I’ve sat in on the occasional “what is emergent” conversation at various events, and it’s interesting to note that even Publisher’s Weekly is stymied by the term. Marcia Ford, writing in this week’s issue, points to the confusion that the term engenders for publishers and booksellers as much as it does for readers interested in learning more about emerging church, emergent theology and Emergent Village—three terms that are used interchangeably as “emergent.”
But more significant, Ford continues, is that nontraditional expressions of Christianity that do not fit into these three areas but are still, perhaps mistakenly, considered emergent.
“The term ’emerging church’ is so loose that one moment you can apply it to a specific book, and the next moment, you can just as easily decide it isn’t emergent at all,” says Dudley Delffs, Zondervan’s v-p and publisher of trade books.
One author who has separated the emergent from the nonemergent is Tom Sine, whose InterVarsity book, The New Conspirators, released earlier this year. In it he makes a clear distinction among four streams of alternative Christianity: emerging church (emphasizing the gospel as story, community, experiential worship, the arts, and much more); missional (an outward focus on mission); mosaic (intentionally multicultural); and monastic (a radical communal lifestyle, often lived out among the poor).
Many in the emerging church “conversation,” the preferred self-descriptor, distinguish among three terms: emerging church, an umbrella term for the category; emergent, referring to an unorthodox interpretation of scripture; and Emergent, shorthand for Emergent Village (EV), a largely online community. Most of the publishers PW spoke with used the terms interchangeably, as does the Christian community at large.
Other forms of alternative Christianity are often mistaken for emerging/emergent, but are not. One cause for confusion, says Al Hsu, associate editor at InterVarsity Press, is that many books that are not theologically emergent still resonate with emergent readers, such as IVP’s The Circle of Seasons (Nov.), a title about the liturgical year from Presbyterian writer Kimberlee Conway Ireton.
And then there’s the mistaken assumption that to be young and edgy is to be emergent. “A traditionalist in a younger body is not emergent,” Hsu says, pointing to Shane Claiborne as an author who is frequently referred to as emergent but is not. Claiborne, who with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove coauthored Becoming the Answer to Our Prayers (IVP, Oct.), lives in an intentional community in inner-city Philadelphia.
The rest is here.