The Emerging Church: A Brief History and Helpful Resources

By William R. Baker

See the Main Article: “The Emerging Church and the Stone-Campbell Movement: Some Striking Similarities (Part 1)”

 

 

What is now dubbed the emerging church began with a few prominent, young, evangelical church leaders in the early 1990s who became disenchanted with the megachurches with which they were involved. It has grown now to an expanding network of mature, culturally savvy church leaders and thinkers who minister with congregations, mostly in large cities. 

These leaders are attempting to embody the gospel within the challenges of a postmodern world. The crisis these leaders were experiencing, it turns out, was the impact of postmodernism on Western culture, on the church, and on themselves personally. This crisis they saw as creating a gorge that cut off younger, postmodern, urban people from Christianity because of the modern fence that entangled it. This was epitomized by the middle-aged baby boomers attending technically driven, brilliantly produced megachurches and living the modern suburban dream.

These leaders believed this crisis called both for disentangling the church from modernism and also recreating Christianity in a way that embraced the reality of people living in a postmodern way””both unbelievers outside the church and believers who no longer fit into a modern church. This still evolving process has produced a flurry of literature, both practical and theoretical, a think tank of authors called Emergent Village, and a growing number of extremely innovative and highly eclectic congregations striving to be what are currently called missional churches, a more generic term that is slowly replacing emerging and emergent.

With no official organization, the numbers of missional, emerging congregations is difficult to estimate, but it is clear they cut across all Christian traditions””evangelical, Protestant, Catholic, and orthodox.

Key resources for understanding this movement include: Doug Pagitt and Tony Jones, eds., An Emergent Manifesto of Hope (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007); Scott McKnight, “Five Streams of the Emerging Church,” Christianity Today (February 2007), 35-39; Brian McLaren, “Emerging,” Christianity Today (September 2008), 59-66; Eddie Gibbs and Ryan Bolger, Emerging Churches: Creating Christian Community in Postmodern Cultures (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005); and Brian McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy (Grand Rapids: Zondervan).

Recent CHRISTIAN STANDARD articles include: Jennifer Taylor, “Two Examples of “˜Emerging Worship”: More than a Method” (January 21, 2007); Gary Zustiak, “The Missional Emphasis of Emerging Churches” (September 9, 2007); and the entire issue of September 16, 2007.