the state of emergent - 2006





The past year saw increased attention coming our way from national and local media, and it saw the first “third-person” books written on the movement from the breathtakingly bad (D.A. Carson’s Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church) to the even-handedly critical (R. Scott Smith’s Truth and the New Kind of Christian) to the openly supportive (Ryan Bolger and Eddie Gibbs’s Emerging Churches). And for those of us who frequent the blogosphere, the online chatter about Emergent and the emerging church is louder than my three preschoolers.

A couple of more notable trends in 2005 are: 1) We witnessed a significant uptick in interest and involvement from traditionally “mainline” Christians, especially those in Methodist and Presbyterian circles. And 2) We have begun to clarify the difference between “Emergent” and the “emerging church.” My favorite metaphor of late is that the emerging church movement is like the Internet, and Emergent is one of the servers.

In the new issue of Next-Wave, Emergent National Coordinator Tony Jones updates us on all things emergent.