The Emerging Church has been a very interesting (and confusing!) topic for the last few years. Here are two recent articles that have emerged from the blogosphere regarding the Emerging Church. It appears that a definition for the Emerging Church is emerging from the confusion.

Dan Kimball (who wrote the lovely book: "They Like Jesus but Not The Church") shares a diagram he found - it seems to depict different levels of emergence.

Mark Driscoll shares his classification of the emerging churches. Also see this short youtube video from him

For clarification, in case you haven't heard this one yet, "Emergent" is not equal to "Emerging". Emergent is the conversation being had by many different denominations and is facilitated by folks like Tony Jones, Doug Pagitt, Brian McClaren and others. Emergent tends to be labeled more "controversial", while emerging is a more broad term referring to many churches employing new methods and ideas.

There has been a fair amount of demonizing of the term "emerging church". But I think it's in our best interest, as the body of Christ - rather than name calling - to civilly discuss how and why we disagree.