Resonances with the Emerging Church 
 
I'm genuinely curious why folks participate in the emerging church conversation. As the movement itself is protean, folks’ resonances with the emerging church are similarly diverse.

Last April, when Will Sampson, Nick Ciske, Steve Knight, Aaron Flores, DJ Chuang and I made up the unofficial "emerging church track" of the Internet Evangelism in the 21st Century Conference, over dinner one night we did an around the room with the question: why are you in the emerging church? 
 
What really struck me that night was that most of the answers were relational and not primarily theological or practical. Yet on further reflection I suppose that shouldn't be too surprising. Though I answer that question primarily in theological and praxis terms, there's no question that I entered the conversation a few years ago primarily through the influence of the man who had been my pastor since 1988 when he handed me a draft copy of his first book and asked for comments.  
 
Nevertheless, this relational connection is not the first thing that comes to mind when I'm asked such a question. My resonances with the emerging church movement are two:

• My theology has segued from encyclopedia to outline.  
   
  I've detailed this more in some comments I've made on the term "faithmaps" but my participation through the years in the evangelical church had left me with the impression that it was believed we pretty much had all of our theological i's dotted and doctrinal t's crossed. But in more recent years, I've come to the conclusion that my personal theology is generally an outline and not an exhaustive encyclopedia. There are known items in the outline but there's much that's not filled in.


• I've come to embrace the transpropositional. 
   
  It has been my observation that evangelicals - whether intentionally or not - sometimes rely on information transfer as the omnicompetent modality of spiritual transformation. We could call this propositionalism. I've come to believe that spiritual change only occurs in the context of relationship - either vertically with God or horizontally with others or - perhaps usually - both. This is not, of course, an apropositional context, but it is a transpropositional context. There is something conveyed in a hug, a shared meal, the sharing of service experiences, the presence of another, that is not entirely capturable by lexical symbols. This, of course, has large implications on question of praxis, leadership development, and spiritual formation.

Some may be disappointed to read that I have not found that my resonance with the ec has led to the overturning of any primary point of what I previously considered orthodoxy. And I also haven't found the ec conversation leading me to question any previous conclusion I had made on major points of morality. Sometimes, I have wondered if these types of changes for some are their primary points of interest in the emerging church. I genuinely don't know.

For me, perhaps it is most accurate to say that I am embracing what is old in a new way. 
 
It might be helpful for some of us in the conversation to lay out why we are in it to begin with. It might lead to a greater clarity of mutual understanding. If you’d like to detail your resonances, let us know in the comments section of this article!

Stephen Shields