference over scripted or superficial experiences. Emerging churches strive to be relevant to today's culture and daily life, whether it be through worship or service opportunities. The core Christian message is unchanged but emerging churches attempt, as the church has throughout the centuries, to find ways to reach God's people where they are to hear God's message of unconditional love.

Doug Pagitt gives 11 characteristics of the emerging church movement and a post-modern spirituality:

1. A Kingdom of God focus - join the Kingdom of God wherever it finds it.
2. Pursue faithfulness to God through new practices, structures and understandings.
3. Tend to have a hopeful and positive view of God's engagement in the world - we should find the activity of God in the world and join it.
4. Committed to loving God and loving neighbor and loving enemy in real ways in this world.
5. Deeply connected to the story of God and the Bible.
6. Living with the guidance of the Holy Spirit - not culture or understandings
7. Theologically active - thinking deeply about these practices
8. Openness to the "other" - outsider, foreigner, doesn't get freaked out
9. Want the good news of God to change the world and be the good news for all creation.
10. We understand community to be an essential part of the Christian life.
11. We are interested in the future more than fighting the battles of the past - we are people who are trying to live the story of Jesus in our world in ways consistent to where we have come from.

from “meltingearth.com”

you might not be emerging if :
-you think or act as if numbers are important
-you are sure you know what the term "pastor" means
-structure / authority are assumed (important / critical)
-your experience of worship is, in practice, quite narrow
-your future has a dependency on a building or buildings
-preaching / a message, sans discussion, is standard fare
-finances play a (perhaps) "undue" role in decision making
-systems / programs are primarily utilized to address issues
-scripture is normally dissected or predigested before ingested
-*doing* kingdom work is valued more than *being* the kingdom
-you've yet to critique the economic metaphor used to describe salvation
-you read, write or employ systematic methodologies of how to do church
-meetings/services are timed to sub-minute intervals, for efficiencies sake
-being cool / vibey / edgy (and not uncool) is somehow key to the kingdom
-dialogue, particularly negative feedback, is avoided - rather than welcomed
-mythological truth has not regained is rightful place alongside factual truth
-time at a divinity school is considered more useful than time at a monastery
-administrative announcements are allowed to disturb the flow of the service
-the terms "music" and "worship" can be substituted without loss of meaning
-your website architecture mirrors corporate america (mission, vision, values)
-you can point to a senior pastor / figure / person / personality in your community
-you believe society or people-in-general consider spirituality inherently irrelivant
-service elements are added without thought to their role in the holistic experience
-emerging church jargon appears on your website - e.g. 'emerging' or 'postmodern'
-you don't give a second thought to employing marketing techniques for your church
-unity is considered important, rather than a (negative) signal of (artificial) conformity
-your resume / credentials / accomplishments / title, appear prominently or are "relevant"
-you fail to see the irony in propagating "emerging-church" products via christian industry
-you talk, lecture, write books about the emerging church without being one in a community
-growing hearts (i.e. for loving God / loving others) is given less attention than growing heads
-what the central speaker has to share is generally the point - rather than the ensuing dialogue

you have yet to deconstruct church
and experience an organic emergence
of something unique to your community

From www.emergentafrica.com/node/60

We're talking about practice: how do we plan public worship experiences in ways that form individuals and form communities? How do we approach the Bible in a world that sees the twin dangers of narrow fundamentalism and shallow relativism? How do we understand preaching and teaching in a digital world that is formed far more by hypertext than linear text? How do we lead boldly in a flattened world? How do we lead gently in a world made cynical by larger-than-life broadcast personalities? We're deeply engaged in the rediscovery of monastic spiritual practices. We didn't invent these - we're not creative - we're just desperate and so we're learning from anyone we can about spiritual practices - and we're seeking to practice them with transforming results. We're exploring what it means to be missional in a local church context; we're trying to imagine what missionality looks like serving in a local church over a long period of time.

And beneath this - beneath the practice - we share this sense that our theology needs desperate revisioning. It's not that we expect to hold a bunch of new beliefs - although that is happening - but it's more that we sense we're coming to believe our beliefs in a new way. We're coming to believe our beliefs in a way which is different from the options that we're presented. And that new way is very hard to define because we're stumbling into it - and maybe making it up as we go along - but we hope that this new way of believing our beliefs is less arrogant and strident and defensive and aggressive, and we hope that it's more honest and deep and properly confident.

I do not believe that the Emergent discussion will form a “new denomination”. I do not believe that lines will be drawn separating this movement from already existing Christian movements. If anything, I could say that it’s effect would mostly resemble the reformation – but without the tearing down and rebuilding. The emergent discussion will challenge all people who think they have a grip on what “church” or “Christianity” is all about. I believe that this movement will have the effect of causing Christians to rethink their theological positions, to rethink what they think they know about the church or Christianity, transform Christians and churches into a missional movement. Present day western Christianity in my view is an entity. Book of Acts Christianity is a movement.

To find out more about this, there is an abundance of resources. One emerging voice that I know subscribes to over 2000 blogs on this discussion. Here are 2 that I frequent: www.jesuscreed.org and www.tallskinnykiwi.typepad.com.

Please feel free to comment if you have any thoughts.