Emerging church movement

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The emerging church movement is a recent Christian (mostly Protestant) movement that seeks to cater to the attitudes and experiences of what it sees as people who are postmodern, Generation X and "post-Christian" through a deconstructive and conversational approach to Christianity. Participants in the movement often say the movement is a reaction to the evangelical right-wing, which they find overbearing. The movement started in the United States of America around 2000, and has spread elsewhere in the world including the United Kingdom.[1]

The emerging church movement tends to reject church hierarchy, has a strong focus on praxis—the practical consequences of faith, and tends to prefer narrative theology over propositional, systematic theology - what one does, not what one believes[2].

Conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists often criticize the emerging church, alleging that it is unorthodox or heretical in its embrace of postmodernism, which they claim undermines Biblical truth.

References

  1. Katharine Sarah Moody, "'I Hate Your Church; What I Want is My Kingdom': Emerging Spiritualities in the UK Emerging Church Milieu", The Expository Times, 121: 10, pp. 495-503.
  2. Jasen Tracey, Emerging Impulses: Narrative Theology, Zeal for Truth blog