One of the most amazing things to me is the varying expressions of church that there are already.  We allow in our minds the thought that Catholics and Baptists can both be worshiping on Sunday mornings.  This doesn’t hurt our brains.

But for some reasons, the modernists, the skeptics, and the trolls among us cannot get past the different strands and understandings of today’s Christians that are actually trying to embody the beliefs they already hold, which may or may not be the ones they inherited.

It is in this spirit that I will send you to a couple of other places to look at some interesting descriptions of the different strands of emergence.  First, I want to thank Shawn Anthony, whose blog compares these two options here.  It is worth looking at his intro first, since he did the work, so should get the props of your web visit.

Next, visit Scot McKnight’s depiction of the Five Streams, which can be found here.  His understanding of the different groupings is pretty much in line with most of what I have read and makes a lot of direct sense.  I like it, though I find myself fitting neatly into all of them, which I don’t think is the point…

After you have visited McKnight’s article, check this one out at Gathering in Light.  This one, I think, is a more accurate and useful description, if not a bit more academic.

Now, I recognize that both of these lists are a bit old, and I only just discovered them, but I think they are excellent.  I am most interested in the latter “Four Models of Emerging Churches” as it breaks up the conversation into which theologians most directly affect them.  If we can get past the intellectualism of this suggestion, it is actually much more practical, since the means of understanding a person can best be done by examining his or her influences.  For instance, if one simply knows that I was an English Major, it gives a certain useful definition to the way I may be seen.  But, if you ask me what literature most influenced me, WWI poetry and absurdest drama, you can begin to see the areas I would most likely be interested in (existentialism, personal transformation, social, political, and cultural upheaval) and what my preferred literary criticism might be (reader response and deconstructionism).  These specific examples may be difficult for a non-English major to understand, but if you and I were to have a conversation about this, you could learn a whole lot more about me than simply defining me using typical options (liberal, progressive, traditional, orthodox, whatever).

Further, if you wanted to learn more about what I think, one could actually read some of the works that I find most impressive, such as the poetry of Wilfed Owen or David Jones and the plays of Samuel Beckett or Harold Pinter.  Going to these sources can be much more descriptive.

This can also be a useful shortcut in understanding what these different theological concerns represent when we are able to engage these theologies.  Clearly, based on what I’ve just shared, I am most attracted to the first model, which the writer describes as the deconstructionist model.  It is where my heart is and where my study takes me.  But I now have the means of examining three other streams through their theological forebears and current practitioners.

As we continue to examine ourselves and where we fall into this Great Emergence, I for one will find this tool handy.  I could be persuaded to explore another model if that’s where the Spirit takes me.