Over the past year or so, especially the past few months, I’ve been interacting with all sorts of people who consider themselves emerging and many some also Emergent. In my recent conversations here I’ve noted that there’s an important difference, but I haven’t, until now, taken the time to spell it out. 

Luckily, I’m not alone in my understanding. In the recent issue of Criswell Theological Journal on the Emerging Church, Pastor Mark Driscoll describes how Emergent came about and offers an excellent definition: “the Emerging church is a broad category that encompasses a wide variety of churches and Christians who are seeking to be effective missionaries wherever they live. This includes Europeans and Australians who are having the same conversation as their American counterparts.” He goes on to outline the three groups that Dr. Ed Stetzer delineated- Relevants, Reconstructionists, and Revisionists.

Driscoll’s definition is in line with what I’ve come to understand. Though, while he “includes Europeans and Australians who are having the same conversations,” I think the category reaches further. “Emerging” refers to any church or Christian who takes into consideration the cultural context in which they minister, regardless of spatial or temporal location. In other words, a church does not need to be North American and dealing with postmodernism in order to be “emerging.” The early church was just as emerging as many churches are today.

While on one hand the “emerging” category is quite broad, “Emergent” is comparatively quite narrow. It refers to a specific group of individuals and churches within the contemporary emerging church that have formed an organization to promote certain ecclesiastical changes within the North American postmodern context. This Emergent organization (Driscoll points them out as “Revisionists”) is primarily led by Brian McLaren, Tony Jones, and Doug Pagitt.

Since the emerging category includes a wide variety of theologies and practices, I don’t think it is at all helpful to describe it as good or bad (unless one believes we should be disengaged from culture). There are, in fact, many good emerging churches that have not compromised the gospel in light of postmodern criticisms- such as Kimball’s Vintage Faith Church, Driscoll’s Mars Hill Church, and the church I currently attend, Portico. There are also, likely, a number of emerging churches that have compromised the gospel, but since the spectrum is so broad, whatever criticisms are launched at them should not be based on them being categorically emerging. Criticisms of individuals ought not be applied to the entire category.

This isn’t always the case for Emergent. While it’s true that what McLaren believes isn’t necessarily what Jones or Pagitt believe, the Emergent organization can be analyzed by its success or failure in promoting the Christian faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.

Many have found it easy to criticize what McLaren teaches and generalize it to the entire emerging category. The problem is that doing so condemns missionaries worldwide for something they have nothing to do with (something Andrew Jones has rightly pointed out). Generalizations are generally helpful, as long as we use them appropriately. In order to use these categories correctly, I believe we must recast the criticisms, as well as strengths, of the emerging church toward the definitions I’ve offered here.

Another point I believe we should draw from this is that there’s nothing chronologically profound about being “emerging.” It’s a category churches have ministered in throughout church history, not some sort of amazing new phenomenon. So while critics need to get their categories straight, many emerging Christians need to get over their tendency of thinking God is doing something in emerging churches He’s never done before. Dr. Andrew Jackson aptly diagnosed this problem as “emergentising.”