A while ago Andrew Jones reposted Wolfgang Simson's 'Fifteen Theses towards a Re-Incarnation of Church'.
I remember being bowled over by these when I first read them some years ago. Some one around here had a draft of 'Houses that Change the World' printed on a pile of A4 paper. It was like a gale of fresh air bringing hope of release from the cage of institutional church, summarised into fifteen compact challenging statements.
So where are we now? Did that gale actually move us anywhere? Well, a couple of years ago a different blast moved us out of the institutional church. And for twelve months we have been gathering on Sundays twice a month in a home. The order for our gathering is very much formed by our lifetime experience of churches.
And Marc has summarised emerging church according to TSK into one PowerPoint slide. According to this, church "Happens on The Way" and making (and keeping) friends are one of the four processes in church planting.
So our church is happening on the way. A bunch of friends finding the way to be church, although our style and culture is somewhat different from TSK's. We don't meet in a pub where they have draught Guinness. (I hope meeting in a pub with draught Guinness is not normative for being Emerging Church). Nevertheless, we do carry a lot of traditional baggage - so there are probably other respects in which we do not conform to the classic emerging model, maybe we're traditional emerging.