Alan Creech notes, the word gets out…. as he and several others have reported, The Jessamine Journal has published an article on the emerging church… and this is one of the good ones (note Alan Creech was also interviewed for the article).
“Emergence,” said [Geoff] Maddock, is a scientific term. It refers to simultaneous eruptions of life.
“That’s very much how I see the emerging church,” he remarked. “I don’t think it is one thing or one model or one strategy.”
I answer my own question with a “no.” Emerging churches are still too “structure-less” for the mainstream… on this longing for destructuring, see Andrew Jones: Mixing our Wineskins? from earlier this week, with followup comments by Jordan Cooper. As Jones puts it, “…we need to …[g]et used to the idea that emergent churches will have an emergent system of government that will be different to their predecessors, and yet still be anchored into the pages of the Bible.”
As I see it, the emerging church is gaining notice from those outside the church, where there’s interest. Inside the mainstream church, there’s still skepticism and caution (and sometimes worse). To some extent I think the reason why there’s interest outside and misunderstanding inside is the same one: the wineskins don’t really mesh.
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