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One of the qualities that drew me to the emerging church conversation was the sense that I could more properly understand God's work in our time with a verb like emerging than with the constructs of Christendom I had inherited. When I first encountered the concept I was spending a lot of time in the kingdom parables of Christ, particularly as contained in The Gospel of Matthew, and the notion of an emerging church seemed to gel so well with how I was coming to believe God operated. It seems to be that God is active and creative and always on the move, so understanding that the church that is emerging from that God makes a lot of sense to me. The overall conversation has been tremendously spiritually fruitful in my life and the life of my family, as we have ventured to a new state, new experiences and a new way of being followers of Jesus, spurred on in large part by this notion that the Church is constantly materializing and re-incarnating herself. A great sadnesses of mine is that the emerging church conversation in America, particularly as it began to move into broader cultural understanding in 2006, has begun to change shape from a verb to a noun. (Let me offer a disclaimer up front - the critique I offer here is largely for the American Church) I see God's emerging work within the Church slowly being turned into a thing, into a product."Productizing" is, after all, what Americans do well. We began as a nation of merchants. It is in our DNA, and has affected the way we form as the Church. The American Church practically invented denominationalism, or at least perfected it. We transformed evangelism so the gospel could be sold to a culture more concerned with the individual than with community. We sell religion better than anyone and seem to relish in that distinction. So it should come as no surprise that we seek to productize God's emerging work within the Church. Over the last year I have read a plethora of blog posts, articles and books that attempt to define the emerging church using noun language. How odd. Even the wiki I referred to earlier defines the emerging church as a movement. As Americans, we understand that kind of language. Movements have set principles and defined boundaries. We like that. But what if God's work in our present world is bigger and more phenomenal than can be described in a wiki, or a missions statement, or even a book? What if the primary lens for understanding the emerging church is not a noun, something that can be described in concrete terms and has specific tenets or creedal statements that can be attached to it? What if the emerging church is a verb, a statement of God's continued interest in the world and of a view toward a forward, missional engagement in the world of God's followers?
Original content by: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Willzhead/~3/71039049/is_emerging_a_n.html.
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Scott Bartchy is a radical. He believes in a subversive system that embraces those on the fringes of our society and seeks to establish a new way of life that goes against the status quo.