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When this site was first planned in 2001, the term 'emerging church' was not in widespread use. In Britain, Australia and New Zealand the term 'alternative worship' had for ten years been the generally recognised name for the kind of church expression listed here.
Nevertheless people had long been dissatisfied with the term. 'Alternative' implies only ever a minority taste, and misleadingly alternative worship has nothing to do with alternative rock. And worship is just an element of what it's about - it's not just an exercise in changing worship styles.
So calling this website 'alternativeworship' was controversial. Many in the movement felt it would perpetuate a name they'd like to leave behind. And yet it was still the only widely accepted name, however grudgingly, for a very distinctive Christian movement.
The picture is now rather different. New church expressions of a similar kind in America called themselves or were called 'postmodern' or 'emerging church', and the term 'alternative worship' never took root there. 'Emerging church' was also taken up by many in the alternative worship movement as a less limiting and more accurate description of their intentions.
At the moment, then, the two terms are used side by side and often interchangeably to describe the same general area of church expression.
A polarity may be starting to develop, with the term 'alternative worship' increasingly used to mean an event in a particular style apart from the fundamental shift in church organisation that would justify the term 'emerging church'. At the same time the original alternative worship movement has a developed position on the nature of church structures which acts as a critique of those 'emerging churches' that have not yet grappled with such issues.
Emerging church is itself an awkward term. At what point does 'emerging church' stop emerging and become just church? After all, some 'emerging churches' have already been around for ten or fifteen years. And many expressions of the global emerging church are not the kind of Western churches in postmodernity that have taken hold of the name. And yet 'postmodern church' is already a cliche and used superficially, and the term 'postmodern' is itself potentially obsolete [though the condition it denotes will no doubt continue].
Meanwhile, 'alternative worship' has a distinctive history and approach, and not all Western emerging church expressions are [or will become] the same thing as 'alternative worship'. It seems useful to have a distinctive name for a distinctive ethos within the broad field of emerging church.
This site is for church expressions within that ethos, whatever they call themselves. The expressions on this site share a set of values and take part in an ongoing conversation - a movement, in fact.
The people involved are linked by friendship and collaboration across the world. They often disagree, but the disagreements have shaped the movement and given it impetus. Because this is an ethos and not a recipe, there are diverse forms of expression - indeed part of the ethos is that there is not a single answer or direction at this time.