Some see the emerging church as an extension or even a response to the seeker-sensitive movement within the evangelical church. I think the two have completely different roots, though there is some overlap.
At the heart of the seeker-sensitive movement was the idea that nonbelievers will not come to churches with a traditional style, because they do not understand it, and more and more they live in a multimedia world. Some seeker churches really did water down the message, while others just made huge (for the narrowness of many established churches) style changes, although structurally they stayed the same. The idea that nonbelievers come to church to become Christians was first and foremost, and the reality that they weren’t coming to churches birthed the seeker-sensitive movement.
Conversely, the emerging church sprung forth out of Christians believing the established church was faulty and perhaps even damaging to all people. While the seekers looked around and said they don’t want to come to church, emerging churchers said, “we don’t want to come to church. Because early changes emerging churches made were attractive to some nonchristians and headway was made with persons previously unreachable by the establishment, some seeker types adopted some of the style of the emerging church, oft with little of the structural changes lying at the heart of the movement.
Some in the emerging church are advocating “relevance” for “evangelism” as the reason to be part of the emerging church, but this is not the heart of the movement. The emerging church does have a tendency to view the established church methods of evangelism as lacking and sometimes counter-productive, but evangelism is only a part of what’s going on in the movement.
I think seekers saw some of the anomalies in the established church paradigm, but they did not see a sufficient amount to support a wholesale change, and thus they tweaked their style more than anything else. In contrast, the emerging church was birthed by Christians looking at the problems of the established church and concluding the anomalies were too many to support a tweak of the system… new structures must emerge for the local church to be a positive expression of the life of the body of Christ.
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