I think avoiding the creation of another denomination will be the easiest part of the job. The emerging church is really a just phenomenon that has been labelled recently, although I suspect it has always existed. It is the collective term for Christians who are refusing to have other people’s meta-narratives imposed upon them and who are seeking out their own self constructed faith. I suspect that the emerging church has always existed and will always exist; it’s just that the increasingly culturally irrelevant nature of today’s established churches is facilitating a much larger emerging church than usual.

What, I think, we must be wary of is creating denominations in the wake of the emerging church. While none of use can guarantee that such a thing would not happen, it is comforting to note that it is not particularly post-modern to want to create a denomination. It’s unlikely that people who are reacting to the meta-narrative imposed on them by modernist established churches would want to create their own meta-narrative to impose on others, but you never know.

Ultimately, I suspect the emerging church will encourage all existing denominations to decentralise and allow more personal interpretation among it’s membership. Although different denominations will do this to differing extents at different paces we can be sure that the current cultural shifts will not allow the church to remain as it is.

I think the hot potatoes you mention are probably still just as potato like in the emerging church, although perhaps not quite so hot. What I mean is that nobody is claiming that we should all agree on this stuff anymore. This follows from my previous point; having deconstructed the meta-narrative that had to be accepted or rejected in totality, we’re re-analysing everything, only we’re all doing it as individuals. Nobody is claiming to have all the answers, and even if they did, we’d probably all ignore them and figure it out for ourselves anyway.