The Global Church Era · c. 1990-2015 · N. America, UK, Australia
The Emerging Church & Post-Evangelical Movement
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About This Movement
In the late 1990s a set of conversations began among younger evangelical leaders in North America, Britain and Australia who thought the church they had been formed in was answering questions nobody was asking. It ran through networks rather than institutions — the Young Leaders Network, then Terra Nova, then Emergent Village from around 2001 — and through books and an enormous volume of blogging. Dave Tomlinson's The Post-Evangelical came out in Britain in 1995; Brian McLaren's A New Kind of Christian in 2001 and A Generous Orthodoxy in 2004; Rob Bell's Velvet Elvis in 2005 and Love Wins in 2011, the second of which split the conversation open. Phyllis Tickle's The Great Emergence (2008) tried to say what was happening while it was still happening. The movement deliberately held confessional questions open rather than settling them, which is why this map assesses its communities one at a time.
Sources
- The movement's own books: McLaren, A New Kind of Christian (2001), A Generous Orthodoxy (2004); Bell, Velvet Elvis (2005), Love Wins (2011, with the split it provoked); Tomlinson, The Post-Evangelical (1995); Tickle, The Great Emergence (2008) (primary) — These are the movement's own foundational, dated texts, theorizing itself as it went.
- The network/conference/blog layer: Young Leaders Network/Terra Nova to Emergent Village (c. 1997-2001); conference records; the blogosphere (2002-2012, link-rotted; Internet Archive captures as de-facto archive); Greenbelt (UK) (primary) — This material has decayed as the platforms hosting it have gone offline; the Internet Archive is what preserves it now.
- D. A. Carson, Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church (2005) (primary) — This is written from outside the movement, by one of its sharpest evangelical critics, which makes it valuable for dating where the movement's boundaries were contested.
- Gerardo Marti & Gladys Ganiel, The Deconstructed Church: Understanding Emerging Christianity (OUP, 2014); Tony Jones's insider accounts (secondary) — Marti and Ganiel's book is the standard sociological study; Jones writes as a movement insider.
- The wind-down of Emergent Village and the movement's dispersal, described in its own late self-assessments (reference)