I'm just finishing reading Tony Jones new book, "The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier" (Tony Jones) and it's raising some questions for me. Namely, to what extent can emerging faith communities operate within the institutional church? This is a live issue for me as I'd love to be part of an emerging faith community, but I'm also a part of an institutional church - The Uniting Church in Australia. I'm a minister of the UCA, I'm employed by the UCA (and by the institution itself, not a local congregation), and I have promised to come under the discipline of the UCA.
One thing which gives me comfort is a tradition within the UCA of being a 'movement' rather than a denomination, but there's still a lot of denominational apparatus, let me tell you! Anyway, I'll keep thinking about it and in the next couple of posts I might try to delineate the things I really like about the UCA and why I think the Church would be poorer if there was no UCA. Then I might look at some of the 'emergent' values I hold and then thirdly how these two lists sit somewhat in tension.