christianity today has posted a clear, clean, well-formatted and articulate summary of the emerging chuch, written by scot mcknight. it’s a reformatting and rewrite of scot’s talk on the emerging church at westminster, given last year (pdf of that talk here).

unlike missiologist david hesselgrave, who says the emerging church will be a passing fad (my words, his implication), mcknight says:

All in all, it is unlikely that the emerging movement will disappear anytime soon. If I were a prophet, I’d say that it will influence most of evangelicalism in its chastened epistemology (if it hasn’t already), its emphasis on praxis, and its missional orientation. I see the emerging movement much like the Jesus and charismatic movements of the 1960s, which undoubtedly have found a place in the quilt called evangelicalism.