Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Steve Taylor: the "emerging church" and "emergent" can't be viewed synonymously

Earlier, I had posted Is the Distinction between "Emerging Church" and "Emergent" Obscurantist?

In summary, my concern there was that while emergent village is a subset of the larger emerging church conversation, increasingly the terms seem to be used synonymously. I wondered aloud if we should just give up and and use the terms that way.

In the comments on that post, Steve Taylor from New Zealand correctly (imo) called my hand on such a proposal because to use "emergent" and "emerging church" as denoting the same group thereby runs the danger of collapsing the entire global conversation down to the issues that emergent village is discussing. Or it might imply that emergent village considers itself the primary international organization for the emerging church conversation which I don't believe that it does.

I agree with Steve that my comment was United States-centric and could be seen as dishonoring the international conversation.

Steve, thank you for pointing this out; I apologize.

All that being said, we still have confusion over the terms in the American context! Still not sure what to do about that. Not sure that saying over and over again that they aren't the same is the answer but maybe that's the best and only course we have.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have got to say, I really appreciate the honest and humble tone you have represented in this discussion. This post is very honouring to all of us outside the US. Thanks!

Peace,
Jamie

Anonymous said...

thanks for listening Stephen, and for pushing me to keep explaining myself.

steve
www.emergentkiwi.org.nz