What about this decade old movement (already aging) known as the emerging churches? The movement (sometimes labeled simply “Emergent”) includes house churches, prominent Gen-Xers (my millennial students show little interest in it) and reminds many of the “Jesus people” of the 1960’s. 
Uncomfortable with failed Boomer churches too accommodating to the spirit of the age; emerging churches are attempting to rethink everything.
There is great danger in this and much that is easy to parody. As someone sympathetic to many of the movement’s goals (as I perceive them), I have been actively attempting to implement many of them for over a decade in Torrey Honors Institute.
The healthy goals of emerging churches are:
a desire for authentic community
a disposition to favor the intimate over the grand
a delight in blending the best of the old with the new
a disgust with the “overly contrived” like the four-d alliteration in this list.
Often these just condemnations of the institutional church come attached to “root causes” or warnings of Christian apocalypse if the Emergent message is not heeded . . . and these warnings can border on the absurd.
Emergents live in the certainty that there is something “post-modern” that has been added to the drinking water in America and Europe that means the “old ways” of doing things will no longer work. Older Christians who have lived through scores of such putative seismic changes that turned out to have the staying power of a vampire in Sunnydale might be tempted to yawn and move on to other topics.
Still on the whole, it is better to wait and see what God is doing rather than to simply condemn the obvious errors in a group still trying to find its voice.
The emerging church has two strong positive attributes.
It is highly interested in justice, particularly dealing with the race problem in American churches. It is an open scandal that American churches are highly segregated and the color line is likely to be a major opportunity for positive change in the coming decade.
The Bible commands Christians to serve the poor, fight injustice, and to raise up the oppressed.
Sadly, this positive interest in the Emergent is associated with a decline in interest in fighting for the rights of unborn children. Some of this may be associated with a corresponding de-emphasis on sexual ethics in these churches. While eager to condemn (as they should be) the faintest sign of racism, too often the Internet porn generation is too eager to give sexual deviancy a pass. Perhaps it is easier to condemn sins of your parents (such as institutional racism?) than to condemn those that plague your own culture.
Determined to outgrow simplistic Falwell-style social thought, as they should, Emergent runs the risk of turning a blind eye to what is good about the religious right. In condemning the “culture wars,” they may end up being co-opted by a Left eager to silence religious people to maintain power in their last cultural bastions.
So here is a cheer for justice, but a caution that it is the means of getting there that is the problem. Young Christians once cheered Castro as a prophet of justice and now they are just old fools.
Another positive thing about emerging churches is their increased attention to beauty. One sign of a culture in decline is when aesthetic values become determined by subjective opinions or by the marketplace. Sadly, uninformed majority opinion is no surer a guide to quality art and music than it is to quality scientific research.
If part of the prophetic role of the church is to speak to the culture, then failure to encourage artists and filmmakers is a failure to encourage potential prophets. Emerging churches are often artistically innovative and open to new ideas. This is mostly positive and can serve the church as an “art-tank” for new forms of worship and cultural engagement.
The greatest danger for the Emergent movement is that sincere Christians in it will be captured by old heresies.
Sadly, left-of-center (or in some cases simply incoherent) Evangelical academics are trying to co-opt this spirit led movement. With notable exceptions such as the marvelous Dallas Willard, many of the academics that have chosen to associate with the movement have agendas of their own. From that sad-but-all-too common crowd of people working out their self-loathing comes old fashioned theological liberalism (often made palatable when mixed with discussions of race) or the newer “radical orthodoxy.”
To de-emphasize sexual ethics or abortion in this erotic age is to side with the Shadow and not with the cause of Christ.
To be plain: there is treason amongst Evangelical academics and the emerging church must be careful not to be associated with it. When a few “philosophers” tell Emerging folk “Foundationalism” is dead in epistemology and attack the need for creeds or propositional truth, then the Emerging movement is changed from a sincere, open-hearted way to reach a new generation (as comes to the Church in each age) to an old heresy in new garb. When “scholars” hired by Christian colleges urge socialism as the cure for the economic woes of the world, then Emerging churches are in danger of becoming the pawns of one of the worst things ever to happen to the poor.
Fortunately, Southern California is blessed with any number of Emerging churches that “get it.” One of the best is Rock Harbor. They are putting the gospel into new forms for the rapidly gentrifying Xers without tossing the truth of the Gospel, traditional Christian ethics, or the positive contributions made to the world by the Christian idea of liberty in markets and government. Torrey was blessed to have Mike Erre, well trained in philosophy and theology, as our commencement speaker last year. He is the real deal. . .and is the kind of emerging leader that keeps the best of the old with new means of communication.
There is great danger in the Emerging church, but more opportunity and I hope members of the media can soon report on this pivotal moment in the life of the newly middle aged! What larks!