Alt Worship and emergent stuff

When I first started reading things about 'emerging church' I was confused. It sounded a bit like alternative worship only not. Perhaps it was a bit wider in scope of forms but was/is it really that different? Well, I think Jonny Baker in the referenced interview here probably speaks for me:

I think alternative worship preceded the emerging church discussion by several years, at least in the UK. Emerging church felt like other sections of the church catching up to be honest. Alternative worship had been having discussions about postmodernity, contextual mission, reading liberation, black, and feminist theologians and re-theologising as a result, reading biblical scholars, drawing from contemporary culture and art, re-embracing ritual and the traditions of the church and so on. Alternative worship was always a very radical movement – it felt as though emerging church afforded another way of talking about things that might be more accessible to a wider group of people and to the mainstream church who were never going to embrace some aspects of alternative worship.

I kind of feel vindicated; that the stuff we'd been up to and reflecting on really was the same kind of thing. Perhaps the packaging and the 'sociological' factors are different in that altworship ended up often serving those who could no longer culturally cope with inherited church rather than being truly missional, it could often be a holding operation for those who might otherwise drop out unable to handle the cultural dissonance.

(e)mergent Voyageurs :: Interview with Jonny Baker:
Filed in: altworship, emerging, church, mission, pomo