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Defining the Emerging Church
The vigorous debate between the Orthodox/Catholics and the ‘emerging church’ that has been going on recently (see below for the links), which has been at times very illuminating and at times little more than a slanging match, has made me wonder if we’re not getting this term ‘emerging church’ a bit wrong. It bothers me that it can be so easily misunderstood - and so divisive.
I would suggest for discussion a definition along the following lines:
The ‘emerging church’ is the church as it emerges at any point across the ecclesial spectrum principally from Christendom and from modernism - or the church insofar as it is emerging from Christendom and modernism.
To describe this movement or phenomenon as ‘post-modern’ serves primarily to acknowledge that it is in some sense a self-conscious and deliberate development away from modernism as a philosophical stance and modernity as a state of culture. It does not mean that the post-modern church coincides in all respects with the broader western constructs of postmodernism or postmodernity. We may find ourselves carried along in the same currents as the theorists of postmodernism and we may find that we can learn some valuable navigation skills from them, but we are not in the same boat. We have to come after modernism; we do not have to be postmodern.
So what I think we should mean by the term ‘emerging church’ is not some distinct and possibly break-away grouping within the church, as it is often perceived to be. It is rather, in effect, a label for the process by which the whole church, or at least the western church, is having to come to terms with the collapse of the modernist paradigm in a progressive rather than a retrogressive fashion. Wherever that adaptation is taking place, we see ‘emerging church’. It is not postmodern church - church that wittingly or unwittingly conforms to the values of postmodernism or postmodernity - but church that is emerging from modernism and having, as a matter of necessity, to redefine itself.
This process of redefinition is crucial and has to be done well. It has to be done painstakingly, in humility and in the Holy Spirit. It has to be done in dialogue with other Christian traditions, including the tradition of modern evangelicalism from which many in the emerging church feel they have barely escaped with their souls intact. If we are going to borrow the tools of postmodernism, we must exercise considerable caution: they are powerful and can cause a great amount of damage in the wrong hands. We will have to ensure that a sense of divine vocation, of having been called to be a missional people of God in the world, lies at the heart of the self-understanding that emerges. We will have to live out that vocation. We must engage critically, seriously, persistently, and faithfully with the biblical narrative, which to my mind is perhaps the most pressing need: we do not talk nearly enough about the story as story, rather than as bits and pieces of homogenized divine Word that we invoke in support of prior theological commitments.
This is Life!: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis:
Why the Pomo/Emergent Church Is Extremely Dangerous
Pomo/Em Church Jesus: A Reply to Andrew
Is This a Conversation?: More on Em Church
Seraphim Sez Play Nice Y’All (Yeah, It’s an Em Church Post)
Andrew Perriman lives with his wife, Belinda, in the Hague in the Netherlands and works with Christian Associates, exploring new ways of developing Christian community in post-Christendom Europe. He manages the Open Source Theology website, writes at www.andrewperriman.com, and is author of
Speaking of Women: Interpreting Paul (IVP, 1998);
The Coming of the Son of Man: New Testament Eschatology for an Emerging Church (Paternoster, 2005);
Otherways: In Search of an Emerging Theology (Open Source Theology, 2007); and
Re: Mission: Biblical Mission for a Post-Biblical Church (Paternoster, 2007).
He has also edited a report for the Evangelical Alliance in the UK entitled Faith, Health and Prosperity (Paternoster, 2003).
