Can anyone help me with this question? Has anyone seen any impressive and possibly reliable numbers?

Of course, how one defines the scope of the movement matters when considering this question. I identify two streams within the movement, a doctrine-friendly stream and a doctrine-wary/averse stream. This means that I call some communities of faith “emerging” who would not embrace that characterization for themselves.

I include all of these folks as part of the emerging church movement whether they like it or not: Brian McLaren, Mark Driscoll, Erwin McManus, Tim Keller, Rob Bell , Matt Chandler, Darrin Patrick, and Tim Keel. My rationale for inclusion of such diverse figures and communities of faith under the umbrella term “emerging” is explored in my chapter for the upcoming volume from Lifeway Evangelicals Engaging Emergent set for publication in May 2009.

But never mind. I am writing a book-length analysis of the movement and I would love to gain a better idea of the size of the this phenomenon.

Seen any numbers?

My dear Wormwood,

You mentioned casually in your last letter that the patient has continued to attend one church, and one only, since he was converted, and that he is not wholly pleased with it. May I ask what you are about? Why have I no report on the causes of his fidelity to the parish church? Do you realize that unless it is due to indifference it is a very bad thing? Surely you know that if a man can’t be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighborhood looking for the church that ‘suits’ him until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches.

             . . . the search for a ‘suitable’ church makes the man a critic where the Enemy wants him to be a pupil. What He wants of the layman in church is an attitude which may, indeed, be critical in the sense of rejecting what is false or unhelpful, but which is wholly uncritical in the sense that it does not appraise¾does not waste time in thinking about what it rejects, but lays itself open in uncommenting, humble receptivity to any nourishment that is going.  . . . This attitude, especially during sermons, creates the condition (most hostile to our whole policy) in which platitudes can become really audible to a human soul. There is hardly any sermon, or any book, which may not be dangerous to us if it is received in this temper. So pray bestir yourself and send this fool the round of the neighboring churches as soon as  possible . . . .

 If you have read my chapter for the upcoming book  E³:Evangelicals Engaging Emergent, William D. Henard and Adam W. Greenway eds. Forward by Thom S. Rainer (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2009), you know that I divide the emerging movement into two major streams, a doctrine-friendly stream, and a second stream that ranges from doctrine-averse to merely doctrine-wary. What do I mean by this? How do I justify such designation? Here is part of the answer:

Jacob’s Well in Kansas City where Tim Keel serves as the lead pastor provides a helpful window into my justification for the three designations: 1. doctrine-friendly; 2. doctrine-wary and 3. doctrine-averse. When Jacob’s Well first started, they self-consciously held to no doctrines. Not the Apostles’ Creed, not the Nicene Creed, nothing. Later on they formally (the elders at least, for they had no formal membership) adopted the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds.

In my taxonomy, this change marked a move from a doctrine-averse or doctrine-devoid status to a merely doctrine-wary status. The leadership (Keel) remained and remains wary of doctrine, alert to the scholasticizing, reductionistic, spiritually stultifying dangers of doctrine for the community of faith. Many of the websites of such communities of faith make very clear that even if they post doctrines, however minimal by historical standards, you must visit them and live among them in order to really know what they are about. Just reading the doctrine doesn’t cut it and might even be misleading. (I speak of communities of faith, not churches, because many of these groups know they are not churches, do not want to be thought of as churches or do not care if they earn the “church” tattoo before the bar of history, tradition or any other measure of such tings).

So the self-conscious wariness and sometimes aversion to doctrine is there. This is how many of these groups describe themselves. But, all of these communities of faith that flourish in any way, all of them that display signs of real vitality and life do actually have doctrines as I have argued in a previous post. What would be helpful for “the conversation” is for leaders of these communities to recognize, state, formally accept and defend those convictions and values that already function as doctrines among them as doctrines. Otherwise we find ourselves talking past one another when one group wants to be viewed as being above the fray as it were where doctrine is concerned.

A similar talking-past-one-another occurred during the late unhappiness within the Southern Baptist Convention during which moderates and liberals dubbed themselves the freedom party and dubbed the conservatives as indoctrinating fundamentalists. In fact, as liberal Baptist Nancy Ammerman “confessed” (an apt word in this context) and demonstrated in her book Baptist Battles, the moderates and liberals were just as identifiable according to a set of non-negotiable convictions (doctrines!) as were the conservatives.

Doctrine-friendly emerging types such as, for example, congregations associated with the ACTS 29 church-planting network, or Mosaic in LA (Rafael McManus) have old-fashioned full blown confessions of faith. The leaders of such churches usually share many of the same concerns about the dangers of doctrine that Emergents fear, but it strikes me that they have a more mature realization that doctrine, despite its susceptibility to misuse and abuse, remains essential to sustainable church life. Why? Because, to a significant degree, the depth of our fellowship with others is proportional to our shared convictions, especially where the things of God are concerned.

In the very short model prayer given to the church by Our Lord Jesus Christ we are instructed to petition Our Father thus¾“Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Matthew goes on to add in 6:14, 15 “For if you forgive others for their transgressions, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, then your Father will not forgive your transgressions.”

Among the fruit of the spirit produced within the Body of Christ we find patience, kindness, and longsuffering. Love, we understand “does not seek its own . . .bears all things, . . . endures all things.” Note also Romans 14:1-15:7 in which the Apostle Paul admonishes the carnivores and herbivores and those who count certain days more holy than others and those who treat all days alike to “pursue the things that make for peace and the building up of one another” (Rom 14:19). In Ephesians Paul implores the church “walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, showing tolerance for one another in love, being diligent to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”

Of course Paul could get his back up and go fundamentalist as well, couldn’t he? Just check out the Epistle to the Galatians! Want to impose circumcision? Well just go ahead and castrate yourself then. Prefer a different (eteroV) gospel from the one Paul preaches? Well just go straight to hell. That is what Paul says. The very heart of the gospel was at stake. But what about matters of disagreement where the gospel is not at stake. Then what?

What might the strong New Testament emphasis upon Christian unity, patience within the Body of Christ, forgiveness, bearing with one another have to say about God’s preference for denominational affiliation versus a non-affiliated way of being church of being a Christian?

What are your thoughts?

Wednesday a young pastor entered my office to discuss a variety of issues related to ministry and church planting. He had been ordained within a large protestant denomination but had left that denomination in favor of an unaffiliated status. I asked him how he like being disconnected from a denomination. He responded, “The worst part about it is that now I feel so disconnected.”

During the post-sermon mingle time at a non-denominational church where I preached this past Sunday, one of the members said he would love for me to come back again and preach, then went on, his face beaming, to state, with gusto and pride¾“Notice that we don’t have any kind of denominational stuff on the sign out front. We are just Christians!”

Denominational loyalty is at a very low ebb. There seems to be no reason to expect a trend in the direction of denominational revival anytime soon. Why is this so?

Have you considered bolting your own denomination? Why?

Have you already left a denomination? For another one? Or are you now worshiping and serving within a denominationally unaffiliated congregation? How’s it going?

Click here to read or download my overview chapter, “The Emerging Church: One Movement¾Two Streams” in the forthcoming book Evangelicals Engaging Emergent, William D. Henard and Adam W. Greenway eds. Forward by Thom S. Rainer (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2009). Other authors include Ed Stetzer, Darrell Bock, Norman Geisler, Russ Moore, Danny Akin, Chuck Lawless et. al.

Actually Scot Mcknight’s latest article in the most recent edition of Christianity Today focuses on Brian McLaren, but McKnight acknowledges McLaren’s formative and continuing influence within the Emergent segment of the broader emerging movement. The article re-confirms McKnight as one of the most astute observers of the emerging movement. The article also highlights his well known disproportional interest in and sympathy with the Emergent stream within the wider movement.

Does McKnight’s special interest in Emergent, given his prolific writing. speaking, and blogging, secure a disproportionately higher profile for the Emergent stream than it deserves? Don’t know. But I wonder.

I divide the movement into two major segments or streams: (1) the Emergent stream: a variously doctrine-wary or even doctrine-averse stream best epitomized, as McKnight recognizes, by EmergentVillage.com, Brian McLaren, Doug Pagitt, and Tony Jones. And (2) a doctrine-friendly stream perhaps best represented by the ACTS29 network of church planters but also associated with the names Mark Driscoll and Tim Keller and, among Southern Baptists, Ed Stetzer.

Has anyone seen significant data on the numbers involved in the emerging movement? Any good numbers out there that show how big the movement might be or the relative strength of the two major streams of the movement? How big is ACTS29 for example?– keeping in mind that ACTS29 is not a denomination and, despite strong reformed theological affinities and shared convictions related to church-planting in a post-Christian context, nevertheless accommodates significant diversity within its circle of church planters.

Back to McKnight’s CT piece. Though McKnight has proven himself a great friend and skilled defender of the Emergent stream within emerging, he has also identified blind spots and weakness within Emergent that he fears could jeopardize the movement, sabotage its prospects for growth, and call into question its claim to be a movement that, in the words of Brian McLaren, seeks “to plant and nurture biblical communities of faith.”

McKnight’s more longstanding concern has been the bad conscience Emergent has displayed for proselytizing. McKnight recognizes that good news should be not only lived but also proclaimed and that where squeamishness for evangelism takes hold, it compromises the viability of any would-be Christian movement. A case in point–Protestant Liberalism. Liberals found a welcome resting place within the wider culture which easily accommodated their hyper-sensitivity toward the views of the unconverted and their embarrassment about their own faith, its history, and its tradition. The same characteristic psyche that helped liberals “make friends” also ensured that they would not “influence people,”– at least they would not exert the kind of influence that results in conversion, church-planting, and church growth. The Emergent segment of emerging may be headed for a similar fate.

But in this latest of his critiques, McKnight puts his finger on a theological weakness that undoubtedly underlies Emergent aversion to conversion: its inability articulate a view of the Cross that takes the full biblical revelation seriously. However much McKnight celebrates Emergent recovery of the implications of the Incarnation for a truly Christian understanding of issues related to the poor, the sick, and the oppressed, he also notices neglect of great portions of the biblical witnesses–dimensions of witness that center on the chief purpose of the Incarnation, namely that the Incarnate one might do a unique work on the Cross. McKnight puts it this way:

“The most stable location for the earliest understandings of the Cross, from Jesus all the way through the New Testament writings, is the Last Supper– and not a word is said there about violence and systemic injustice. Other words are given to explain the event: covenant, forgiveness of sins, and blood ‘poured out for many.’ Insight into the Cross must begin here.”

Could it be that Emergent failure to comprehend or make much use of the Cross in its thinking involves a pattern of highhanded theologizing that traces back at least to the turn of the 19th century? I have in mind the grand attempt of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) to rescue Christianity in the face of an Enlightenment assault upon the church’s supreme epistemological touchstone, the revelation of God in Holy Scripture.

Formally, at least, is not the chief distinction between “liberal” and ”conservative” or “evangelical” theologizing the opposing postures they take before the witness of the Bible? A true liberal admits, with Schleiermacher, that the theologian stands above the Bible and sifts wheat from chaff, selecting from the Scriptures those teachings best suited to advance the agenda brought to it by the theologian or the preacher etc. In this sense, liberals are not answerable to the Bible. Rather, the Bible serves as a resource for their use.

Conservatives, on the other hand, express formal answerability to the word of Scripture. That’s a big difference. And the danger lurking where the church would stand over rather than under the Bible as the authority for her faith and practice was recognized clearly by Karl Bath: it is the danger of idolatry. Whenever we stand above the Bible and imagine a competence for the sifting of wheat from chaff among its contents, we do, wittingly or not, make a god!

On what basis do Emergents sift biblical wheat from biblical chaff? Irony of ironies–they sift according to their DOCTRINE!  That’s right. The doctrine-wary and doctrine-averse Emergents are eat-up with doctrine whether they realize it or not. They may not admit it, and some may not recognize it, but in fact, Emergents not only have doctrine but are deeply shaped by it. The cluster of unrecognized doctrines active and embedded within Emergent thinking is indicated by such terms precious among them as: authenticity, missional, community, mystery, and post-christian/post-modern. Take note that this same set of terms are just as indispensable when doctrine-friendly emerging types (such as those one finds associated with ACTS29) describe themselves.

Yes, Emergents have doctrine. What they lack is any kind of identifiable, stable authority to which those doctrines become answerable–not the Bible, not the Christian tradition, not anything apparently, beyond their own emerging sense of what the world needs now. While use is made by Emergents of both the Bible and the tradition, neither is allowed to trump or even penetrate Emergent protectiveness of its own un-recognized doctrines. Both Bible and tradition are ransacked for their usefulness to the predetermined Emergent cause, a heavy slice of which seems to be its sour attitude toward evangelicalism.

For this reason McKnight cannot simply issue a straightforward appeal to the Bible in his warnings to Emergents where the Cross and Evangelism are at issue. He shrewdly appeals also to Emergent construal of “kingdom” (another of Emergent’s embedded “doctrines”).

Are not McKnight’s concerns well founded? Are we in a position today to identify with any clarity the underlying malady plaguing Emergent? Might that malady reside precisely in Emergent failure to anchor itself to anything more substantive than the conflation of its own diagnosis of the pathologies latent within existing models of church with its own idiosyncratic prescription for addressing those pathologies? Answers to such questions will reveal to what extent Emergent belongs to that other, older movement known as Christianity and whether the communities of faith nurtured within its ethos can rightly be called churches.

Are not the doctrine-friendlies within Emerging attempting something more promising for those who covet faithfulness to the Bible and inclusion within the global and historic church of Jesus Christ as well as relevant Christian living and church-planting within a post-Christian context? If the doctrine-friendly emerging types such as ACTS29 retain their commitment to Holy Scripture, their welcoming of historic doctrinal anchors along with their zeal for conversion-seeking evangelism and church-planting, they may well leave a mark on Christianity in the West that will long outlast anything likely to come from the still largely unformed and wandering Emergent stream of the movement. I hope they do.

C. S. Lewis’ reputation for being unimpressed with the modern world, with the pretensions of newness, is well established. Long before Thomas Oden coined the phrase modern-chauvinism and then critiqued its underlying assumptions, Lewis understood and rejected its reflexive instincts. Namely, the default assumption that newer ideas and practices are necessarily superior to older ones.

Now that “networking” designates one of the supposed essential tools of success for today’s aspiring professionals, including for many would-be ministers of the gospel, a peek into Lewis’ view of such things reminds us of the prophetic edge the creator of Narnia so often achieves.

In the following excerpt Lewis reflects upon childhood experiences at boarding school:

“ . . . the essential evil of public-school life, as I see it, did not lie either in the sufferings          of the fags or in the privileged arrogance of the Bloods. These were symptoms of something more all-pervasive, something which, in the long run, did most harm to the boys who succeeded best at school and were happiest there. Spiritually speaking, the deadly thing was that school life was a life almost wholly dominated by the social struggle; to get on, to arrive, or, having reached the top, to remain there, was the absorbing preoccupation. It is often, of course, the preoccupation of adult life as well; but I have not yet seen any adult society in which the surrender to this impulse was so total. And from it, as school as in the world, all sorts of meanness flow; the sycophancy that courts those higher in the scale, the cultivation of those whom it is well to know, the speedy abandonment of friendships that will not help on the upward path, the readiness to join the cry against the unpopular, the secret motive in almost every action.”

From Lewis’ Surprised By Joy, paragraph 9 of chapter VII entitled “Light and Shade.”

A little consideraton of Mary on Christmas? Why not? Click here to read my review of Tim Perry’s Mary For Evangelcals: Toward and Understanding of the Mother of Our Lord. 

Reading Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz, though I had not yet heard of the emerging church movement, was my introduction to that movement. Donald Carson’s Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church: Understanding a Movement and Its Implications was the first serious treatment of the movement I encountered. That was almost two years ago. Since that time I have found myself frequently frustrated by the conviction that Carson had “got it wrong,” and so had wrongly poisoned the pot of evangelical reception of the emerging movement. Carson’s reputation as one of the most respected evangelical scholars writing today is well established and well deserved. His influence is significant and with good reason.

Over the last two years I have engaged in constant research of the emerging church movement, have published a couple of short pieces on the movement and have warned audiences that Carson’s work should not be viewed as the final, comprehensive, evangelical assessment of emerging church. I stand by that view. No treatment of the movement that makes no mention of the names Mark Driscoll, Tim Keller, Erwin Rafael McManus, Ed Stetzer and John Burke can hope to achieve anything like a comprehensive overview of emerging.

But! Having just re-read Carson’s book, I am much more impressed with it than I once thought possible. In a forthcoming book I will argue that folks like Mark Driscoll and Erwin McManus do merit (whether they like it or not) the emerging tattoo and thus, Carson’s book involves an analysis of only a couple of sub-sections of the movement. But very important sub-sections they are and Carson’s analysis of them is, I believe, right on.

Far from the mean, reductionistic treatment of McLaren some have charged him with, Carson is very thorough, fair, and even seems to look for every opportunity to praise McLaren where he can. For example Carson notes McLaren’s care in avoiding the simplistic notion modernism bad/postmodernism good-trap that so many others fall into. Nevertheless, Carson, through careful and footnoted examination of McLaren’s writings, exposes unbiblical conclusions, questionable analysis of culture, and contradictory assertions that characterize McLaren’s thinking. I read Carson before McLaren and when I got around to McLaren I took a bias against Carson with me. But, now having tried to read McLaren sympathetically with little success, I find Carson, upon second reading, very impressive indeed.

I highly recommend Carson’s Becoming Conversant as an indispensable evangelical assessment of what I call the doctrine/wary and doctrine/averse streams within the emerging church movement.