I looked this up a little over a month ago after coming across the phrase in a web page discussion.
Here is what it is the best I could figure out:
It started as discussions over the Internet. There is some kind of emergent church list. Many people in the movement are in what used to be called 'youth churches' that were geared to the youth, but a lot of people in these churches aren't youth anymore, so the name isn't accurate.
Emergent church discussions are kind of abstract sociological discussions about making the church relevant to people who hold to Post Modern philosophical views. Their churches may have discussion times after sermons, may be organized as traditional congregations or house churches, and some of their churches are into encouraging the arts. They tend to like chuches to be sort of grass roots.
Emergent people like to make lists that start with one pronoun like:
We want to love people. We want to be bla bla bla We do bla bla bla.
Long lists of 'we' statements. I can't remember the particulars.
'Emergent' does not apply to a specific theological stance. One of the movements most prominent people has written a book that some conservative evangelicals consider to contain some bad doctrine about the Bible. Since they are rethinking everything, some are rethinking doctrines a lot of evangelicals hold dear. However, these views about the Bible are not part and parcel of emergent docrine, since some emergent people hold to evangelical beliefs.
