Emergent? or Emerging? does it make any difference?

Every now and then I mention in my blog the relationship between 'Emerging/Emergent' and institutional church. In a comment on an October post someone asked whether I see a distinction between

" 'emerging' being all the experimental alt.worship or 'new ways of being church'; and 'emergent' being the future church as a whole, quite possibly something different to either the current 'institutional church' or the 'emerging church'."

It's a reasonable question, certainly, given that in normal parlance there is a substantial difference in meaning between the two words. And there is some mileage in teasing out the meaning of them in thinking through current developments in church practice and theology. But what I don't think is worth doing is insisting on a precise application of the words in this particular conversation. Why not? - because most people don't notice the difference and use them interchangeably anyway, and because different people use either word to describe different conceptual visions of Church in any case. So I'll stick with Emerging/Emergent, I think, bearing in mind that it's quite possible those terms won't last more than a few years anyway. Only time will tell.

But in any case our energy needs to go into thinking through the issues, rather than discussing the terminology. And one of the recurrent issues is whether we should abandon the institution of the Church as we know it, in favour of small, organic groups that meet in houses or pubs. This is a difficult argument to follow, partly because "institutional church" itself covers a LOT of different strands of church organisation, which differ substantially in the way they are organised, and even in their ethos. Some are healthier than others, all of them could do with improvements and refreshers; some of them embody some things that are deeply hurtful and damaging to people, yet even the least well-functioning retain something of value that is worth considering before we sweep them away with a Big New Broom mentality.

I'm not persuaded that we want to create a new Reformation, and start a whole new movement. A new Reformation won't solve the problems of iNstitutions - it will just begin a new one. All Church revolutions in history have, at their inception, been "non-institutional"; yet it only takes between five and twenty years before new movements begin to be institutionalised. (Some research that is now about 20 years old demonstrated the effect of this on para-church mission organisations.) It would be better to recognise that the institutional church has as much good in it as bad, and think about how to prune, reorganise, interact with, etc. Institutions always become unwieldy, and always need some degree of reform and reorganisation. And most certainly new "organic" groups that grow up both inside and outside the institution have a reforming edge to them - as Rowan Williams has said, change usually starts at the margins, not in the centre. But the idea that we can have a church that is not institutionalised is sheer idiocy. If you doubt my words, go read some history books - human beings create systems and institutionalise their structures. I've said this before, many times, but I get weary of Acts chapter 2 being used to show that "true" church is a 'house church' with no institution, but no attention being given to Acts chapter 6, where - right there within a few months or years - the minute the church began to grow they institutionalised. It's not institution itself that is the problem.