In my experience, not only are a significant proportion of Emerging Church participants simultaneously attached to one or more established “institutional” congregations, but probably the majority are what we might call “de-churched”: having had some previous experience of “institutional” church in earlier life. The result of this is that the Emerging Church largely views itself through the prism of the “institutional” churches.

Even when the Emerging Church (which probably shouldn’t be used in the singular) seeks to differentiate itself from “institutional” churches, it is still largely doing so through the language of the Protestant churches it has emerged from. The Emerging Churches are yet to find – or at least promote – a more adequate vocabulary to conduct discourse on itself.

In addition to this, much of the critique of the Emerging Church is coming from those more attached to the “institutional” church, with its own perspective, which could sometimes be a defensive one.

I think what we’re seeing is a tension between the “institutional” and Emerging churches, which on the one hand could stifle future discourse as the Emerging Churches evolve, or could be rendered into a healthy, complementary relationship.

nice edits. my thesis is the post for the same treatment.

i think the only thing i’d add is that not only can we say that some folks never left the church – because they never belonged, we can also say others never left – because they always belonged.

and to push it further, i then think we need to be cautious here. if we’re not careful, we risk that latter group ie. those that stayed in institutional churches while defining themselves as or identifying with ‘emerging church’, (yet can’t ‘retreat’ back in because they were in the institutional church all along) as not being *truly* emerging.

in other words, it seems to me like we’re walking a fine line where only those that retreat or remain outside the “institutional church” can be said to have ‘emerged’.

but then we’ve defined emergent on the basis of church attendance (or indeed lack thereof) and not on the basis of theological perspective. the post i was responding to pointed out that the emerging church tends not to use things like church attendance as an automatic indicator of ‘success’. and i think that the ‘retreat’ argument comes close to doing just that. or indeed inferring that retreat is a lack of success.

and maybe that gets a little closer to the heart of it. seems to me that as we start to dig into this, we end up using the terms of the existing/institutional rather than emerging church to define the emerging church and what characterises it.

while i’ve not read much of her work i’m aware that Phylis Tickle has written/spoken on the growing number of hyphen-emergents. ie Anglimergent, Presbymergent, and so on. Or indeed Queermergent – which covers pretty much every denomination there is. those hyphens may or may not have significance here. i’m not sure.

as i say, it’s all provisional in my own mind. but i think the questions raised in the other post are worthy of interrogating because they’re not insignificant questions.

cary.