I’ve heard lots of people talk about the emergent church, I’ve read a little about it in Christian Century, and even have talked with one of its leaders – Tony Jones, a colleague of my wife’s at Princeton Theological Seminary – but I never quite "got it." I just couldn’t quite wrap my head around what the movement is about. (And I write about it here at the peril of looking like an idiot. I’m just learning about it, but there are innumerable adherents and critics of Emergent on the web who are much more knowledgeable than I.)
Then after reading a post on Tony Jones’ blog I found the Emergent Village site. This site’s articles describing the Emergent church helped put the movement in focus for me. In many respects the Emergent Church looks like liberal protestantism (without the denominational structures) with an emphasis on spiritual practices from the liturgical tradition. Coming in large part out of Evangelicalism, this movement seems to have embraced the complex and critical world view of liberal protestantism along with various elements of the liturgical tradition that have been present in some forms of protestantism and in the Roman Catholic Church for centuries.
What Emergent does, it seems to me, is embrace these liturgical elements and world view with a passion and dynamism that most of our protestant denominations don’t. It seems that Emergent congregations who are not rooted in a reformation-era denomination have a flexibility – in terms of polity, theology and tradition – to engage liturgy and post-modernity in a way that most congregations in a 300-500 year-old denomination cannot. Perhaps many of our main line denominational churches are overly bound to hymnals or inherited forms of ministry to engage these emerging forms?
I’m no scholar of theology, church history, ecclesiology or philosophy, so engaging the various voices of the Emergent movement (look at their reading list) or its critics is not something I could do with any ease. And I have yet to understand the impact Emergent forms of ministry can and should (or shouldn’t) have on Lutheranism or other main line denominations.
This is an emerging understanding for me. Bear with me and throw your thoughts my way.
The Lutheran Zephyr 