4 Lanes of the Emerging Church

[Gale]

Last year in our town because of the priest shortage there was a combining of five parishes into one church. There was considerable anguish as you can imagine.

One of the closed parishes was quite “progressive” in some ways and quite a few of those parishioners left the Catholic church or became Roaming Catholics.

One parishioner with a Wiccan priestess background has become a liberal emergent church aficionada and began a study/discussion group in a ELCA Lutheran church. She called it an inclusive community of faith but it really just became a vehicle for her to indoctrinate others with the liberal, unbiblical belief system of that strand of the emerging church with a little anti-Catholicism and Wiccan thrown in for good measure.

I attended for four sessions and she really was not happy with my calm appraisal of the unscriptual nature of her teachings.

I was very happy to see the video posted in this thread as it added to my overall understaning of the emergent church movement.

There is a group on Facebook called Cathlimergent…I have not investigated their page. Anyone here familiar with it?

 

[CDNowak]

Last year in our town because of the priest shortage there was a combining of five parishes into one church. There was considerable anguish as you can imagine.

One of the closed parishes was quite “progressive” in some ways and quite a few of those parishioners left the Catholic church or became Roaming Catholics.

One parishioner with a Wiccan priestess background has become a liberal emergent church aficionada and began a study/discussion group in a ELCA Lutheran church. She called it an inclusive community of faith but it really just became a vehicle for her to indoctrinate others with the liberal, unbiblical belief system of that strand of the emerging church with a little anti-Catholicism and Wiccan thrown in for good measure.

I attended for four sessions and she really was not happy with my calm appraisal of the unscriptual nature of her teachings.

I was very happy to see the video posted in this thread as it added to my overall understaning of the emergent church movement.

There is a group on Facebook called Cathlimergent…I have not investigated their page. Anyone here familiar with it?

I looked at that group briefly, your Wiccan acquaintance would be at home there . i do believe. (An interesting side note: Tom Fox of the NCReporter has taken up the flag emergent movement and its encounter with “liberal” “catholicism”.)

An interesting contrast (at my end of the age spectrum ) is MonkRock, an emergent definitely Catholic monastic movement.

 

[Ahimsa]

3 Things the Emerging Church Took from the Catholics

1 The Catholics coined the term “emerging church”

The phrase “emerging church” as well as “emergent church” appeared in Catholic literature more frequently than in Protestant writings in the first half of the last century. It often referred to the first centuries of the Christian church but occasionally it pointed to the new “younger” expressions of church rising up on the mission field. By the 1960’s writers were using it to describe new church expressions in the Western world. Some of these churches also embraced an “emergent theology” referring to the “theology from the underside of history” (Torres and Fabella)…

“The mature Christian of the future will not belong primarily to a Christian denomination: he will belong to a community of people who believe in the Christian interpretation of life.” from The Emerging Church, by William Kalt and Ronald Wilkins (Catholic writers), published June 5, 1968, page 230.
…
2 The Catholics demonstrated church in a house

Its a revolutionary idea, well . . . unless you consider the first three hundred years of church history, but we Protestants were inspired to do house church from the Catholics. Let me play it out. The current global emerging house church movement is a less cheesy outgrowth of the house church movement of the 1970’s, which was precedented by the experimental house churches of the 1950’s. Donald Allen, writes in 1972, “Of all subsequent house church developments in England the most notable has been the oft-cited work of E. W. Southcott as vicar of Halton Parish in Leeds.” And if you are lucky enough to find Southcott’s book The Parish Comes Alive (1956), which, being the geek I am, managed to do just that, you will discover that the main inspiration for his network of 12 house churches were the Franciscans who were doing house church in the 1940’s in Belgium and France. Chalk up another for the Catholics.

3 The Catholics inspired church in a pub

Or church in a coffee house. Or a club. Or quite a number of “third spaces”, “secular” or culturally “neutral” environments. The emerging church movement has made these third spaces kosher for churches and missions of all stripes. But there were already ministries in pubs and coffee houses in the 1960’s, although lacking in a robust ecclesiology. One of the earliest examples of protestant “church in a pub” was at Soho, London, in 1955, where Rev. Tony Reid took his parish to the people. Father Patrick McLaughlin [Anglican; later converted to Catholicism sometime after 1962] gave permission for this experimental fresh expression of church after seeing the [Catholic] church involved in social action in Brussels in the 1930’s. Another one for the Catholics. You could almost say that the emerging church sprouted out of Brussels . . . hmmm…​

 

[cecilia97]

3 Things the Emerging Church Took from the Catholics

1 The Catholics coined the term “emerging church”

The phrase “emerging church” as well as “emergent church” appeared in Catholic literature more frequently than in Protestant writings in the first half of the last century. It often referred to the first centuries of the Christian church but occasionally it pointed to the new “younger” expressions of church rising up on the mission field. By the 1960’s writers were using it to describe new church expressions in the Western world. Some of these churches also embraced an “emergent theology” referring to the “theology from the underside of history” (Torres and Fabella)…

“The mature Christian of the future will not belong primarily to a Christian denomination: he will belong to a community of people who believe in the Christian interpretation of life.” from The Emerging Church, by William Kalt and Ronald Wilkins (Catholic writers), published June 5, 1968, page 230.
…
2 The Catholics demonstrated church in a house

Its a revolutionary idea, well . . . unless you consider the first three hundred years of church history, but we Protestants were inspired to do house church from the Catholics. Let me play it out. The current global emerging house church movement is a less cheesy outgrowth of the house church movement of the 1970’s, which was precedented by the experimental house churches of the 1950’s. Donald Allen, writes in 1972, “Of all subsequent house church developments in England the most notable has been the oft-cited work of E. W. Southcott as vicar of Halton Parish in Leeds.” And if you are lucky enough to find Southcott’s book The Parish Comes Alive (1956), which, being the geek I am, managed to do just that, you will discover that the main inspiration for his network of 12 house churches were the Franciscans who were doing house church in the 1940’s in Belgium and France. Chalk up another for the Catholics.

3 The Catholics inspired church in a pub

Or church in a coffee house. Or a club. Or quite a number of “third spaces”, “secular” or culturally “neutral” environments. The emerging church movement has made these third spaces kosher for churches and missions of all stripes. But there were already ministries in pubs and coffee houses in the 1960’s, although lacking in a robust ecclesiology. One of the earliest examples of protestant “church in a pub” was at Soho, London, in 1955, where Rev. Tony Reid took his parish to the people. Father Patrick McLaughlin [Anglican; later converted to Catholicism sometime after 1962] gave permission for this experimental fresh expression of church after seeing the [Catholic] church involved in social action in Brussels in the 1930’s. Another one for the Catholics. You could almost say that the emerging church sprouted out of Brussels . . . hmmm…​

I say this in the friendliest way possible … LOL!

A couple of Catholic writers don’t speak for the Church, you must know that.

The bolded quotation from Kalt isn’t a very orthodox Catholic idea. In one sense, yes…Catholics are not a “denomination”, we belong to The Church. In another sense, we pray for a time in the future when ALL Christians will belong to one church…the Catholic Church. But the idea that Catholics will lose their Catholic identity as they mature is NOT a Catholic idea.

And the Church in Brussels, most recently, had a bishop with some truly bizarre ideas about liturgy. Ideas that went against Catholic rubrics. So, coming “out of Brussels” is no stamp of orthodox Catholicity for today’s Catholics.

I suppose I see what the writer is trying to do, and I’m not trying to poke fun at the emergent/emerging movement, but it’s NOT Catholic. When I visited, I saw people “playing at Mass”, quite frankly. Some of the trappings were there but the guts were not…and that is very dangerous, to disconnect the WHAT from the WHY.

 

[Philena]

Mark Driscoll also believes that Purgatory offers a second chance at redemption. He sometimes uses his misunderstanding of what Purgatory is to gently bash Catholics. He is not anti-Catholic, but he does not believe the same way we do about Communion, Baptism, and the other sacraments.

He is the classic cultural Catholic who was raised in the faith but never actually aborbed it. But now he uses that fact as his “bona fides” to speak about what the Church believes.

I just finished his book “Doctrine” and like another poster said, 95% is orthodox, but that other 5%, not so much.