According to this post from Out of Ur, R.I.P. Emerging Church, the emerging church is dead. The term 'emerging church' that is, not the actual movement which seems very much alive. Apparently Dan Kimball and Andrew Jones aka. Tall Skinny Kiwi has found the term 'emerging church' so 'polluted' that they have decided not to use the term anymore. Imagine that. Are we in the post emerging church era?
Meanwhile back in the United States, the emerging church movement can be broadly divided into two categories according to an article by Scot McKnight on Brian McLaren's Emerging Theology published in Christianity Today magazine, September 2008 p.58-66, which strangely did not appear on its online form. Sorry readers, you have to get a hardcopy of the magazine to read that.[update: article now availble here] Acccording to McKnight, one category is the Emergent Village (EV) of which Brian Mclaren is the leader with his distinctive brand of theology and the rest belongs to the other category.
Some leaders in the other category are planning to start an alliance that has a theology closer to the Lausanne Covenant. This promises to be fun. We shall be see more of Mclaren and McKnight (I wonder why both have a dropped 'a' in their surname) in the coming years.
In the meantime, listen to Doug Pagit explaining these terms 'emergent' and 'emerging' to you.
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