Firstly can I thank you both for the very stimulating debate and discussion this topic review has produced!

I ‘subscribe’ to the Fulcrum website, which describes itself as ‘open evangelical’ within the Church of England. One of the things it strives to do is bolster the ‘centre ground’ of evangelicalism. It seems to me that ‘names’ and ‘labels’ can mean anything we want them to mean and in many cases an “‘evangelical’ by any other name would smell as ‘orthodox’” – what I mean is that the ‘content’ of the theological system (however it is labelled) is the vital thing and there are those within so called ‘evangelicalism’ who have found problems with some of the ‘content’ and who have thus positioned themselves as ‘against’ (or ‘post’) evangelical where others (like Schaffer, and I would add Stott and Fulcrum) seek to ‘restore’ the orthodox heart of ‘evangelicalism’.

If I’m being honest about my own Spiritual journey (another very ‘emerging church’ term, but also an ancient Orthodox one….) in my most ‘post’-evangelical moments I’m reacting against those areas where evangelicalism has departed from the historic ‘catholic’ and apostolic faith (I’m sure they’d be horrified to know I thought this!) and in my ‘renewal’/open-evangelical moments I’m trying to contend for the ‘centre’ ground of evangelicalism (this occurs most often after reading people like John Stott who is the evangelical’s ‘Pope’ but who is more catholic and orthodox than non-conformists give him credit for – as Lloyd-Jones discovered!).

Of course there are places and communities where the ‘content’ is orthodox anyhow so there is no need to ‘react’ or ‘restore’, but it’s important to listen to what people are saying who position themselves as ‘post’-anything. Of course they may have thrown some babies out with the bath water and be introducing all manner of ‘wrong content’ themselves, but such people are often reacting to ‘perceived’ heterodoxy within their former ‘movements’ and might have a valuable corrective voice to add….

Again, the ‘emerging church’ is not a ‘denomination’ I would wish to be part of (if it is an homogenous movement at all), but an interesting and informed voice which needs to be listened to and taken seriously.

Finally re: being ‘missional’, I would suggest that this is nothing new and has been part of historic Christianity (and is part of the catholic and orthodox faith), but was ‘lost’ by those who thought that ‘salvation’ only occured in a singular ‘crisis conversion experience’ which followed a one way (and two dimensional) ‘preaching of the Gospel’ (this is part of a wider ‘error’ in soteriology which seeks to somehow ‘pre-empt’ God’s final judgement and introduce a ‘justification-through-signing-up-to-a-certain-theological-system’ mentality). That this ‘method’ is hardly effective or transformative (another EC word…) is no suprise and the ‘rediscovery’ that it takes Time, Love and Relationship (and the realisation that God accepts and invites ahead of, and often inspite of, our own nice ‘salvation systems’) is a welcome return to the ‘norm’!

I am hoping that more evangelical churches here in the UK embrace some of the ideas behind the missional concept. It they did, it perhaps might stem the tide of church leaders becoming disillusioned with evangelicalism and heading off in an emerging direction.

As I said in the post I linked to before, where the emergent church is really emergent is where they are verging on (or full-on adopting) heterodoxy or heteropraxy. Where they are not doing that, there’s nothing new at all with the emergent movement. This is such a clear example of the latter that it seems strange to me to consider it a feature of the emergent movement to begin with. It’s a strain within evangelicalism that they’ve latched onto.