KIM LAWTON: In a dark sanctuary filled with votive candles, fast-paced images flash across video screens. Participants come forward to write their names on a wooden cross on the floor. At the altar, a DJ with a computer mixes the music to set the mood.
Welcome to worship for the coming generation.
More and more Christians say the usual ways of "doing church" no longer resonate in a contemporary, postmodern culture. Seeking to fill the gap, a growing movement called "the emerging church" is developing new forms of worship and theological questioning for a new cultural context.
DOUG PAGITT (Pastor, Solomon's Porch Church): Christianity is just simply not a stagnant belief. And I know that that comes as a very hard concept for some people to put their minds around, or for people to accept. But Christianity has never been stagnant and has never been about uniformity. LAWTON: But critics fear some parts of the movement may be heading in a dangerous direction.
DON CARSON (Professor, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School): You keep moving farther out and farther out and farther out, until the whole cultural shift that is sometimes characterized by the label "postmodern" begins to domesticate what the Bible is actually about. And at that point, it becomes more than troubling. It becomes really a threat to historic Christianity.
LAWTON: The emerging church movement began several years ago as a conversation among evangelical Gen-X leaders who were alarmed at church dropout rates among 20s and 30s. About the same time, a pastor from Maryland, Brian McLaren, began writing about what he saw as a growing disillusionment with the way evangelical Christianity was being practiced.
BRIAN MCLAREN (Pastor, Cedar Ridge Community Church): So it was [a] very exciting coming together of some of these younger leaders, and some of us a little bit older, saying, "This is our world, and this is the future. And the Christian faith and our individual churches, we've got to engage with and deal with it."LAWTON: They formed a loose network named Emergent to discuss what it means in today's world to follow Jesus and to reach out to others. Their discussions exploded over the Internet, especially through several lengthy and ongoing blogs. The network now sponsors national conventions and offers resources, but emergent leaders still resist becoming institutionalized. Many vigorously deny that it should even be called a movement.
Call it what you want, the emerging church is having a big impact across denominational lines. But there are no easy labels. Participants have called themselves postmodern, postconservative, postliberal, postevangelical, and post-Protestant.
Professor Scot McKnight of North Park University in Chicago is closely monitoring the Emergent conversation and its participants.
SCOT MCKNIGHT (Professor, North Park University): It can't be simply defined; it can't be simply categorized. And it's causing no end of frustration for people who'd like to have tidier boxes. This is the way they want it because they believe the gospel should have a local expression. LAWTON: Solomon's Porch is an emerging church that began six years ago in Minneapolis. Its pastor, Doug Pagitt, was one of the early Emergent leaders. The church meets in the round and has couches and recliners instead of pews.
Pastor PAGITT: When you sit on a couch as opposed to a bench or a pew or something else, you just sort of have a sense that you're supposed to talk to that person. Because who do you sit on a couch with, other than a friend? And so, it implies a relationship.
LAWTON (To Pastor Pagitt): Why do you worship this way, in the round, as opposed to, you know, a more traditional model, which is everybody looking forward?
Pastor PAGITT: We're trying to say something about where power lies in our community. And so to meet in the round says all of these people matter.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN (To Congregants): We gather not simply to be a blessing.LAWTON: Every member here has a say in what happens. They don't call it a Sunday worship service; it's a worship gathering, and it happens on Sunday evenings. Pagitt doesn't preach sermons, he leads discussions. No question is off limits.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: There's a sort of comfort in knowing that one, I don't have to have the answers, and that there aren't necessarily answers.
LAWTON: Pagitt says their community reflects the contemporary culture.
Pastor PAGITT: We are people who tend to think we matter and our voice matters and our opinion matters, even if we're not all that educated, even if we're not as qualified as someone else. It doesn't exclude that voice from the conversation.
LAWTON: Individual emerging churches may look different, but they share many characteristics. Most are casual, with a big emphasis on the experiential.
Pastor MCLAREN: More and more of us are feeling that if we have a version of the Christian faith that does not make us the kind of people that make this a better world, we really want no part of it.
DIANA BUTLER BASS (Religion Historian, Virginia Theological Seminary): These mainline churches are as dissatisfied with their bureaucratic structures and their denominational structures as these emerging evangelicals are with the traditional patterns of setting up evangelical congregations. So they're -- on both sides of this conversation, they're reaching toward new kinds of structures.
LAWTON: Brian McLaren has been especially provocative.
TONY JONES (National Coordinator, Emergent): Is it more sloppy than what a systematic theology professor does, sitting in his tenured chair typing up a book on the doctrine of the atonement? Yeah, it's messier than that! But that's, I think, theology as it works itself out in the lives of human beings who are kind of scratching and clawing their way to try to follow Jesus on a daily basis. It's a messy endeavor, and I embrace that messiness. 
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