Dutch Emerging Gathering

Last week there was a spontaneous gathering at the house of the Graf family from Christian Associates in Amsterdam. They have a really beautiful home which is most suited for these kinds of gatherings. The reason for this spontaneous gathering was that Andrew Jones was spontaneously visiting The Netherlands. Next to meeting a lot of people it was good to get an update on the discussion about the emerging church.

As for the development of the emerging church it are interesting times. My main conclusion is that the term is surfacing (coming to the surface from the underground). Two signals make me come to this conclusion. The first is that the emerging church is discussed a lot by Dutch magazines like CV Koers and Nederlands Dagblad. But also the more neutral newspaper Trouw is starting to pay attention to emerging church. On top of that a growing amount of diverse initiatives is identifying themselves with emerging church. But, on the contrary, Andrew Jones, who has been discussing about the emerging church since the start of this century gives a different signal from the core of the emerging church conversation. He told that every year he asks people in the emerging movement how they think about the term and about using it. He told that people from the inside have not been as negative as they are now, that the score was fifty percent pro and 50 percent contra. To him this indicated that the term emerging church has outdone its use and time.

The reason for this development is exactly because the term emerging church is surfacing and by that attracting a lot of attention. The surfacing creates use and attention in much broader perspective and very much different ways. This leads to at some point that the definition of what emerging church or emerging movement means becomes so unclear that the term becomes unusable. The danger becomes that everyone puts the term in its own use, which makes the term useless. The reason why this happens is because the term itself becomes the center of the attention and not the values / intentions that were initially associated with it. So maybe it is time to focus on new, still unknown terminology that indicates the values and intentions again and has not yet become the center of attention on its own right.