Emergent: Defined by Doug Pagitt

'"The word "emergent" -- the part of it that I liked most was its use in forestry, where the emergent growth, or in agriculture it's pre-emergent growth, it's the growth that's just down right at the surface, and it's just broken through, and it's small. So we said, what we are is this small, little thing that's broken through, but down the road.....this growth will grow up and will become the treetops. So in the forestry world, you determine the health of a forest both by what you see at the treetops from a flyover but also by the level of emergent growth and pre-emergent growth. So we said, hey that's kind of our metaphor, we're not trying to eliminate anything else that exists - in fact, we're gonna grow up inside of the shadows of all the rest of this. So "emergent," it kind of captures us pretty well, that's what we think this is, it's not competition, it's not anything like that, it's just that which is now growing up inside of the context that the rest of this has already existed."Doug Pagitt, discussing the Emergent Church