If you have read my chapter for the upcoming book  E³:Evangelicals Engaging Emergent, William D. Henard and Adam W. Greenway eds. Forward by Thom S. Rainer (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2009), you know that I divide the emerging movement into two major streams, a doctrine-friendly stream, and a second stream that ranges from doctrine-averse to merely doctrine-wary. What do I mean by this? How do I justify such designation? Here is part of the answer:

Jacob’s Well in Kansas City where Tim Keel serves as the lead pastor provides a helpful window into my justification for the three designations: 1. doctrine-friendly; 2. doctrine-wary and 3. doctrine-averse. When Jacob’s Well first started, they self-consciously held to no doctrines. Not the Apostles’ Creed, not the Nicene Creed, nothing. Later on they formally (the elders at least, for they had no formal membership) adopted the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds.

In my taxonomy, this change marked a move from a doctrine-averse or doctrine-devoid status to a merely doctrine-wary status. The leadership (Keel) remained and remains wary of doctrine, alert to the scholasticizing, reductionistic, spiritually stultifying dangers of doctrine for the community of faith. Many of the websites of such communities of faith make very clear that even if they post doctrines, however minimal by historical standards, you must visit them and live among them in order to really know what they are about. Just reading the doctrine doesn’t cut it and might even be misleading. (I speak of communities of faith, not churches, because many of these groups know they are not churches, do not want to be thought of as churches or do not care if they earn the “church” tattoo before the bar of history, tradition or any other measure of such tings).

So the self-conscious wariness and sometimes aversion to doctrine is there. This is how many of these groups describe themselves. But, all of these communities of faith that flourish in any way, all of them that display signs of real vitality and life do actually have doctrines as I have argued in a previous post. What would be helpful for “the conversation” is for leaders of these communities to recognize, state, formally accept and defend those convictions and values that already function as doctrines among them as doctrines. Otherwise we find ourselves talking past one another when one group wants to be viewed as being above the fray as it were where doctrine is concerned.

A similar talking-past-one-another occurred during the late unhappiness within the Southern Baptist Convention during which moderates and liberals dubbed themselves the freedom party and dubbed the conservatives as indoctrinating fundamentalists. In fact, as liberal Baptist Nancy Ammerman “confessed” (an apt word in this context) and demonstrated in her book Baptist Battles, the moderates and liberals were just as identifiable according to a set of non-negotiable convictions (doctrines!) as were the conservatives.

Doctrine-friendly emerging types such as, for example, congregations associated with the ACTS 29 church-planting network, or Mosaic in LA (Rafael McManus) have old-fashioned full blown confessions of faith. The leaders of such churches usually share many of the same concerns about the dangers of doctrine that Emergents fear, but it strikes me that they have a more mature realization that doctrine, despite its susceptibility to misuse and abuse, remains essential to sustainable church life. Why? Because, to a significant degree, the depth of our fellowship with others is proportional to our shared convictions, especially where the things of God are concerned.