Emerging churches

A professor at Fuller Seminary posted a relatively short summary of what he’s seen in emerging churches over the last two decades. Some quotes:

In the 1990s, there were very few examples of churches that were communicating within the perspectives and practices of new urban cultures. More typically at that time, the strategy consisted of making the church service relevant to outsiders: play the right music and light the right candles and they will come. However, in our collective experience… the trendy service didn’t solve the problem. Instead it revealed deeper problems in the church.

…Towards the year 2000, we realized that culture language only got the church so far, that postmodern culture needed a positive response from within that culture. We realized, through the help of many scholars of the day, that it was the kingdom of God, or in mission terms, the missio Dei, that was the missing ingredient in church life.