Sunday, July 10, 2005

the post-emerging church?

for me, i am leaning towards the "postemerging.

john o'keefe recently posted his thoughts on the post-emerging church.

andrew jones responds with

As for the concept of "post-emerging" (Ginkworld), it may be helpful to think of emerging church in 3 stages:
1. Submerging - those going deep into culture to listen, think, pray, and share the gospel among the emerging culture.
2. Emerging - When the new church structures begin to rise up and take shape organically inside the culture, a process that will often be described as having "emergent characteristics" and displaying "emergent behavior".
3. Converging - When the new church structures begin to connect to the other existing structures, local and global, and form part of the web that is the body of Christ.
Of course, if you present these options to churches, they will normally choose the one that is most advanced and complete, no matter where they are in this process. But it might help those who have been going 15 years and are now part of the church fabric, despite growing up with emerging culture people.

We had also addressed this earlier in a Next-Wave article - The emerging church, the church, and the post-emerging church

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