Now, I'm a bit of an outsider to this whole emergent blogging thing, so it's taken me a while to work out what 'emergent' might mean. Reading a book by Steven Johnson helped a lot. Emergent means like slime. Slime mould makes complex and effective patterns, but there's no 'higher intellignence' or 'queen amoeba' organising things; each cell is equally 'in leadership', but when they come together the system works (for more on this, including gross diagrams, just put 'emergent slime' into your search engine). 'Emergence' is the phenomenon of adapted complexity evolving without hierarchical organization.
In the christian context, what the various slime-trails called 'emergent' have in common is an instinctive worldview that leadership, theology, structure, mission, vision and style for the church should not be imposed from above. In the old, non-emergent model, the leader goes up a mountain and God tells him - the leader's usually a him! - what he (God) wants. In the emergent model, these things should 'emerge' from below - from the locale; from the people of God; from the signs of the Spirit's groaning in our culture; from the marginalised.
If you want to break the slime down further, it seems to me that there are two slime trails in the 'emergent church' movement.
The first trail feeling its way towards this philosophy (call it emergent1) is largely made up of people who are second- generation free church charismatics. Many of their parents got bored with 'traditional church' in the 1970s and started new ones; now they are just as bored of the new churches. More profoundly, they have a sense that they need a new theology
and a new way of worshipping to be true to who they are and to be able to impact their locality ('locality' increasingly being used in non-geographical ways). For many, their search has led them to find the theology of Tom Wright or Walter Brueggemann and an eclectic worship style which uses (in a postmodern way) ancient liturgy and sacrament alongside club-culture atmospherics. I like it.
The second trail (emergent2) is coming from the other direction. As anglicans (I'm a priest myself) we already have the sacraments and liturgies as (more or less) givens, and we've already been reading Wright and Brueggemann for a while. But we, too, are longing for structure, mission, theology and style to 'emerge' from our locality (and we probably do mean the geographic locality, because of the parish system). Little by little, as the worship events of emergent1 start to look more 'postmodern anglican', our worship events are that little bit more 'anglican postmodern'; you bring the percussion, we'll provide the candles. In short, the two trails should in theory be meeting any time now. But are they?
A visit to a few blogs suggests to me that when the trails meet the result may sometimes be hurt rather than collaboration. To put it bluntly, it seems to me as if some emergent2 thinkers look at emergent1, and feel put out that this group of untrained nobodies is taking the good things from our heritage without all the baggage that goes with it. "If you want the right
to use eucharistic prayer D you should also have to live through 8am 1662 communions where three people come and then don't talk to each other afterwards". Meanwhile, some emergent1 bloggers have clearly been hurt by the institutional church and are scared of what we might do to them. Come on, emergers. Slime can, ants can, certain species of amoeba can, so let's do it, let's learn to... merge.