April 16, 2008 | By Michael McCormack
NEW ORLEANS -- What is the Emerging Church?
Ed Stetzer, renowned church planter and director of LifeWay Research, spoke at New Orleans Baptist Theological during the Baptist College Partnership meeting April 4 held in conjunction with the Greer-Heard Point-Counterpoint Forum. He sought to answer that crucial question.
Stetzer admitted that the Emerging Church, much like Postmodernism, has proven too diverse for easy definition. Participants in the Emerging Church movement are scattered all along a lengthy continuum.
He argued, then, that the best way to answer the question “What is the Emerging Church?” is to approach the movement from a missiological perspective. Participants in the Emerging Church critique Christianity today as being largely consumer-driven. The movement, Stetzer said, essentially seeks to express Christianity in a way relevant to those 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,” Stetzer said.
That collective voice finds its origin in a 1997 event sponsored by the Dallas-based Leadership Network.
In 1997, Leadership Network hosted a gathering near Colorado Springs 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 explained. “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. Because Emerging Christianity stresses contextualization, the “look” of emerging churches varies from place to place. Overtime, though, groups within the movement have sought to update both ecclesiology and theology. Here, groups like Emergent Village enter the scene.
Faith and Praxis
At the heart of the Emerging Church movement is a desire for more effective contextualization of the gospel and more vigorous praxis. In general, Emerging Church values deal with putting the Christian faith to 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 a contending emphasis upon practice they believe is missing in more conservative forms of the faith.”
Christian leaders both inside and outside of the movement have phrased the Emerging Church’s practice-centered values differently.
Stetzer identified four main values held by 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.
Theologian Scot McKnight put his values of the Emerging Church in terms of “five streams flowing to Lake Emergent.” Those five streams are prophetic or provocative, postmodern, praxis-oriented, post-evangelical and political.
Eddie Gibbs and Ryan Bolger, professors at Fuller Seminary, identified nine characteristic practices of emerging churches in their 2005 book, Emerging Churches. Each characteristic carries with it an action verb: identify with the life of Jesus, transform the secular realm, live highly communal lives, welcome the stranger, serve with generosity, participate as producers, create as creative beings, lead as a body and take part in spiritual activities.
Stetzer’s own categories, expressed in a January 2006 article titled “Understanding the Emerging Church,” address both the practice and the theology of the movement. He first identifies “relevants” within the Emerging Church movement. Relevants, he says, attempt to contextualize worship and message while remaining theologically conservative and biblically based.
Reconstructionists, then, are largely concerned with church structures and may lean toward a house church model for church life.
Revisionists within the Emerging Church movement reject the historic form of the church and the gospel and, according to Stetzer, bear some similarities with mainline Protestants. Topics of revision include biblical stances on gender roles, homosexuality and the authority of scripture.
This has led more conservative evangelicals to affirm the contextualization emphases of the Emerging Church while rejecting some of the more liberal theological leanings of groups like Emergent Village.
“I should say that evangelical circles have very quickly developed a shorthand,” Stetzer said. “That shorthand goes something like this: ‘I’m emerging, but I’m not emergent.
“I believe it’s largely because many evangelicals who want to embrace some of the Emerging Church don’t want to embrace some of what they hear coming from Emergent [Village].”
NOBTS professors Jack Allen and Page Brooks and Matt Penson, president of Freewill Baptist Bible College in Nashville, Tenn., then offered their responses to Stetzer’s paper. Overall, they agreed with Stetzer’s assessment of the movement while also voicing their concern for continued commitment to a robust theology and holy living within the Emerging Church.
Stetzer’s presentation and the three panelists’ responses will be included in the upcoming issue of the NOBTS Baptist Center for Theology and Ministry’s Journal for Baptist Theology and Ministry. For more information, go online to www.baptistcenter.com.
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