What does the Emerging church see itself as emerging from? Despite the fact that the emergent/emerging Church is a fairly nebulous and relatively undefined concept, without a centralized organization or structure, they chose the term terms emergent/emerging to describe the movement.

What does that the Emerging church see itself as emerging from?
Evangelicalism. The early leaders of the Emergent church were members of a special project of Leadership Network, a non-denominational parachurch organization designed to help implement church growth/creativity projects for evangelical leaders. Originally, it was a special project aiming at the millennial demographic, which at the time was roughly college aged and showed signed of being a major demographic gap in large evangelical churches. As many of these leaders began to grow in size and popularity they became less affiliated with their traditional churches and more influenced by postmodern theology and philosophy. Though they typically receive harsh criticism from evangelicals for being difficult to pin down, there seems to be a self identity that the Emergent Church is a progressive development of Evangelicalism.