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Five Streams of the Emerging Church

Key elements of the most controversial and misunderstood movement in the church today.
Political

A final stream flowing into the emerging lake is politics. Tony Jones is regularly told that the emerging movement is a latte-drinking, backpack-lugging, Birkenstock-wearing group of 21st-century, left-wing, hippie wannabes. Put directly, they are Democrats. And that spells "post" for conservative-evangelical-politics-as-usual.

I have publicly aligned myself with the emerging movement. What attracts me is its soft postmodernism (or critical realism) and its praxis/missional focus. I also lean left in politics. I tell my friends that I have voted Democrat for years for all the wrong reasons. I don't think the Democratic Party is worth a hoot, but its historic commitment to the poor and to centralizing government for social justice is what I think government should do. I don't support abortion—in fact, I think it is immoral. I believe in civil rights, but I don't believe homosexuality is God's design. And, like many in the emerging movement, I think the Religious Right doesn't see what it is doing. Books like Randy Balmer's Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America: An Evangelical's Lament (Basic Books, 2006) and David Kuo's Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction (Free Press, 2006) make their rounds in emerging circles because they say things we think need to be said.

Sometimes, however, when I look at emerging politics, I see Walter Rauschenbusch, the architect of the social gospel. Without trying to deny the spiritual gospel, he led his followers into the social gospel. The results were devastating for mainline Christianity's ability to summon sinners to personal conversion. The results were also devastating for evangelical Christianity, which has itself struggled to maintain a proper balance.

I ask my fellow emerging Christians to maintain their missional and ecclesial focus, just as I urge my fellow evangelicals to engage in the social as well.

All in all, it is unlikely that the emerging movement will disappear anytime soon. If I were a prophet, I'd say that it will influence most of evangelicalism in its chastened epistemology (if it hasn't already), its emphasis on praxis, and its missional orientation. I see the emerging movement much like the Jesus and charismatic movements of the 1960s, which undoubtedly have found a place in the quilt called evangelicalism.

Scot McKnight is professor of religious studies at North Park Theological Seminary in Chicago, Illinois. He is author of The Jesus Creed (Paraclete, 2004) and, most recently, The Real Mary: Why Evangelicals Can Embrace the Mother of Jesus (Paraclete, 2006 ). This article is condensed and adapted from a lecture given at Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, in October 2006. See the blog JesusCreed.org for more of McKnight's emerging musings.



Related Elsewhere:

Scot McKnight's blog, "Jesus Creed" has many posts on the Emerging Movement. His older blogs include "Divine Hours Daily Blog" and "Jesus and His Death."

He has also written "The Mary We Never Knew" for Christianity Today.

Christianity Today's website has a special section on The Emergence of Emergent.


From Issue:
February 2007, Vol. 51, No. 2
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Comments

Displaying 4–6 of 158 comments

T. Craig

February 02, 2007  8:29am

I enjoyed/appreciated this article for the most part. I agree with the others who posted about the possible need to use less complex terms to express things. That said, I appreciate the fact that he DID define most of his terms. Maybe in the future, though, some of the proponents of simple church could flow in the stream of simpler language? :-) Overall, I believe this article can give readers a general view of what's going on outside the old familiar structures--and I think that's a good thing.

Andre

February 02, 2007  7:31am

I would not be surprised that in a few years from now, the emerging/emergent churches will be the fastest growing sector of Christianity. That is what hapened to the Pentecostals who were unaccepted and doubted by the mainline Christians in the beginning only later to become a major force in Christianity. If God is teaching us something about how to win this generation through the emerging churches, then we better be open and willing to learn.

Philip Miller

February 01, 2007  2:53pm

Thank you. Excellent article helping me shape my interaction with the emerging church. In so many ways, many of us are already in sync with these streams as laid out by McKnight. I have heard the fears, I have read the conversation bewteen McLaren and Colson and am convinced that fear of one another contributes to our talking past one another instead of with one another. Christ is the head of His Church and I am sure He will guide our constant renewals and reversals and (if need be) repentance as we deny ourselve and take up our crosses and follow. These types of discussions can only strengthen the Church.

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