photo by Cindy

The Emerging Church is simply the postmodern church.

Of course any definition is a gross generalization and over simplification. Postmodernism resists generalizations and as a result the Emerging church seems to have avoided definition for a long time. They are an eclectic bunch and they define themselves so differently. Some emergents do not want to be associated with the movement when they clearly share so many characteristics with the movement. Some give very biased definitions of the emerging movement.

Examples of this:

Check out this Driscoll video. Some people are emerging but not emergent. Any normal person would assume that the words emerging and emergent were the same or related.

This article lumps Brian McLaren and Erwin McManus together.

Wikipedia says Flood (San Diego) is theologically aligned with the Emerging Church. Their website used to say “Flood is an emerging Christian church in San Diego, CA…” but they have since taken that down. Those words can still be found in google’s cache.

C. Michael Patton writes how McLaren, Doug Pagitt, Dan Kimball and Mark Driscoll all define the Emerging Church differently.

Open Source Theology tries to cover so many aspects of the emerging church in it’s definition, that the definition loses meaning. Would that definition fit in any dictionary?

I think as a result, those outside of the Emerging movement have defined it for everyone else. This is having pretty disastrous effects for the emerging movement as books by highly respected theologians are coming out attacking the movement such as D.A. Carson’s book. Yet those who attack the emerging movement don’t really understand it’s eclectic nature and thus usually focus their attention on one or two major players. For example, Carson and Millard Erikson focus mostly on McLaren.

So the Emerging Church has been mischaracterized. Whose fault is this? It’s because the emerging church leaders themselves have refused definition themselves. Once someone defines McManus as being part of the emerging movement, he denies it because he does not want to be affiliated with McLaren and Pagitt. Flood puts up a statement saying they’re part of the emerging movement, and then takes it down.

I think the leaders of the emerging movement are finally seeing the harm they are causing themselves by dodging definitions. They are finally seeking to define themselves and categorize themselves. This is an example of that where they sub-categorize the emerging church into “Conversational,” “Incarnational” and “Attractional.”