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Subject Christians, let's talk about 'The Emerging Church'
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Original Message Here is a great article about it:

Emerging Church

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The emerging church or emergent church is a diverse, controversial movement within Christianity that arose in the late 20th century as a reaction to the perceived influence of modernism in Western Christianity.

Proponents of the emergent church embrace postmodernism and call the movement a "conversation" to emphasize its decentralized nature with contributions from people of a variety of beliefs.

The emerging church seeks to deconstruct and reconstruct Christianity as its mainly Western members live in a postmodern culture.

Membership, Ecclesiology and Structure
Emergent Christians, or emergents, are predominantly found in North America, Western Europe, the South Pacific and Africa.[2][3]

The emergent church is highly decentralized with little co-ordination. There is no mutually agreed upon ecclesiology about the role and nature of the church.

Some emergents attend local independent churches that specifically identify themselves as being "emergent" while others contribute to the conversation from within existing Christian denominations.

Denominational affiliation ranges from the Anglican/Episcopal Church to the Southern Baptist Convention while many emergent churches are non-affiliated intentional communities or house churches. [4][5]

Emergents share a willingness to challenge traditional church structures and organizations like the house church movement while respecting the different expressions of traditional Christian denominations. [6]

Values and Characteristics

While practices and even core doctrine vary, many emergents can be recognized by the following values:

Missional living

While emergents place great emphasis on their own communities, they believe the purpose of their communities is to change the world around them. Sometimes their approach to missional living emphasizes social activism. Some "emerging" churches emphasize that their missional purpose is evangelism of the lost.

Narrative theology

Emergent teaching generally focuses on narrative presentations of faith and the Bible rather than systematic theology or propositional exposition which they believe to be a form of reductionism.

Some "emerging" churches incorporate systematic theology into their teaching but present it in a less propositional manner.

Generous Orthodoxy

An understanding of doctrine which claims to move beyond the conservative versus liberal impasse in Christianity to incorporate elements of both. It also continues the Christian ecumenical movement by incorporating some beliefs and traditions of premodern, modern and postmodern Christian denominations. [7]

For some within this movement such as Brian McLaren, this generosity also extends to dialogue with non-Christian religions and non-religious people. There has been criticism and disagreement among some in the movement about this point.

Christ-likeness

Emergents seek Christ-likeness primarily through the virtues of humility and kindness. [6]

Biblical Interpretation

Emergents reanalyze the Bible within varying contexts with the goal of revealing a multiplicity of valid perspectives rather than a single valid interpretation. The influence of postmodern thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Stanley Fish can thus be seen in the emergent approach to interpreting Scripture.

Emerging Church groups also typically emphasize the following elements:

A flexible approach to and continual reexamination of theology which causes them to see faith as a journey rather than a destination, and to accept differences in beliefs and morals.

A missional identity that emphasizes the need to reach out and be "missionaries" to the culture around them.

A non-confrontational approach to other religions with an emphasis on dialogue.

A belief in creating communities built out of the creativity of those who are a part of each local body.

A holistic view of the role of the church in society. This can mean anything from a higher degree of emphasis on social action, building relationships with the surrounding community, or Christian outreach.

A more minimalist or decentralized organizational structure.

Creative approaches to worship and spiritual reflection. This can involve everything from the use of contemporary music and films to liturgy, as well as more ancient customs, with a goal of making the church more appealing to postmodern people.

Use of the internet is a dominant medium of communication through various blogs, websites and online videos.

Comparisons to other movements
It is useful to compare the Emerging Church movement with other Christian movements which emphasize foundational Christianity and inner experience.

The Taizé Community in France also offers a neo-traditional experience of Christianity in which traditional symbols such as candles and crosses have intensified importance. Taizé, however, places relatively less emphasis on Scripture and a greater emphasis on meditation and the experiences derived from the monastic life.

The Emerging Church, in turn, places a greater value on multimedia-based creative expression (and would consider religious orders an anachronism, if they considered them at all). An important difference is that the Emerging Church seeks to be relevant and accessible within the larger society, while the Taizé Community offers an alternative to the surrounding culture.[citation needed]

The Religious Society of Friends, although not born out of the conflicts of modernism, has nonetheless influenced the Emerging Church through thinkers such as Richard Foster and Dallas Willard. The Quakers also reject church hierarchy while valuing the sacred as a personal experience.

All three of these groups are ecumenical in their outlook, value tradition and inward trans-rational experience, and seek to revitalize the faith. The Emerging Church stands out by its close association with post-modernism and by its emphasis on accessibility, as well as its ideal of interacting with the surrounding culture rather than escaping it.[citation needed]

Theologically, the Emerging Church movement bears many striking similarities to the theology of neo-liberals such as Langdon Gilkey and David Tracey, and shares many beliefs with the more liberal post-Vatican II Catholic theologians such as Karl Rahner.

[edit]
"Emerging" vs. "Emergent"
Although "emerging" and "emergent" are generally considered synonymous in popular usage, there are some adherents to emerging methodology who consider it important to make a distinction between the two terms. Adherents such as Mark Driscoll and Chris Seay embrace an emphasis on missional living, decentralized organization, and less confrontational approaches to evangelism, while rejecting the more liberal views on doctrine and morals they associate with emergentvillage. Since the term "emergent" has at times been used to narrowly refer to emergentvillage, these more conservative participants in the movement insist that they are "emerging" but not "emergent." The terms "emerging church" or "emerging worship service" sometimes refer more to the style of a worship service (the use of candles, ancient imagery, and more narrative or casual preaching) and philosophy than to a set of theological beliefs. The more conservative minority within the emerging church movement would not be described by the more liberal views listed nor subject to all of the criticisms elaborated upon below.


Criticisms
The Emerging Church movement has been criticized by many within the Evangelical community.

Many Evangelical scholars criticize the movement for maintaining that certainty in faith is not achievable. The movement's rejection of epistemological foundationalism and reliabilism, as well as bounded-set theology (borders for orthodoxy) has caused similar concerns within Evangelicalism.

Some Evangelicals complain that when these factors are combined with the postmodern tendency to deconstruct traditional terms and biblical texts, the result causes emergents to tolerate doctrinal and moral positions that most Evangelicals believe are non-negotiable. Critics of the movement often assert that emergents frequently indulge in logical fallacies, especially the false antithesis (similar to the false dilemma).

Some authors have insisted that the emergent tendency to consider Evangelicalism culture-bound to modernism is a straw man argument. These Evangelicals respond that their movement has never embraced modernism in its entirety in spite of Evangelicalism's acceptance of the correspondence theory of truth and the referential theory of language. They maintain that only classical, liberal theologians completely accommodated modernism and many of these same scholars fear that the Emerging Church movement's accommodation to postmodernism has the same practical effects as liberal accommodation to modernism.

While many Evangelicals have been open to some of the criticisms that emergents have offered, most seem to have rejected emergent views of several key theological themes within their soteriology and eschatology as well as emergent openness to alternative lifestyles. Several critiques of this movement have been written recently by leading Evangelical scholars such as D. A. Carson and Millard Erickson.
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