What is the difference between Emerging and Seeker-Sensitive?

[shackleton]

I have been calling certain churches emerging (Mark Driscoll, not Mclaren), thinking that the idea of emerging was to do away with the denominational tendencies, sort of to blur the distinction between the different beliefs each denomination has. The idea being to take all of the stuffiness out of church.

Whereas SS tailoring church to the wants of the "non-churched." Or maybe Emerging is the next evolutionary step in the SS process.

Anyway, the reason I ask is that I have been corrected more than once when calling a church Emerging and was told it was only SS.

 

[Reepicheep]

I highly recommend "Why we're not Emergent (by two guys who should be)" by DeYoung and Kluck. It's a great read and very informative.

Basically "Emerging" is the label for the latest evolution from the Seeker/Warren churches(Driscoll). There are variations within this "camp" for sure, but "authentic", "community", "missional", are all buzz words. It's a reaction to teh program-driven mega church, however, ironically, churches like Driscoll's look pretty much the same as the Warren Megachurch- the only difference seems to be the use of the occasional swear word or other shocking preaching tactic used on occasion. Lots more could be said here, check out the book. Youtube Driscoll on the Emerging Church variations also. "Emergent" is the theologically liberal manifestation of the same (MacLaren, Pagit, Bell). Emergent is nothing more than old school liberalism and it's social gospel being tauted in a non-traditional setting by 30 somethings "pastors".

I love this quote from the book I mention above:

After reading nearly five thousand pages of emerging-church literature, I have no doubt that the emerging church, while loosely defined and far from uniform, can be described and critiqued as a diverse, but recognizable, movement. You might be an emergent Christian: if you listen to U2, Moby, and Johnny Cash's Hurt (sometimes in church), use sermon illustrations from The Sopranos, drink lattes in the afternoon and Guinness in the evenings, and always use a Mac; if you readng list consists primarily of Stanley Hauerwas, Henri Nouwen, N.T. Wright, Stan Grenz, Dallas Willard, Brennan Manning, Jim Wallis, Frederick Buechner, David Bosch, John Howard Yoder, Wendell Berry, Nancy Murphy, John Franke, Walter Winks, and Lesslie Newbigin (not to mention McLaren, Pagitt, Bell, etc.) and your sparring partners include D.A. Carson, John Calvin, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, and Wayne Grudem; if your idea of quintessential Christian discipleship is Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, or Desmond Tutu; if you don't like George W. Bush or institutions or big business or capitalism or Left Behind Christianity; if your political concerns are poverty, AIDS, imperialism, war-mongering, CEO salaries, consumerism, global warming, racism, and oppression and not so much abortion and gay marriage; if you are into bohemian, goth, rave, or indie; if you talk about the myth of redemptive violence and the myth of certainty; if you lie awake at night having nightmares about all the ways modernism has ruined your life; if you love the Bible as a beautiful, inspiring collection of works that lead us into the mystery of God but is not inerrant; if you search for truth but aren't sure it can be found; if you've ever been to a church with prayer labyrinths, candles, Play-Doh, chalk drawings, couches, or beanbags (your youth group doesn't count); if you loathe words like linear, propositional, rational, machine, and hierarchy and use words like ancient-future, jazz, mosaic, matrix, missional, vintage, and dance; if you grew up in a very conservative Christian home that in retrospect seems legalistic, naive, and rigid; if you support women in all levels of ministry, prioritize urban over suburban, and like your theology narrative instead of systematic; if you disbelieve in any sacred-secular divide; if you want to be the church and not just go to church; if you long for a community that is relational, tribal, and primal like a river or a garden; if you believe doctrine gets in the way of an interactive relationship with Jesus; if you believe who goes to hell is no one's business and no one may be there anyway; if you believe salvation has a little to do with atoning for guilt and a lot to do with bringing the whole creation back into shalom with its Maker; if you believe following Jesus is not believing the right things but living the right way; if it really bugs you when people talk about going to heaven instead of heaven coming to us; if you disdain monological, didactic preaching; if you use the word "story" in all your propositions about postmodernism- if all or most of this tortuously long sentence describes you, then you might be an emergent christian.

 

[SolaGratia]

Tony,

Sounds like a great book!

Does the book mention how we should confront this movement or both movements especially as Reformed Protestants?

 

[2 Tim 4:2]

To be fair To Mark Driscoll he has grown quite a bit and all but completely denounced the EC. Here is a brief synopsis of Marks view of the Emergent Church and a link to a podcast where Mark outlines his concerns.

He still believes the gospel is beholden to subcultures but in the way average EC churches do. It seems to be more of an excuse to dress and act a certain way than anything else.

 

[Reepicheep]

Tony,

Sounds like a great book!

Does the book mention how we should confront this movement or both movements especially as Reformed Protestants?

Gil,
Yes. The structure of the book is to confront the various tendencies of the emerging church. I wouldn't necessarily say it's a polemic approach, but it definitely serves to show what the Emerging church is, identify it's problems/weaknesses, and offer ways to guard against some of the imbalance that seems to be occuring in the movement.

Dealing with something that is emerging, is difficult. You do some research, some guys write a book about it, then the movement morphs in to something slightly different.

 

[jogri17]

I think we reformed people need to give Mark Driscoll some slack and leave him a little room to grow. He has made huge strides. If he'd put on a suit and stop the language and stop watching tv he'd be a John Piper without the academic credits.

 

[Sonoftheday]

From the title of this thread I was expecting a punchline.

 

[DMcFadden]

Emergent Church includes a host of philosophical assumptions that are antithetical to orthodoxy and are driven by a philosophy of church and culture. No accident, for example, that Tony Jones is a Fuller grad who got his ideas from FTS prof Nancy Murphy.

Seeker Sensitive is a pragmatically driven phenom that attempts to lower the cultural entry barriers to attracting a larger "market share" of the unchurched population. As such, it has been a marketing focused approach. Again, no accident that Willowcreek's CEO, er, ah, I mean pastor . . . has more in common with a MBA curriculum than with a seminary one*:

James Twitchell, in his new book Shopping for God, reports that outside Bill Hybels’ office hangs a poster that says: “What is our business? Who is our customer? What does the customer consider value?” Directly or indirectly, this philosophy of ministry—church should be a big box with programs for people at every level of spiritual maturity to consume and engage—has impacted every evangelical church in the country.

I take "emerging" to be a complex of two things:

1. Orthodox evangelicals who want to be "cool" and be winsome to a secular audience but have gotten afraid of the heretical excesses in the McLaren/Jones/Padgitt style of EC (e.g., Dan Kimball, Mark Driscoll). They started down the road, turned around, and have retained some of the quest for strategies without the philosophical superstructure.

2. Uncritical/unthinking (?) evangelicals who always seem attracted to the latest fad, trend, or seminar "how to." Younger pastors are particularly attracted to this kind of stuff. The younger ones who are put off by the glitz of the Boomers with their Big Box church, but want to be "cool" can have their cake and eat it too with an emerging approach.

My personal bottom line:
a. Emergent Church - heresy being packaged as the latest greatest new thing.
b. Emerging Church - Uncritical (sometimes unthinking) Evangelicals in search of relevance as an evangelistic tool.
c. Seeker Sensitive - a marketing driven philosophy based upon consumerism and models of consumer behavior applied to church.





*In my early 40s, I returned to school to obtain a graduate management degree. My training and research permit me to speak "business babble" fluently. The observations here are intended to be from the perspective of someone who has actually "gone to school" to learn the things Hybels has adapted and adopted for his approach to ministry, not as just another church critic of a successful person and their ministry.

 

[RamistThomist]

I would opt for what Robbert Webber calls "Ancient-Future" church. When I read the following list, I found myself cringing at some emergents and agreeing with others.

if you readng list consists primarily of Stanley Hauerwas, Henri Nouwen, N.T. Wright, Stan Grenz, Dallas Willard, Brennan Manning, Jim Wallis, Frederick Buechner, David Bosch, John Howard Yoder, Wendell Berry, Nancy Murphy, John Franke, Walter Winks, and Lesslie Newbigin (not to mention McLaren, Pagitt, Bell, etc.)

I read Newbigin and Wright. And enjoy it.

and your sparring partners include D.A. Carson, John Calvin, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, and Wayne Grudem;

I will spar with Carson on Covenant theology, baptism and other important issues.

if you don't like George W. Bush

or institutions or big business or capitalism or Left Behind Christianity; if your political concerns are poverty, AIDS, imperialism, war-mongering, CEO salaries, consumerism, global warming, racism, and oppression and not so much abortion and gay marriage;

There is a good and bad way to approach this. We can oppose Empire without buying into the baptised socialism.

use words like ancient-future, jazz, mosaic, matrix, missional, vintage, and dance;

I agree with missional and ancient-future.

and like your theology narrative instead of systematic;

Guilty. Narrative is an extremely powerful concept.

if you disbelieve in any sacred-secular divide;

Guilty again. that sums up my cultural worldview.

if you want to be the church and not just go to church;

Guilty

if you long for a community that is relational, tribal, and primal like a river or a garden;

Guilty

if you believe salvation has a little to do with atoning for guilt and a lot to do with bringing the whole creation back into shalom with its Maker;

Why can't we have both? We really need to recover the Christus Victor model without losing the forensic.

if it really bugs you when people talk about going to heaven instead of heaven coming to us;

Well, that is sort of how St John described it in Revelation.

 

[shackleton]

Based on above definitions I would say that is pretty much the understanding I had of them and feel I was correct in saying some churches seem to be "emerging." It is an attempt to be hip and relevant and drop the trappings of their fathers churches. "This is not your fathers church!"

A lot of them are trying to overcome the fire and brimstone reputation that churches of the past have. They are bending over backwards to be non threatening. I think some are going the emerging route and others the self-help route but all are trying to be more people oriented. Sometimes to the detriment of the gospel.

I read a book that outlined different people who called themselves emerging and what attracted them to it. It was mostly people who had grown up in "Mega-Churches" and figured there had to be something more to "church" than that. They felt that what ever it was their church was doing, that was not it.

It seems to be morphing into something as people change, redefine and perfect the "emerging" definition. I have seen many churches that have books by emerging and relevant authors in their bookstores who are, in an attempt to reach people, reading these books and trying these things.

 

[MICWARFIELD]

To be fair To Mark Driscoll he has grown quite a bit and all but completely denounced the EC. Here is a brief synopsis of Marks view of the Emergent Church and a link to a podcast where Mark outlines his concerns.

He still believes the gospel is beholden to subcultures but in the way average EC churches do. It seems to be more of an excuse to dress and act a certain way than anything else.

I listened to that podcast and was gonna post the link, but you beat me to it. Driscoll and McLaren do NOT belong in the same category.

 

[shackleton]

Maybe it represents a complete break from Modernism. It is seeing and doing church outside the box.

I do kind like the concepts of the emerging style if they can do it without dropping theology and good teaching.

I also like N.T Wright. He has written one of the best modern books of the Resurrection, it is a counter to the liberalism of Crossan.

 

[RamistThomist]

Maybe it represents a complete break from Modernism. It is seeing and doing church outside the box.

I do kind like the concepts of the emerging style if they can do it without dropping theology and good teaching.

I also like N.T Wright. He has written one of the best modern books of the Resurrection, it is a counter to the liberalism of Crossan.

What I fear is happening is this:

1) Pomos are rightly reacting to modernism and that great whore, The Enlightenment.

2) They easily tend to overreact. They see institutionalism as it is today a throwback to modernity (sometimes it is) and so go for some fluid faith.

3) The more disciplined postmodernists, James Smith, Robert Webber have much that we can feast on.

But I would offer a rejoinder (right word?). Imagine the guy on the street who believes that Jesus is Lord is in heart but doesn't want to offend his Muslim neighbor and says well anything goes. We think that is postmodernsim. It's not. That is John Locke and Enlightenment acceptance of all faiths as long as they dont' go public.

I am about to post a review of a postmodern book.

 

[RamistThomist]

I love this quote from the book I mention above:

[ drink lattes in the afternoon and Guinness in the evenings,.[/B][/I]

I am all for critiquing bad ecclesiology, but let's not bash good beer.

 

[Semper Fidelis]

There is no essential difference. Both cater to the narcissism that is common among American Evangelicalism today.

They certainly take different forms but both cater to the "felt needs" of the heart turned inward upon itself. The Emergent movement tries to integrate different "spiritualities" and forms from more ancient liturgies to return to the bells and smells of the ancient "seeker sensitive" movement because a lot of people have figured out that the lame knock-offs of modern culture in modern seeker-sensitive variants have no sense of the sacred. I read an article 9 years ago by a religion writer (non-Christian) who lived in San Diego. It was his job to visit different Churches in the area and write about them. He even complained back then about the formulaic "Hi, I'm Chet the cool guitar playing, happy worship leader and this is my cool band" and "Hi, I'm Bob, the funny Pastor with the warm smile and the advice for your life today."

If you're going to worship yourself, you might as well have a high liturgical form when doing so.

 

[RamistThomist]

are all forms of so-called "ancient future" worship bad?

 

[danmpem]

After reading nearly five thousand pages of emerging-church literature, I have no doubt that the emerging church, while loosely defined and far from uniform, can be described and critiqued as a diverse, but recognizable, movement. You might be an emergent Christian: if you listen to U2, Moby, and Johnny Cash's Hurt (sometimes in church), use sermon illustrations from The Sopranos, drink lattes in the afternoon and Guinness in the evenings, and always use a Mac; if you readng list consists primarily of Stanley Hauerwas, Henri Nouwen, N.T. Wright, Stan Grenz, Dallas Willard, Brennan Manning, Jim Wallis, Frederick Buechner, David Bosch, John Howard Yoder, Wendell Berry, Nancy Murphy, John Franke, Walter Winks, and Lesslie Newbigin (not to mention McLaren, Pagitt, Bell, etc.) and your sparring partners include D.A. Carson, John Calvin, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, and Wayne Grudem; if your idea of quintessential Christian discipleship is Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, or Desmond Tutu; if you don't like George W. Bush or institutions or big business or capitalism or Left Behind Christianity; if your political concerns are poverty, AIDS, imperialism, war-mongering, CEO salaries, consumerism, global warming, racism, and oppression and not so much abortion and gay marriage; if you are into bohemian, goth, rave, or indie; if you talk about the myth of redemptive violence and the myth of certainty; if you lie awake at night having nightmares about all the ways modernism has ruined your life; if you love the Bible as a beautiful, inspiring collection of works that lead us into the mystery of God but is not inerrant; if you search for truth but aren't sure it can be found; if you've ever been to a church with prayer labyrinths, candles, Play-Doh, chalk drawings, couches, or beanbags (your youth group doesn't count); if you loathe words like linear, propositional, rational, machine, and hierarchy and use words like ancient-future, jazz, mosaic, matrix, missional, vintage, and dance; if you grew up in a very conservative Christian home that in retrospect seems legalistic, naive, and rigid; if you support women in all levels of ministry, prioritize urban over suburban, and like your theology narrative instead of systematic; if you disbelieve in any sacred-secular divide; if you want to be the church and not just go to church; if you long for a community that is relational, tribal, and primal like a river or a garden; if you believe doctrine gets in the way of an interactive relationship with Jesus; if you believe who goes to hell is no one's business and no one may be there anyway; if you believe salvation has a little to do with atoning for guilt and a lot to do with bringing the whole creation back into shalom with its Maker; if you believe following Jesus is not believing the right things but living the right way; if it really bugs you when people talk about going to heaven instead of heaven coming to us; if you disdain monological, didactic preaching; if you use the word "story" in all your propositions about postmodernism- if all or most of this tortuously long sentence describes you, then you might be an emergent christian.

Oh, man, I've got to get out. Almost every one of those describes me.

 

[RamistThomist]

there is a lot of good stuff described there (and some horrendous things as well). Blanket statements on either side, except when bashing modernity and the En-Darkenment, are not helpful.