It feels sort of like arriving at a party just as the guests are leaving. In the past month, two of the best known champions of the emerging church have announced they have stopped using the term. Their announcement comes as I have just completed a sabbatical in which I immersed myself in emerging churches. Here I am now, exploring with my church how this creative approach might guide us into new and more faithful ministry.

Except that, before we can even understand or assimilate the ideas, they are being abandoned. Or are they? Here’s what I am reading. Dan Kimball, pastor of an innovative California church and author of the 2003 book, The Emerging Church, finds that the meaning of emerging church has broadened from when he began using it. His definition is “evangelism and mission in our emerging culture to emerging generations.” Because the meaning no longer necessarily centers on evangelism, and because the theology driving the movement now includes views he cannot accept, Kimball is dropping the word from his vocabulary.

Same thing for Andrew Jones, British champion of all things emerging. Now that some evangelical churches are boycotting any speaker who supports the emerging church movement, Jones is walking away from the term, but not the ideas, and certainly not the people associated with emerging churches.

Url Scaramanga, in his blog, “R.I.P. Emerging Church,” says that the leaders of the emerging church movement are now discovering their mistake: they failed to “define purpose and doctrine early so your identity doesn’t get hijacked.” But of course, that analysis is wildly off the mark. The emerging church movement has succeeded precisely because it is a world-wide phenomenon that no one owns or controls. Its strength lies in multiple experiments, embedded in varying cultures, and benefiting from rapid cross-fertilization on the internet.

The current backlash is driven by strong reaction among some evangelical leaders. It’s ironic, actually. The emerging church was born by evangelical Christians leaving their home base in pursuit of a more effective and biblically faithful way of being church. Now, those left behind are reacting to the reactionaries.

It gets confusing right at this point. Within the larger emerging church movement is an organization called Emergent Village. Some of the ideas proposed by the organization – and widely disseminated in books and blogs – surpass the tolerance of more traditional Christians. The whole emerging church movement is being defined by some of these outspoken mavericks.

So, is the emerging church over already? No, and I think the name will endure as well, even if it is somewhat tarnished. The movement itself is still emerging, and I have my own opinions of what aspects will survive and what won’t. But the bottom line is that there remains too much pent up dissatisfaction with conventional churches to allow a return to former ways of being church.