Emerging Christians tend to be theologically pluralistic and quite suspicious of tidy theological boxes. They believe that God is bigger than any theology and that God is first and foremost a story-teller, not a dispenser of theological doctrine and factoids. Theology for them, therefore, is conceived as an ongoing and provisional conversation. Emerging Christians are also allergic to thinking which fixates on who is going to heaven and who is going to hell, or on who’s on the inside and who’s on the outside. They stress the importance of right-living (orthopraxy) over right-believing (orthodoxy). What’s important, they often say, is whether you engage in God-love and neighbor-love. Or as one of our conversation partners put it, “We’re more interested in doing truth than believing ‘truths’.”
Even more, emerging Christians believe the church must change if it is to speak meaningfully to a postmodern culture. So, like the prophet Amos, the rhetoric of emerging Christians can be shocking, alarming and hyperbolic. They are frequently given to dramatic overstatement. But it should be kept in mind that, at its best and most sincere, the aim of the rhetoric is to rouse us (the Church) from dogmatic slumber, to get us to see old things with new eyes, or sometimes to see completely new things. The aim, one might say, is to unsettle us such that a space is open for God to break in and to speak afresh, and then for us to get on with God’s agenda in the world.
Lastly, participants in the emergent and altworship movements are passionate about the present. The gospel, they want us to realize, is about the here-and-now, and not a ticket to secure a place in the there-and-then of heaven. This passion for the present manifests itself in four overlapping foci: community, transformation, worship and social engagement.