In recent years, the EmergentChurch movement has become a headline-grabbing favorite of the religious media establishment. Emergent leaders’ books and videos line the shelves of religious bookstores. Press coverage of their activities and pronouncements is overwhelmingly favorable. The movement has received national exposure in a two-hour PBS television special and on ABC’s Nightline. Emergents’ influence has spread like wildfire in colleges, seminaries, and churches – mainline liberal, Roman Catholic, and Evangelical alike.

Emergent Church1 leaders and their supporters promote the movement as “the way forward” for the church. It is, they claim, a “new Reformation” with its own “95 theses” and its own new Luther pointing the way. But the Emergents’ “way forward” is in fact a headlong, headstrong retreat into pre-Reformation spiritual and intellectual darkness.

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