"An Evaluation of Emerging Churches on the Basis of the Contextualization Spectrum"

Gregg Allison, Associate Professor of Christian Theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has posted onto the Resurgence website a paper from ETS that looks intriguing: An Evaluation of Emerging Churches on the Basis of the Contextualization Spectrum (C1-C6).

The purpose of this paper is threefold: (1) introduce participants to the Contextualization Spectrum (C1—C6), a helpful missiological tool for describing Christ-centered communities in the Muslim world; (2) modify this tool so as to render it useful in assessing the emerging church phenomenon; and (3) apply this modified contextualization spectrum to assess some representative samples of actual emerging churches. At the heart of my proposal is the conviction that the emerging church phenomenon is, in part, a contemporary attempt at contextualizing the gospel and the church of Jesus Christ in a changing (postmodern) world. If this is the case, then the emerging church phenomenon (1) bears some similarities with contextualization efforts carried out in the past, and (2) manifests a spectrum of embodiments that are contextualized from a lesser to a greater degree.