“Emergent”

In my dictionary, “emergent” is an adjective, meaning “becoming apparent, emerging.”

The word has been paired with “church” over the past few years, to signal something new on the ecclesiastical landscape – that of a new generation responding to postmodernism.

Soon it carried the sense of an identity already held (emerged, that is, rather than just emerging), as seen in this self-description by a reviewer in ChristianWeek recently: “I’m quite interested, as an emergent post-modern evangelical, in paradigm busting.” Now it is often shorthanded to a noun, sometimes capitalized and sometimes not.

But what does it mean?

Emergent is occasionally used to refer to church folks under 30 or worship styles that are “contemporary” or a quest for cultural relevance. But a follower of emergent would probably say that’s woefully inadequate. Brian McLaren, author of A New Kind of Christian and a key leader, perhaps even founder of the movement called Emergent (though he prefers to call it a “conversation”), says it “represents a rising voice of dissatisfaction with the religiously right, highly pragmatic, biblically neo-fundamentalist, and generally conservative evangelical establishment.”

If that definition doesn’t help, because it’s framed as what Emergent reacts against, there’s this one from the movement’s website: “Emergent is a growing generative friendship among missional Christian leaders seeking to love our world in the Spirit of Jesus Christ.”

Frankly, that’s not much help as a definition either. Tony Campolo, however, in an article in Christian Courier (Dec. 20, 2004), manages to put some flesh on the new emergent.

Campolo calls the Emergent Church “progressive evangelicalism” because it emphasizes traditional evangelical beliefs yet rejects aspects of institutionalized Christianity like church buildings, hierarchical or denominational systems, and “contemporary services,” and is indifferent to some of the issues like homosexual marriage that preoccupy mainstream evangelicals. Its adherents, he continues, are attracted to Christian mysticism, talk a lot about “spiritual formation,” and focus on healing through prayer.

It is a mark of emergent that Campolo’s definition might well be challenged on a number of points. There’s no “definitive expression of Emergent,” the Emergent Network’s leaders declare. “And that is a good thing,” they continue, because it’s “like the kingdom of God.”

Put that way, perhaps we are all – to use another variation of the word recently encountered – emergentesque!

—Dora Dueck