I’ve been involved in discussions, research, thinking about the Emergent Church. I even wrote a paper that was partially on it. I’m not Emergent but I am sympathetic to what many of them want to do. They are trying to engage post-modern people. The typical Evangelical church is not particularly good at this. The cultural differences are just too much for post-moderns. Anyway, here’s how I summarized it in my paper:
Attempting to summarize the Emergent Church can be compared to thumbtacking Jell-O to the wall. As the name implies, it is a movement that is still in process, it is still emerging. Furthermore, one of the movement’s key characteristics causes it to be difficult to define: the Emergent Church is missional. It is my opinion that to understand the Emergent Church, one must understand what it means to be missional. The way ‘missional’ is used in the Emergent Church, the term means doing cross-cultural missions within the Western culture. Tim Keller [1] (PDF) explains ‘missional’ this way:
The British missionary Lesslie Newbigin went to India around 1950. There he was involved with a church living ‘in mission’ in a very non-Christian culture. When he returned to England some 30 years later, he discovered that now the Western church too existed in a non-Christian society, but it had not adapted to its new situation… Some churches certainly did ‘evangelism’ as one ministry among many. But the church in the West had not become completely ‘missional’? adapting and reformulating absolutely everything it did in worship, discipleship, community, and service–so as to be engaged with the non-Christian society around it. It had not developed a ‘missiology of western culture’ the way it had done so for other non-believing cultures.
Generally speaking, the Emergent Church sees itself as the witness to the emerging, post-modern culture in the West. As we get over the (false) scientific surety of modernism, things are changing. The Emergent Church, then, is an attempt to be the Church of that emerging culture. To say that it is a ministry to “post-moderns” would be a gross oversimplification. The difference in approach would be comparable to a church establishing a Chinese ministry by adding a Chinese language service on Sunday morning and what Hudson Taylor did in China. While the church may have a Chinese ministry, Hudson Taylor’s work was to be the Chinese church.
As the Emergent Church reads Western culture, they try to speak with, not to or at, post-modernism. Therefore, the movement embraces eclecticism, intentionally stretching its arms around a wide variety of different thoughts and moods in Christianity. Some Emergent churches include ancient liturgies such as the Stations of the Cross but re-imagine them via modern art and poetry. The goal is to portray truth and beauty in other ways than just propositional
speech.
I’ll be doing more observing and commenting on the Emergent Church in my blog. Again, I’m not completely in to it but I do admire some of what it is trying to do.