Updated Tuesday, May 13, 2008

'Emerging church' too diverse for easy definition

By Michael McCormack

Baptist Press

NEW ORLEANS - The emerging church movement, much like postmodernism, is too diverse for easy definition, with participants scattered along a lengthy continuum, Ed Stetzer told a Baptist College Partnership meeting at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.

Stetzer, an experienced church planter and director of LifeWay Christian Resources' research division, said emerging church leaders feel much of contemporary Christianity is consumer-driven. Their movement essentially seeks to express Christianity in a way relevant to people outside the church.

"The emergent/emerging church stands as something of a collective voice in an attempt to call attention to the ways in which contemporary expressions of Christianity have been domesticated," said Stetzer, who provided an early history of the movement's beginnings.

That collective voice originated in a 1997 event sponsored by the Dallas-based Leadership Network, Stetzer said. The gathering, which met near Colorado Springs, Colo., was aimed at raising up new leaders who would reach young Americans with the gospel.

"The name chosen for (the) gathering of about a dozen young leaders ... was 'Gen-X 1.0,'" Stetzer said. "Leadership Network offered a tag line for their logo. It said, 'Advance Scouts for the Emerging Church.' At this point, the term was really descriptive of the project to locate and encourage future church leaders.

"That gerund would eventually become a noun, and a movement would be born," he said.

In time, the movement has both organized and diversified, Stetzer said. Because emerging Christianity stresses contextualization, the "look" of emerging churches varies from place to place. Over time, however, groups within the movement have sought to update both ecclesiology and theology. That is where groups like Emergent Village enter the scene.

At the heart of the emerging church movement is a desire for more effective contextualization and practice of the gospel, Stetzer said. In general, the emerging church values putting Christian faith into action.

"For those in the emergent church, practice is considered a first-order spiritual matter, while doctrine is a second-order spiritual issue," Stetzer said. "The values of the emerging church illustrate an emphasis upon practice they believe is missing in more conservative forms of the faith."

Christian leaders both inside and outside the movement have phrased the emerging church's practice-centered values differently, Stetzer said. He identified four main values, for example, held by the liberal-leaning Emergent Village: a commitment to the way of Jesus, commitment to the church in all its forms, commitment to God's world by living missionally and commitment to one another.

Many conservative evangelicals affirm the contextualization emphasis of the emerging church while rejecting some of the more liberal theological leanings of groups like Emergent Village, Stetzer said. "Evangelical circles have very quickly developed a shorthand," he said. "That shorthand goes something like this: 'I'm emerging, but I'm not emergent.'"

(EDITOR'S NOTE - Michael McCormack is a writer for New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.)