Community, Transformation, Worship, and Social Engagement are four key tenets of those practicing what’s been called “Emergent Worship.”
Community: Emergent Christians place a premium on community, living life together in all its messiness. However, community can take many shapes, and emergent or altworship communities often do not resemble traditional church community with a paid staff and centralized leadership. It’s a dispersed community that is lived in the rough-and-tumble of everyday life. So a premium is placed on togetherness, journeying with and alongside others.
Transformation: Emergent types are passionate about transformation, both personal and structural. They tend not to view themselves as finished products, as “saved” or even as “Christian.” Instead, they speak of themselves as “being saved” and “becoming Christian.” They tend to be political activists and socially “liberal” in the sense that they care deeply about the proverbial “widow, orphan and alien,” those who are marginalized, oppressed, and disenfranchised and about changing the personal and structural realities that perpetuate the disenfranchisement and marginalization. They believe that engaging in such tasks is to follow Jesus.
Worship: Emerging Christians are innovative and imaginative in the aesthetics of worship, and they are technologically savvy. They’re sacramental and incarnational, sometimes employing large-scale transformative theatre (Ikon). Revelation, one of the communities we visited, offers a sophisticated blend of ancient ritual and liturgy and cutting-edge image technology and participation. Typical of the worship in these communities is worship that engages us as whole and embodied beings, providing a feast for most if not all of our sensory modalities: sight, sound, smell, and tactile experience.
Social Engagement: Emerging Christians enthusiastically endorse Jesus’ claim that “by their fruits you will know them.” Thus, they seek to be active agents of God’s reconciling, redemptive, and restorative agenda in and for the world.
What has your experience been? What do you associate with the words “Emergent” or “Emerging Church”?