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The Emerging Church: A Postmodern Reformation 1
The Emerging Church: A Postmodern Reformation 2
The Emerging Church: A Postmodern Reformation 3
The Emerging Church: A Postmodern Reformation 4
The Emerging Church: A Postmodern Reformation 5
The Emerging Church: A Postmodern Reformation 6
The Emerging Church: A Postmodern Reformation 7
The Emerging Church: A Postmodern Reformation 8
The Emerging Church: A Postmodern Reformation 9
The Emerging Church: A Postmodern Reformation 10
2006
2006 served to be a year where there was a flurry of interest in the emerging church. In January of 2006, the then North American Mission Board missiologist Ed Stetzer penned an article that was posted on the Baptist Press website entitled, “First-person: Understanding the Emerging Church.†[1] The article was met with some resistance within Southern Baptist circles, but in the article, Stetzer coined a classification of streams within the emerging church that transcended the controversy and had served as a launching pad for later taxonomies.
The first group Stetzer calls the “relevants.†Stetzer says this:
There are a good number of young (and not so young) leaders who some classify as “emerging†that really are just trying to make their worship, music and outreach more contextual to emerging culture. Ironically, while some may consider them liberal, they are often deeply committed to biblical preaching, male pastoral leadership and other values common in conservative evangelical churches. [2]
Stetzer calls the second group, “reconstructionists.†Stetzer says this group thinks that the current form of church is frequently irrelevant and the structure is unhelpful, yet hey typically hold to a more orthodox view of the Gospel and Scripture. Therefore, Stetzer sees an increase in models of this type of church a rejection of certain organizational models, embracing what are often called “incarnational†or “house†models. [3]
The final group Stetzer names the “revisionists.†Stetzer claims that revisionists are questioning (and in some cases denying) issues like the nature of the substitutionary atonement, the reality of hell, the complementarian nature of gender, and the nature of the Gospel itself. He believes that the revisionist emerging church leaders should be treated, appreciated and read as we read mainline theologians — they often have good descriptions, but their prescriptions fail to take into account the full teaching of the Word of God. [4]
Later that year, there were three significant papers on the emerging church presented, one at the New Attitude Conference given by author Justin Taylor [5], one given at the Evangelical Theological Society’s Annual Meeting by Stand To Reason’s Brett Kunkle [6], and one given at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia by professor and author Scott McKnight [7]. Taylor’s taxonomy is particularly a regurgitation of Gibbs and Bolger, Stetzer, and Emergent Village’s distinctions, with a critique on some key theological issues and Kunkle’s paper is primarily a critique rather than a description of the movement.
McKnight’s paper was well received by Emergent supporters. He described the emerging church movement as these five streams flowing into the emerging “lakeâ€: 1) prophetic – seeking radical change, 2) postmodern – ministering to, with, or as postmoderns, 3) praxis-oriented in orthopraxy, worship, and being missional, 4) post-Evangelical – moving to post-systematic theology and rejecting the in vs. out paradigm, and 5) political. [8]
Also that year, InterVarsity Press published the book, An Emergent Theology for Emerging Churches by Ray Anderson, Fuller Theological Seminary professor, in which Anderson states that the emerging church is: 1) missional, 2) reformational, 3) about kingdom-living, and 3) incarnational. [9]
[1] Ed Stetzer, “First-person: Understanding the Emerging Church,†Baptist Press; available from http://www.bpnews.net/bpnews.asp?ID=22406; Internet; accessed 14 December 2007.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Justin Taylor, “Primer on the Emerging Church,†9 Marks; Internet; available from http://9marks.org/partner/Article_Display_Page/0,,PTID314526%7CCHID598014%7CCIID2249226,00.html; Internet; accessed 14 December 2007.
[6] Brett Kunkle, “Essential Concerns Regarding the Emerging Church,†Annual Evangelical Theological Society Meeting, Washington, D.C., November 2006; available from http://www.str.org/site/DocServer/Essential_Concerns_Regarding_the_Emerging_Church.pdf?docID=1441; accessed 14 December 2007.
[7] Scot McKnight, “Five Streams of the Emerging Church,†Christianity Today; available from http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/february/11.35.html; Internet; accessed 14 December 2007.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ray Anderson, An Emergent Theology for Emerging Churches (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006), 16.
