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Emergent Hybrid Synergy: The Rise of the -Mergents

Posted Mar 28, 08:00 PM | 5 comments | by Steve Knight | Link

By Tony Jones and Steve Knight:

We’re not sure how it started to happen exactly, but people from many different streams of Christianity started finding some inspiration, hope, and community through Emergent Village—and then they started to find each other. Well, it’s grown dramatically over the past couple years, thanks in large part to the Internet. We’re thrilled about this, as people explore how the emergent experiment might take hold in the Petri dish of their own traditions/denominations.

All of this has resulted in a number of hybrid groups:

• Luthermergent (Lutheran) — possibly the earliest hybrid group to form; the official name of this group is the “Emerging Leaders Network,” but don’t let the name fool you, they’re Lutherans


• Methomergent (Methodist) — probably the second oldest group; Jay Voorhees, pastor of Antioch UMC in Nashville was perhaps one of the first, most visible Methomergent voices


• Presbymergent (Presbyterian) — this group started with Karen Sloan and Adam Walker Cleaveland and has now grown to “a full-fledged community of several hundred ministers, lay-persons, writers, evangelists, youth directors, web-developers, theologians, seminarians, artist-musicians, and more.”


• Reformergent (Reformed) — this group is somewhat different from the others because it’s “interested in the interaction between Reformed theology and the emerging church movement.” Chris Case is the main man “minding the (occasional) gap.”


• Submergent (Anabaptist) — this group has a growing list of conspirators, but Mark Van Steenwyk is one of the most prolific


• Anglimergent (Anglican/Episcopal) — this is “a generous and generative friendship among diverse Anglicans, engaging emerging church and mission”; it is fast approaching 400 members with the “urban abbess” herself, Karen Ward, at the helm (in North America, and Ian Mobsby is the man in the UK and Europe)


• Convergent (Quaker) — this network includes people from the North America, the UK, and Australia who are trying to “discuss the radical changes within our culture, how that’s affecting our tradition, and how we can follow God’s mission in the world given our postmodern world.”


• AGmergent (Assemblies of God/ Pentecostal) — this is probably one of the newest groups to form; founder John O’Hara has described it as “a meaningful conversation about what it means to live out our faith in Christ, as Pentecostal believers, in relationship with each other and the greater Body of Christ.”

Other groups probably exist, and we’d love to know about them. If you’re part of an Emergent hybrid group, please email us post info in the comments and let us know about it. We’d love to help others connect with you.

Emergent Village is “a growing, generative friendship among missional Christians seeking to love our world in the Spirit of Jesus Christ”—and we realize that missional Christians exist in every stream of the Church. To put it another way (as our website states), Emergent is just one “node in the web of the emerging church,” and it’s deeply gratifying to help facilitate these kinds of connections between people emerging from within these various streams. So give us a shout, if/when you start a new network, and we’ll be glad to help spread the word.

UPDATE 4/8/2008: Thanks to Greg Arthur for pointing out the Emergent Nazarenes website.

UPDATE 5/6/2008: Emergent Baptists!

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