Emerging Church 101
Introduce the topic of the emerging church among pastors and church leaders and you will probably evoke a strong response. That response will tend to be either strongly positive or strongly negative. We're either "for" it or "against" it. The tendency is to categorically reject the perspectives of the emerging church or to uncritically affirm them. This article is an attempt to make our way into the conversation without being polarized. However we finally regard the critique and proposals of the emerging church conversation, it is an important conversation to be aware of and, in some constructive way, involved in.
The dynamic nature of the emerging church conversation makes it hard to simply define or categorize. Part of the ethos of the postmodern approach is to reject such categorical thinking. Nevertheless, we need to be able to have some orientation amidst the disorder if we are to make our way meaningfully. The characterizations suggested in this article are offered as tentative, or working, descriptions. I realize that they only serve to identify general tendencies or prominent themes and can't adequately or accurately portray the entire conversation or individuals in it. But I think we can see some patterns that allow us to orient our thinking. I am not an authority on the emerging church but I am an interested observer. What follows is an overview of my observations.
