Remember the wheel?

I was thinking today about the difference between "Emerging" and "Emergent". Mark Driscoll seems to have defined the two terms very differently, and noted that "Emerging" is the group of people who are thinking differently about how to do church, considering how to become relevant yet still keep with the past, while "Emergent", explains Driscoll, is the group that is questioning everything from relevancy to theology.

I will be brief but to me its sort of like the car industry right now. On the one hand you have the industry that is trying to put new paint on the old things, produce new models of the old tried and trues. They are asking the question: "How can we sell this in the new market?" The same is true for Emerging churches. They are asking themselves how they can sell their church in the new market, how they can appear relevant in a world that is quickly changing, how can they stay on top?

Of course what these churches, and that end of the auto-industry, are missing is that for some reason their surges of buyers are getting smaller and smaller. Quickly they are being overtaken by the other end of the spectrum, those who are rethinking their philosophies all together, the Hybrids.

Instead of putting new paint on old ideas, the Hybrid industry and those who are leading it are asking entirely new questions. Not "how can we sell this?", but more "why is this?". They aren't just seeking to stay on top, they are seeking to recreate the way we view transportation, burst through the old molds and create something altogether new. Something, ironically enough, that if successful makes fully irrelevant all previous molds and models. Who wants the gas guzzling diesel when the new 100 mpg truck comes out? Who will care about land speed and maneuverability when cars can fly?

These are the Emergents. They are the side that is rethinking everything they thought they knew about church, God, theology...everything. Instead of asking how they can make their church more relevant, they are asking why they do what they do in the first place. Their changes are coming from the inside out, from deep shifts in their ways of thinking, that far surpass a simple new coat of paint...they are a whole new concept. They are reconsidering the old fuel economy of ideas, and inventing new sources of power, new balances and new measures of success.

Where once speed and power were the trophies of a ministry (and the auto industry), now environmental impact and long term resource allocation are fast becoming the new badges of honor. A few decades of this new thinking and we won't even call what we drive churches (or cars) anymore, because they will just be too different from what that word describes.

Emergents are not trying to reinvent the wheel, they are trying to make it obsolete in the wake of what comes next. What if one day people turn to one another over coffee and say, "Remember the wheel?"