Why I Am Proud to be Emergent

I am an emergent Christian. As I do not hold to any specific denomination, that is as far as I can go to describe, in one word, what I believe. In the past few years since the coining of the term "emerging" or "emergent" or whatever you want to call it, there has been a great deal of controversy over what these terms mean and what this type of Christian believes. It is such a broad term and emergents have such a varied statement of beliefs, that it can not be considered a denomination or even a true movement.

Scott Mcknight has published a pretty good string of blogs on his Jesus Creed website on the emerging church movement. You can find them by clicking here.

Since the term emergent can mean so many things to so many different people, I will just explain what it means to me personally. For me, the emerging church is a back-to-basics approach to Christianity. I look at the Church in America today, and far too often I see the us-against-them mentality on life. I see too many churches putting too much emphasis on the number of converts they get each year, and not enough time into reaching out to people and loving them. And as my Blue Like Jazz post from last week illustrates wonderfully, sometimes there is more love to be found outside the Church than inside. This should not be.

To be emergent is to take a missional approach to evangelism. It is important to spread the message of Christ. However, I think it is clear that our current methods of evangelism are not doing their job. It makes me angry when I hear of Christians becoming friends with non-Christians simply to get them converted and to turn them into honest, church going people who say things like "bless you" and "thank the Lord" all the time. They're trying to create clones. To love somebody is to love who they are, not who you want them to become. It doesn't work that way.

I see the emerging movement as one of genuine love and compassion toward the world. It's stems from the love that Jesus shows time and time again in the gospels. The message is repeated over and over: love the week, the helpless, the alien, the widow, the poor. Yet, the Church seems to think it's about numbers, about converts, about getting people to conform to their belief systems and even political mindsets. Constantly, I see a warlike mentality toward the "secular" world. It's hard to truly love people when you're at war with them.

I call myself emergent, because it's the best way I've found to describe what my vision is as a Christian. I want to love people and reach out to them the way Jesus did. I want people to see that I'm a Christian, not simply by telling them that I believe the Bible, but by the way I love them with a genuine love, a love without the pretext of conversion.