Will it, in fact, address the decreasing involvement of young people in many churches - the problems of the drop-out rate among churchgoing young people from 12 to 30, and of an increasing sense of alienation among both young and old?

AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND (ANS) -- The emerging church is believed by some to be the most important development of the decade in Western Christianity.

It is primarily an attempt to counter the inroads that postmodernism has made into faith and church attendance.

Churches which identify themselves as emerging are diverse. Some have distanced themselves from both the mindset of traditional denominations and contemporary "seeker" models of church, while others identify with ancient traditions.

Some emerging congregations grow within an existing church, while others are new church plants that retain their denominational affiliation. There are also some significant differences between the United States and other Western countries such as New Zealand, Britain and Australia.

Any attempt to pin down a definition of “emerging church”, therefore, is daunting. One of the acknowledged worldwide leaders, Brian McLaren, agrees it presents a problem.

Mr. McLaren has been in New Zealand to take seminars in Auckland, Palmerston North and Christchurch. He told Challenge Weekly that one of the ironies is that a lot of the people associated with it never use the term “emerging church”.

“First, part of what’s needed is to stop talking about the Church so much. One of the central ideas that a lot of us are engaging with is the idea of the kingdom of God at the heart of Jesus’ message.

“When we keep talking about church functions, church meetings, how we do church, we keep postponing the needed conversation about the kingdom of God, which in a way is about the mission of the Church beyond itself.

“Also, the idea of the emerging church, with the emphasis on the, suggests that this a model or a style, and whatever this thing is it has so many different forms and shapes there’s not really one style.”

Mr. McLaren prefers to use the term “emergent conversation”, because he says that for those involved it is a theological conversation about Gospel and culture – “about our understanding of the gospel related to mission, some fresh and exciting engagement with scripture”.

“Many of us feel we’re in a transition period where the world in general is emerging from modernity, from the Enlightenment, from colonialism, from the industrial era. People don’t know what to call this emerging culture, so they use words like ‘post-colonial’, ‘post-Enlightenment’, some would say ‘post-Christendom’.

One of the primary aims is to address the decreasing involvement of young people in many churches. Mr. McLaren says there are both the problem of the drop-out among churchgoing young people from 12 to 30, and the problem of an increasing sense of alienation among both young and old.