Emerging churches are communities that practice the way of Jesus within postmodern cultures. This definition encompasses nine practices. Emerging churches (1) identify with the life of Jesus, (2) transform the secular realm, and (3) live highly communal lives. Because of these three activities, they (4) welcome the stranger, (5) serve with generosity, (6) participate as producers, (7) create as created beings, (8) lead as a body, and (9) take part in spiritual activities.He then rightly criticizes Carson's Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church.
Carson's book lacks firsthand awareness and suffers from an overly narrow focus—on Brian McLaren and postmodern epistemology.The five streams he highlights are:
Prophetic - the emerging movement is consciously and deliberately provocative.
Postmodern - postmodernity cannot be reduced to the denial of truth. Instead, it is the collapse of inherited metanarratives.
Praxis-oriented - at its core, the emerging movement is an attempt to fashion a new ecclesiology. Its distinctive emphases can be seen in its worship, its concern with orthopraxy, and its missional orientation.
Post-evangelical -this stream flows from the conviction that the church must always be reforming itself. In this it is post-systematic theology. That is, it tends to be suspicious of systematic theology because the diversity of theologies is alarming, no genuine consensus has been achieved, God didn't reveal a systematic theology but a storied narrative, and no language is capable of capturing the Absolute Truth who alone is God. Also included in the post-evangelical point is a skepticism toward the "in versus out" mentality of much of evangelicalism.
Political - they "lean left on politics".
If you're one who has only heard that emergents are heretics, read this article and some of the references. While you may not like all that emergent is, I think you would be hard pressed to find the "conversation" heretical.
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