By huge popular request

Categories: musings

Tags: Anabaptism, emerging church

Date: 02 December 2007 11:58:01

Well, by one request actually, I have been persuaded to say more about the 'Emerging Church Seminar' yesterday at the London Mennonite Centre.

It was led by Stuart Murray, author of books in the 'After Christendom' series*, with lots of interaction, group work and discussion. Basically he spent the morning outlining various types of 'emerging church', grouped into three categories according to their major focus: mission-led, community-led and worship-led, with stories of different initiatives, and we discussed our responses to what we were hearing or had personally encountered. Lots of questions came up about 'what is church?' , 'what is church for?' and other such easily answered problems ;-)

After lunch he suggested that the Anabaptist movement was itself a 16th century emerging church movement. However the emerging churches of the 21st century are not directly inspired by it, although when they do encounter Anabaptism they may recognise common ground - eg coming from the grassroots rather than the leadership, a 'flat' authority structure, experimentation in worship, communal interpretation of the Scriptures. Where the emerging church differs from Anabaptist concerns and emphases is in its relatively homogeneous membership - largely white, middle class, educated, its lack of presence in the inner cities and the degree to which it is or is not counter-cultural, not just to the inherited church, but to the society around it. Some participants felt emerging church might just be another form of consumer church, pandering to particular subcultures and tastes while not sufficiently challenging the wider culture.

That's from my memory - I took notes but my pen ran out so the notes did too. Anyway the notes were a bit 'emerging' and post-modern, sort of scrawled all over the page at odd angles...

*Tractorgirl, I am ashamed to say I haven't yet read 'Church after Christendom' but I suspect that Stuart says many of the same things there.