I have encountered increasing pleas to define what Emergent means. There is some debate over whether "emergent" and "emerging" are synonymous. From my perspective, I view them as such. The emerging church movement being made up of emergent Christians...or something like that. While I think it is nearly impossible to define what the Emerging Church is, Wikipedia does a fairly decent job of it.
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The emerging church is a controversial 21st-century Protestant Christian movement whose participants seek to engage postmodern people, especially the unchurched and post-churched. To accomplish this, "emerging Christians" seek to deconstruct and reconstruct Christian beliefs, standards, and methods to fit in the postmodern mold. Proponents of this movement call it a "conversation" to emphasize its developing and decentralized nature. The predominantly young participants in this movement prefer narrative presentations drawn from their own experiences and biblical narratives over propositional, Bible exposition. Emergent methodology includes frequent use of new technologies such as multimedia and the Internet. Their acceptance of diversity and reliance on open dialogue rather than the dogmatic proclamation found in historic Christianity leads emerging church Christians to diverse beliefs and morality.
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Critics of the movement are often conservative evangelical theologians and pastors who disagree with the movement's embrace of postmodernism, believing such a worldview leads emergents to unorthodox theology, relativism, antinomianism, universalism, and syncretism. These critics frequently associate emergent theology with the liberal theology that has historically been at odds with Christian fundamentalism and Evangelicalism.
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Emergent Christians often see themselves as bridging the divide between conservative evangelical Christianity and liberal mainline Christianity.
