Emerging Movement

Welcome to one of my first blogs. In this blog I want to make a statement about why I am involved in the emerging movement and why I think it is relevant.

Since there's great material out there i used a statement from Motionsickness which formulates very well why I think the emerging movement is relevant today in our postmodern culture:

Postmodernism signifies the quest to move beyond modernism, specifically, it involves a rejection of the modern mind-set, but launched under the condition of modernity.” Particular is the rejection of the modern notions of knowledge as certain, objective and good. While modernity was a “rage for order, regulation, stability, singularity and fixity;” postmodernism is a “rage for chaos, uncertainty, otherness, openness, multiplicity and change.” Framed in different terms, postmodernism embraces centrelessness, lack of absolute truths, celebration of diversity, movement from an objectivist to constructionist perspective and signals the end of the ‘meta-narrative’ and the end of science. Another awareness is that in postmodernism, there is “extreme openness to spiritual things” - spiritual but not religious.

A recent response to this atmosphere is the emerging church development. Emerging churches, according to Eddie Gibbs, are “missional communities arising from within postmodern culture and consisting of followers of Jesus who are seeking to be faithful in their place and time.” He brings a warning as well. Emerging church seeks to:

“dismantle ideas of church that simply are not viable in postmodern culture. Neither the gospel nor the culture demands these expressions of faith. Emerging churches remove modern practices of Christianity, not the faith itself…many of us do not know what a postmodern or post-Christendom expression of faith looks like. Perhaps nobody does. But we need to give these leaders space to have this conversation, for this dismantling needs to occur if we are to see the gospel translated for and embodied in twenty-firstcentury Western culture.”

The emerging church response has been that:

“if you have a new world, you need a new church. You have a new world.” 

In terms of answering the question of how Christians relate to culture, the emerging church states that there is a place for ‘adapting to’ and ‘arising from’ culture.

“We won’t need a new religion per se, but a new framework for our theology. Not a new Spirit, but a new spirituality. Not a new Christ, but a new Christian.” There is balance of what must change and what must not.

From: Paper from Motionsickness, found on blog of Andrew Jones