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Everybody’s talking “emerging” or “emergent” church, and the phrase applies to alternative
worship services with 30 people, house churches with eight artists, and multi-media gatherings with
1,000 people. So what is emerging?

First of all, life is always emerging. You stop emerging, you’re dead. So the church, like any other
living body, has always been and will always be emerging, birthing fresh forms from the ancient
stories and traditions so that the always unfolding story of God’s people and God’s truth can come
alive in a new day and a new way.

Emerging church is happening wherever people are translating the always-good news of God in
language, forms, practices and sounds that speak from and back into the culture and life
emerging around us, welcoming voices from the bottom up, moving from the witness of Jesus out.
Way more than doing a worship laboratory, we’re exploring the radical edge, crafting new ways of
defining and being God’s people that make sense given our postmodern (and, in The Crossing’s
case, urban and multicultural and globally aware) context. Asking hard questions, listening to and
celebrating voices on the ground, examining the systems that privilege certain cultures and certain
ways of learning and communicating and singing, building our lives around the transforming
mission of God… you get the idea.

It’s not change for the sake of change, not rebellion for the sake of making the Church Fathers
mad. But it is fundamental, paradigm-shifting change, refusing to be trapped by old assumptions
about the way church "ought" to feel or the way Christians "ought" to act. Progressive meets
evangelical. Neo-soul meets chant. The wrought iron candelabra sits next to an amp and bass. Lay
people do the preaching. The ancient order for worship gets fused with centering prayer. Eucharist
set to a bumping groove. The contradictions aren't contradictions anymore. It all belongs to God.

Here are some of the communities we’ve befriended and learned from along this emerging way:

• emergent village
• thads (CA)
• vintage faith (CA)
• wicker park grace (IL)
• jacob's well church (MO)
• cedar ridge community church (MD)
• solomon's porch (MN)
• transmission (NY)
• circle of hope (PA)
• the church of the apostles (WA)
• the moot community (UK)

     
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