Emerging Church Versus Emercing Missional Church
Someone asked me the other day why I use the phrase "Emerging Missional Church" rather than "Emerging Church".

The answer to this has to do with a conversation I had with Gerard Kelly a few months back now. I was struggling to articulate a frustration I was having. Something like this. I am not high art by any stretch of the imagination. My background is nominal (read: very) Catholicism, hacking, Sci-Fi, pop culture, etc ad infinitum. I don't think I am a real deep thinker. I'm pretty simple really.

I had an encounter with Jesus a few weeks before the age of 18 and was (and continue to be) transformed by God. As I got older and finally married, my wife and I started opening our home, both as a result of our backgrounds and also because of what we felt was God's conviction in our lives to share what we had with others. We have had many people live with us over the years, many with life controlling problems, more often than not, substance abuse.

We have had a few of my relatives stay with me. One of these experiences was one of those classic, trying to do some holistic discipleship with people in your home but not having any chance of overcoming the cultural hurdle of getting them involved in the life of church community. This is something that I have experienced time and time again, both before and after this event, but it was this particular event that clinched it for me.

Anyway, as I got involved in the Emerging Church movement and the associated alt.worship streams, the thing I felt but was not able to articulate until this conversation with Gerard Kelly was that for me, the Emerging Church movement seemed (and still does in many respects) to be an attempt to make church more culturally accessible to Christians on the fringe of the Pentecostal/Charismatic/Evangelical church.

There was an embracing of the arts, an appeal to the philosophical mind, use of image, metaphor, story all those sorts of things that characterised the alt.worship movement.

There was still frustration because for me, now not only did we have one space where my relative with the life controlling problem would and could never feel at home (the Contemporary Charismatic "worship" service) but there were two: The Emerging Church service/community.

It was only as I discussed this with Gerard that he helped me to articulate the frustration. The impulse that resulted in what we know and describe as the Emerging Church was an attempt to "contextualise worship" for a generation of those feeling more and more disenfranchised by the mainstream Evangelical/Charismatic/Pentecostal experience.

This is not a bad thing. This is a step in the right direction or a development.

Gerard was able to help me see that if this thing is really going to honour the creator, we do not stop at contextualising "worship". The primary impulse needs to be mission, or more correctly, the mission of God.

So for me, the likes of the Backyard Missionaries, which if we are going to be pretty honest is pretty low brow by alt.worship standards, to me is a significant development on the Emerging Church/alt.worship stage of the history of the Emerging Church.

The real stunt is to recognise and affirm the theological development, ie: ecclesiology follows missiology and not the other way around. Something that begins with a missiological experience rather than an attempt for fringe Christians reclaiming their place in the church of Jesus, it is this impulse that seperates an Emerging Missional Church form an Emerging Church.

Hope this clarifies the distinction.  Posted by Stephen @ 2:21 PM