earticle

영어

The emerging church movement is one of movements how the church identifies its identity and performs its mission in the postmodern era. The emerging movement is divided into three categories - “Relevants”, “Reconstructionists,”, and “Revisionists.” In spite of the diversity of emerging churches, the understanding and evaluation of the emerging church movement introduced into Korean churches are negative and unbalanced. The reason is most of critiques are concentrated on “Revisionists” and “Reconstructionists.” Therefore to get a more balanced understanding and evaluation of the emerging church movement, we need a holistic understanding and evaluation of the three sub-movements. This study is to identify the characteristics of the third way of Jim Belcher, which is the characteristics of “Relevants” within the emerging church movement by analyzing distinctions of the view of truth, evangelism, gospel, worship, preaching, ecclesiology, and culture between traditional church and emerging church with his view of Reformed tradition. In the emerging church movements, “Relevants” try to keep the essence and the mission of the church without compromising with postmodernism by keeping the reformed theological tradition. This study provides a more balanced understanding and evaluation of the misunderstood movement. This also provides important insights to the secularized Korean Church and as a result marginalized by the consequences of modernism and the emerging postmodern culture.