Introduction

Abstract

Abstract The Emerging Church Movement (ECM) is one of the most important reframings of religion within Western Christianity in the last two decades. The book argues that Emerging Christians share a religious orientation built on a continual practice of deconstruction by the religious institutional entrepreneurs who drive the movement. To introduce the movement the book provides four descriptive snapshots of various manifestations of the ECM: pub churches, Emerging Christian conferences, web-based networks, and neo-monastic communities. We outline the history of the ECM, emphasizing its evangelical roots yet locating it within wider religious trends. The “deconstructed churches” of the ECM represent religious communities with loose boundaries of belonging and belief (so that pluralism is not just tolerated, but celebrated as a positive religious value). At the same time, ECM “churches” encourage people to follow individualized religious paths. This religious individualization is complemented by a fierce relational ethic, a type of “cooperative egoism” that sustains community life within emerging congregations. The ECM therefore both reacts against modernity and draws on modern Western conceptions of the self and community to produce a form of spirituality that is well suited to our era.