When asked about the phase “emerging church” in the Australian context, Alan Hirsch said,
“We find the phase actually now singularly unhelpful. We are tending to drop it ourselves, or when we use it, [its] with [the word] missional attached to it. That is what we are more on about, like the church becoming a missionary agency and thinking like missionaries in our own context.”
When I first became aware of the entire Emerging Church movement I was extremely excited and quickly learnt that there was a difference between Emerging (which is a wider movement) and Emergent (which is a narrower movement with whom some of its practitioners I would differ quite strongly theologically on certain issues) and enjoyed discussing the relative merits and weaknesses of both.
But now I have become tired of the entire discussion. What I enjoyed about the Emerging/Emergent movement in the first place was that side issues were less important like baptism, the gifts of the Spirit, church government etc. When I was younger (and freshly out of Bible college) I loved to debate these kind of issues and the fine nuances of theology and semantics but soon it grew tired. Of what value is it really whether you are paedo-baptist, episcopal or secessionist when there is a dying world that needs to hear about and experience the gospel(ok - it does have some value but not the pride of position we normally give this kind of debate). It was this focus that first attracted me to the whole movement.
But it feels like now as the movement is becoming more legit, with conferences, books, recognised leaders and churches it is also becoming more concerned with defining what it is and it not (i.e. emerging rather than emergent). This ground feels familiar and quite frankly not somewhere I am in the mood to go over again.
So I agree with Alan Hirsch here - I have had enough of Emergent/Emerging terminology and would prefer to simply prefer to talk about Missional Church. As it keeps the two most important things at the centre - Mission (the gospel) and the church (community - the best hermeneutic for the gospel is the local church!). Also it is devoid for now of terminological baggage that needs to be deconstructed, justified or explained and I have grown weary of this kind of theological debate.
So I prefer to speak about missional church… Well that is until that becomes a technical term itself…

