[Disclaimer for those who are hard of humour: This post is a ‘joke’, and as such may contain hyperbole, exaggeration, gross caricature and stereotyping, satire, irony, and downright inaccuracies. You have been warned.]

Don’t know your Calvinists from your Catholics? Pull up a pew in our handy spotters guide to the various types of Christians you may come across both online and in real life:
Emerging Christians are the coffee-drinking, Mac using, too-cool-for-school hipsters. Emos want to be down with the postmoderns and don’t have much time for any of this fuddy-duddy doctrine business. A little less conversation, a little more action please. Even if it does tend to end up in being endless conversation about less conversation.

Conservative Evangelical Christians are the squares. ConEvos get very exited by activities like Biblical exegesis, systematic theology and reading tomes by Dead White Males, particularly from the 16th century. They have the social skills of a science fiction fan and the cultural awareness of a High Court Judge. Evos also get very upset if anyone doesn’t agree with their tidy lists of doctrines, or, God forbid, not care about these lists.

A typical conversation between Evo and Emo will often be an argument about doctrine (the nuts and bolts of what you believe) as opposed to living the Gospel in practice, going something like this:
Evangelical says: “How you live is important, but doctrine is important too.”
Emergent hears: “Doctrine is everything.”

Emergent says: “Doctrine isn’t everything, how you live is important too.”
Evangelical hears: “Doctrine is unimportant.”

And sometimes, the two spend so much time arguing, that the evangelical really does begin to believe that doctrine is everything, and the emergent really does begin to believe that doctrine is nothing. And that, sadly, is no joke.