{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.013983220135836995, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 4.6909090909090905, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
On the Periphery of the Emerging Church

In the nearly twenty-five years that I have been a pastor (and almost half of that time as an interim pastor), none of the congregations I have served would typically be identified as a part of the emerging movement. This is easy to understand, in that none of the congregation I have come to know best have been in regentrified urban neighborhoods teeming with a young and hip adult population, even though the congregational settings have ranged from small towns to suburban communities, as well as a number of mature neighborhoods within medium and large-size cities. Without exception, the congregations (and there have been more than a dozen of them now) were established within a decidedly Christendom era when to belong to a church was considered to be a cultural norm. And while the larger culture no longer views the church in quite the same way as it did in previous decades, the visions expressed by members of many of the congregations I have known best have not fully come to terms with the church’s changed place in the larger society. While nearly all congregants do indeed recognize that old patterns and behaviors do not hold up the way that they once did, most people have not quite grasped the need to do their work all that differently than before either. While many congregations have tinkered around with their worship and educational programming, few have done so in any radical way. From my vantage point within a mainline denomination (the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America), most established congregations still assume that people in the wider culture have needs for what they provide, and there is no urgency to explain the church’s mission to outsiders in a new way. The reality is that the vast majority of congregations are dominated by leaders and members who grew up in a time and place where it was easy to be a Christian— indeed where it was almost assumed that every person had some kind of church affiliation. Even though it is a decidedly different reality now, many congregations have yet to grasp how truly different it is. The prevailing thought seems to be that if the church could just get back to doing what it used to do, or if it could do everything just a little bit better, there would be no problem with worship attendance statistics or with levels of financial support. The mindset of emerging Christian communities is vastly different. Congregations that identify strongly with the emerging movement already