emerging church vs emergent church part 2
In this second part I am going to write about the stream of the emerging church called the “emergent liberals”, or more commonly the “emergent church”. Recently this stream has come under harsh criticism…. a lot of unfounded criticism.
What is the “emergent church”?
An emergent church is one that aligns itself with an organization called the “emergent village”. This organization was started in the late 1990s by a group of pastors. Most recognizable are Brian McLaren and Doug Paggit.
The definition the emergent village gives to itself is:
“Emergent Village began as a group of friends who gathered under the auspices and generosity of Leadership Network in the late 1990s. We began meeting because many of us were disillusioned and disenfranchised by the conventional ecclesial institutions of the late 20th century. The more we met, the more we discovered that we held many of the same dreams for our lives, and for how our lives intersected with our growing understandings of the Kingdom of God.”
Something that may be worrying to discover is that the emergent village has no statement of faith. This means that on one Sunday you could go to two different “emergent” churches and hear different doctrine preached. This is why it is very dangerous to label the whole emergent church as “heresy” or “wrong”.
The emergent church has been given a lot of criticism because it is very liberal with some of its doctrine. The emergent church would be keen to re-evaluate scripture to see what it has to say to our postmodern world. Some questions pastors have brought up are (NOTE not all pastors of emergent churches ask these questions):
1) Was Jesus fully God? Not new thinking as a group of people called the Donatists that were about in Pauls day believed Jesus was not God when he died on the cross.
2) Did Jesus die to take away our sins? (deny Penal Substitution)
3) Is Hell real?
4) Is homosexuality a sin?
While some of these questions may sound worrying, I must stress not all pastors ask these questions.
Because the emergent church is a stream of the emerging church, it shares the same ethos of the emerging church in how it re-evaluates what it is doing to reach people. It is interesting to discover that some emergent churches do not have church buildings but met in places like coffee shops, bars or even nightclubs.
In conclusion I think we should be slow to criticize the emergent church. Too often we criticize things based on the bad we heard from other people. I encourage everyone reading this to check out some of the pastors of the emergent church. My personal favorite is Rob Bell who preaches at Mars Hill church, Michigan.
We also have to remember to test all we hear with scripture. This even includes what we hear from our own pastor!
I would also like to hit out against those who say the emergent church is “heresy” and shouldn’t be called a church. I say “wise up”. Any church that preaches that Christ was truly the one true God and though his death and resurrection we are saved by grace, should be classed as a church.
I would also like to say that all this tagging hurts the unity of the church. Maybe soon the church will stand in unity all over the world to proclaim the good news all over the world.
