Here is a nice poster of the Emergent Church guru, Brain McLaren. My fellow seminarian, Michael Dewalt is to be blamed for this one. Pass it around! (And yes, I have read his books, which gives me a voice in the 'conversation'!)* Addendum: There are many voids that the Emergent Church are filling and they are to be commended for that.
9 comments:
why did you read those things? I read some of Tony Jones works for Christian education - they love to affirm and promote ancient Christian practices and some eastern ones as well. Bleh.....
I try to keep current. One of the problems with the attempt to be ancient is that they try to just behind the Reformation to avoid its teaching....but the ancient church was 'very calvinistic' if I can say that.
We cannot get around Augustine!
What voids? The need to have rock n roll in church or perhaps the need to bring thousands into the church only to not do much anything besides entertain them and not teach them a thing about scripture?
The emergents actually say a lot against the megachurch mentality. They're largely a reaction against modernity in the church, which is all well and good. But they throw the baby out with the bathwater - for instance, they're dead-set against propositions, preferring stories instead. Now, to a degree they're right. But if you lose propositions, there's no story, either.
They generally read postmodernity into scripture, which is of course really just jacked-up modernity. I think Rev. Lanning's old metaphor about the pendulum swing comes into play here. It's good they react against the one thing, but they go too far in the other direction.
Sweet poster, BTW.
Thank you Mark. That is where I was going to go.
I was also going to add that they attempt to regain the New Testament focus on community and mutual accountability. These are things that the current evangelical church has lost and replaced with altar calls.
Many people mix up emergent with seeker-sensitive.
We Reformed people do have something to learn as long as we remain teachable and the Word of God is the teacher!
Altar calls are nothing more than emotional mush in the moment, some pastor's I know count their sermons succes rate via how many came up for the altar call...where is the altar call in Scripture? However, there is the occassional person who the Lord does redeem via the altar call, so I shouldn't bash it that much
save some money - read some blogs buy better books :-) thats my philosophy. I got it from John MacArthur and his boys... hehe and plus i am a poor college student
granted those who are neighbors with Rob Bell should be more converse than just blogs. :-)
You're right, we should be grateful to the emergent movement for decrying the megachurches.
By the same token, we should be glad that the Muslims recently were burning some Roman churches.
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