What is the emerging church?

When people ask me what the 'emerging church' is, one of the resources I point them to is the book Emerging Churches by Eddie Gibbs and Ryan Bolger. In a recent email conversation I summarised the 9 common characteristics they find in emerging churches, and a number of people seemed to find my summary helpful so I thought I'd put it up here for reference.


The Cliff Notes version is this: they identify nine characteristics of emerging churchs:

  1. they tend to identify heavily with the life and teaching of Jesus as much as his death and resurrection - a 'kingdom' emphasis if you will;

  2. they tend to break down the secular/sacred dualism thus being generally far more optimistic about culture (seeing God at work in it) and identifying with the concept of the church joining with God the Missio Dei, rather than the Church being the sole (or main) instrument of God's work. They are also thus warm towards a sacramentalist approach.

  3. they tend to emphasise the importance of community; and value family over institution.

  4. they tend to value hospitality, generosity to the stranger, inclusiveness.

  5. they tend to value service to others and to see that such service should be generous and transparent (without ulterior motivation).

  6. they tend to emphasise full participation with God in the redemption of the world and hence worship tends to be multi-sensory, all-age, participatory, dialogical, holistic, etc.

  7. related to this, there is a strong emphasis on creativity (participating with my gifts) and aesthetics.

  8. leadership tends to be seen as relational, corporate, vulnerable, influential (rather than authoritarian), passionate (rather than rationally driven), facilitative.

  9. there is a strong interest in learning from, and incorporating into life and worship, the 'best' of ancient thinking but more particularly *practice*, especially practices of spirituality (some refer to an emergence of a 'new monasticism').