5 Streams

I enjoyed this article entitled "Five Streams of the Emerging Church" featured on Christianity Today's website. LINK It's been quite awhile since I had much discussion regarding "emergence".

The 5 proposed streams "flowing into the emergent lake" are:

1. Prophetic Rhetoric

• The emerging movement is provacative and prone to exaggeration.

2. Postmodernism

• Some in the emergent movement minister to postmoderns, some with postmoderns, and others as postmoderns. Still, postmodernism's relativism and preference towards narrative truth is a major if not the most powerful influence upon the emerging church.

3. Praxis

• The emerging church's core is the desire to build a new ecclesiology and what is most noticeable about the movement is its practices, especially in worship, life, and a missional orientation - towards the redemptive work of the church.

4. Post-evangelicalism

• The emerging movement is a protest against much of modern evangelicalism. Bullseye.

5. Politics

• This really bothered me as I hope the emerging movement will transcend the normal left-right political discussion. However, as Brian McLaren has become outspoken with the Call to Renewal organization (which is very left-leaning) and I discover that many emergent-esque believers vote Democrat, I wonder if this writer is correct and that a political orientation toward the left will become characteristic of the emerging church. Even I, as I shifted in the last few years to a more emergent-styled thinking have seen an impact on my political views. (Obama '08) However, I guarantee the Democratic Party will not understand this vein of Christianity no matter how many votes it brings them. I hope we all beware the centers of power.

Nice short, to-the-point article. It reminds me how much I miss these discussions that were such a part of my life 1-2 years ago. Although, I think many of my conversations with my fellow believers in Kzoo are part of the emerging conversation but we don't call it that... and that may be a beautiful thing.