The emergent church has been shaken by the recent question: What is the difference between emergent church, emergence and emergency? In this emergency the first-responders are Doug Pagitt and Tony Jones, and the scramble for definitions has been amusing. The Keystone Cops are called to lower Manhattan.

Apparently everything must change; but not so much as to leave the leaders of this movement without a confused following, for crying out loud!

Here is Doug's "little reflection"; we hope you find it somewhat more helpful than his commenters have. Tony Jones reasons—if "reasons" is the right word—that "where we all go from here will have more to do with that to which God is calling us than to any labels".

Odd. Here was a movement not about definitions and ideas, but about "ethos" and "vibe". Now it is engaged in nice little distinctions between words and subsets of words, labels and subsets of labels, movements and subsets of movements.

Tony thinks it's all a question of NSMs, which he has learned from the sociologists means New Social Movements. [By the way, aren't sociologists scientists and suffering under "platonic" delusions? Aren't they the labelers of social groups?]

Anyway, the NSMs that excite Tony's imagination are cultural and social: civil rights, GLBT (people whose sexual identity is under cataclysmic deconstruction), environmentalism and feminism. Fret not thyself that these are merely a bunch of labels for lefty political alignments.

Apparently God is calling them to social upheaval, racial resentments, sexual perversion, economic extortion, gender ambivalence....

Moses would be so proud.

And St. Paul.