The Impact of the Emerging Church on the Protestant Church in the Netherlands

Abstract

AbstractThe emerging church movement never really developed into a big movement in the Netherlands. However, several ideas of the emerging church movement did influence the Protestant Church in the Netherlands quite heavily. The Protestant Church, a mainline denomination, made a missional turn from 2004 and onwards. One of the interesting aspects of this turn is that issues raised by the emerging church movement are now being embedded in an institutional organization seeking to develop a mixed economy of church, which is called “a mosaic of churches.”A big part of that missional turn is the room and support for classical church planting and the start of new contextual Christian communities in incarnational ways. This new movement of 100‐plus pioneer churches is focused more on flexibility, networking, and relationships than on upholding church order prescriptions. In practice, all kinds of tensions have risen around membership, the offices, the sacraments, and much more. The informal, relational understanding of involvement in pioneer churches with regard to membership, sacraments, and the offices sits uneasily with the formal, procedural approach of the larger body of the Protestant Church. The practice of pioneer churches challenges the Protestant Church to rethink its theology and the application of that theology.Many elements of the emerging church conversation (such as church as a movement, being church in an incarnational way, and a rethinking of theology) have been incorporated within the Protestant Church. The current situation is that the Protestant Church has a large programme for contextual church planting and other experimental ways of being church. Fostering this mosaic of churches within an existing synodal‐Presbyterian system is challenging and requires a broader understanding of the body of Christ as a Church with a capital C, which includes incarnational churches that look totally different from regular churches.