I may get my full-length article out of this yet. Anyone who missed the prior post should read it and the comments attached, as this is a continuation of those thoughts and comments.
What is shaping up in the conversation is a discussion of two things: firstly, what does a postmodern church movement look like when compared and contrasted with a modern church movement, and what does that mean for the future of an emerging church movement? Secondly, a side-discussion has evolved about the Vineyard movement in relation to the Charismatic and Pentecostal movements which preceded it. Thirdly (because when someone says “two things” in an informal conversation, there’s always a third thing somewhere), how do these understandings work into a post-charismatic theology… with the side-discussion of where the charismatic emerging churches are? To put that last one another way, how do charismatic and emerging church orthodoxy and orthopraxy fit together, and does it mean anything that there’s so little discussion of that question?
On to the point of this post, which is a further clarification of something I said in the earlier musings — it is probably not correct to think of the charismatic movement springing directly from the Pentecostal movement or the Vineyard springing directly from the charismatic movement… I think I said “spawned” in this context above, but that’s not quite accurate, a slip of the keyboard. In considering this, I believe that each of these movements were sparked at point #3 in the diagram (the trajectory of the earlier movement). For specific reasons each their own, in each of these cases the new movement that was sparked held some things very much in common with the preceding movement, but rather than join in that movement, became a movement of its own… that is, while there were many similarities, there were enough differences for the new movement to be distinct from the older one(s). Rather than being directly spawned then, I would therefore clarify that they grew out of the milieu that existed at the time, so the relationship is somewhat more indirect.
New consideration… is the Vineyard movement at their “Point 3” now, and out of that milieu we are witnessing the birth of a new movement?
Follow-on question, if the new movement (i.e., emerging church) is very different than the prior ones because it’s the first postmodern church movement launching from the context of the last modern church movement, will the outcome be different or not? Can we see that far?
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