Kimball on “Emerging” and “Emergent”

Dan Kimball is blogging out a brief history of how “Emerging Church” and “Emergent” came into USA’s ecclesiastical vocabulary.

1970 (I bought a hard copy) and in 1984

Many people don’t know this but Zondervan contacted Dan and myself at the same time and asked us to both write something on this subject. Dan wrote his book “The Emerging Church” which was very well received.

Dan’s book in 2003

I, on the other hand, being more dysfunctional than Dan and perhaps more overreaching in my aspirations, suggested a multi-media book that was hyperlinked and layered. At the time (I think about 1999), neither I nor Zondervan could see a way to accomplish this but both of us were keen on the idea. As it turned out, I never did create that book but technology has been catching up and this blog has become a kind of hyperlinked, biographical, subjective, multimedia journey of the emerging church. Now if i could just find a way to edit it down to a layered PDF . . .

But in the meantime, check out Dan’s Origin of the terms “Emerging’ and “Emergent” Part One and Part Two

Dan’s history is American so he has not added the European dimension. But Dan actually worked in England for a time before he returned to USA to start Graceland (pre-VintageChurch). The word “Emerging” has been used in Europe for some time. Cultural Shift had a huge event in 2001 in Frankfurt that I attended. it was called “Emerge”. When I type “emerging church” into google, the first entry that comes up is an English site called “EmergingChurch.info – which, funny enough, is sponsored by CMS, the missions organisation mentioned in the last post.

Oh, Dan . . . heres another “emerging church’ book for your library that the Reformed folk will love.

1980

Related:

My own thoughts on the usage of Emergent Vocabulary

Dan Kimball interviewed on Next Wave

In a recent post, JR Woodward says, and I agree, that students of emerging church should be accessing primary sources.

Technorati Tags: Emergent, emerging church