Dan Kimball, the author of The Emerging Church and Emerging Worship, discusses in a blog post the Origin of the Term "Emerging Church."

For me, the term "the emerging church" simply meant churches who were focusing on the mission of Jesus and thinking about the Kingdom in our emerging culture. It meant churches who were rethinking what it means to be the church in our emerging culture. There were some distinct values about leadership and community and evangelism approaches that were being established among the churches - but overall at that time it meant missional churches passionate about seeing the gospel of Jesus communicated and lived out to emerging generations. That is at least what I was thinking as I used the term and still do think as I use the term "emerging church". The word "emerging" simply means 'what is coming to the surface'. So I use the term for what is the Spirit of God bringing to the surface in terms of the church that He has since the birth of the church.

He included a quote from another book called "The Emerging Church", written in 1970 by Bruce Larson and Ralph Osborne:

If the church be true to its Lord, it may never properly say it has emerged.

Kimball is also working on a post describing how the term "emergent" recently developed. But the term "emerging" basically came from people who were on a mission to engage the culture:

...to my best remembrance it is Leadership Network back in the late 1990's who first began using the term and it spread from there to be used as a replacement word for the whole "Gen X" then "postmodern" then "emerging church" words of expressing a term for missionally minded churches wanting to engage culture for the gospel.

Labels: church, emerging