Tag: emerging

Nine practices of the emerging church

A couple weeks back I shared a series of posts on on what I saw as the defining characteristics of the emerging Christian movement.

And Wednesday, I found that Urban Theologian (HT @knightopia) shared nine practices of the emerging church, according to Eddie Gibbs and Ryan Bolger in their book “Remembering Our Future: Explorations in Deep Church.”

If you are unclear about what an emerging church is, Gibbs and Bolger define emerging churches as “missional communities arising from within postmodern culture and consisting of followers of Jesus who are seeking to be faithful to their place and time.” The nine “practices” are:

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What is emergent? Trinitarian based values

what is emergent?

Read Part 3 :: What is emergent? Missional

From what I’ve seen of the emerging conversation, Trinitarian based values aren’t something that come up on a daily basis, but a number of folks are pointed to it as one of the great strengths of the movement. In fact, I can’t think of it being mentioned in any of the books I’ve read (I apologize to any authors that may have brought it up and I’ve overlooked it), and I don’t exactly recall it being brought up in any Bible classes in college (granted I didn’t make much higher than a C in any of them). But regardless of if it’s talked about, written about, or not — it still seems to be a strong point in the emerging conversations I’ve been a part of.

Perhaps Ian Mobsby (as quoted on Wikipedia) explains this idea best…

I suggest that perhaps the Emerging Church had found, or been led to a Trinitarian ecclesiology which had inspired a model, the values of which reflected God’s desire for what the emerging church should be. This is what Volf is talking about in After our Likeness. A Church whose values reflect the Trinitarian God. This development appears not to have been a consciously mediated action, but to have emerged out of the experience and practice of those involved in the projects. Is this a God-led re-imagining of the Church? I believe that it is.

Continue reading What is emergent? Trinitarian based values

The Great Disappointment

Nicholas Fiedler (of Nick and Josh Podcast fame) shared an open, honest reflection on his disappointment with Emergent on his blog.

He mentions later in the comments that perhaps after spending 15 months abroad, he’s disappointed to see the conversation hasn’t moved anywhere from when he left. Understood.

Here are my comments:
Continue reading The Great Disappointment

The end is near

While uploading the encounter podcast tonight – yeah I really got behind this week – I got back into “Everything Must Change” by Brian McLaren. I’ve been itching to read it lately but have set it aside while I wait for others in our book club to “catch up.”

Reading Chapter 10, McLaren talks about some of the differences between the conventional view of Jesus and the Gospel and the emerging view’s. He gives four comparisons and then suggests six unintended negative consequences of the conventional views of Christ.

Simply put, the conventional view of Jesus poses little or no significant challenge to the dominant framing story that currently directs our societal machinery in its suicidal trajectory. It only fails to confront and correct the current dysfunctions of our societal machinery, but energetically aids and abets its suicidal tendencies in at least six unintended but nevertheless harmful ways.

The conventional view:

  • relegates Jesus to practical irrelevance in relation to human social problems in history; His message is about the soul, its guilt before God, and it’s afterlife and not about our world and its current crises
  • offers relatively little hope for history but anticipates the complete destruction of the world; easily becomes an “opiate of the masses” pacifying people with dreams of a better afterlife rather than motivating and mobilizing them to transform the world here and now
  • tends to be dualistic, with human souls and other “spiritual things” in one category and human bodies and other “secular” things in another; it tends to keep faith private and personal so believers are seen as “just passing through” and steering away from “worldly” social engagements beyond their personal, family and church-related concerns
  • may view blessings as God’s blessings to an elect group and little or nothing else (except condemnation) to everyone else
  • sees God’s essential attitude toward the world as one of wrath and believers are discouraged from seeing God as an ally in the world’s transformation
  • by postponing the essence of salvation to the afterlife, and by assuming that God plans to destroy the earth, the conventional view leads us to assume that the world will get worse and worse and that this deterioration is in fact God’s will or plan. This assumption tends to create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Not only that, but in some versions of the conventional view, the worse the world gets, the better we should feel since salvation – meaning post-mortem salvation after the world is destroyed – is approaching.

McLaren suggests there are many lines between the conventional and emerging viewpoints that people may agree with or disagree with. Some may take the conventional view as their “contract” and portions of the emerging view as the fine print or vice versa.

But this really got me, when he suggest that our “framing story” in our modern Western culture has resulted in a “Gospel about Jesus” and not the “Gospel of Jesus.”

Share your thoughts. Comment away – and yes – you can do it anonymously.

Why Al Qaeda Supports the Emergent Church

I’m sure many of my friends will get a laugh out of this one. KKLA Radio Host Frank Pastore has written a recent article that theorizes that Al Qaeda actually supports the Emergent Church.

He says the Emergent church is weak and is actually creating weak Christians who don’t want to fight.

I think he’s out in left field on this one but if he really wanted to strengthen his article, he would have called it, Why the Emmergent Church supports Al Qaeda.

The emergent church is an ally in the war against radical Islam–al Qaeda’s ally. Not in the sense they are supplying bullets and bombs to Osama, of course, but in the sense they are weakening our conviction to fight.

If those in the emergent “we’re-a-missional-not-an-institutional” church had their way, American church buildings would be just like European church buildings – empty. And the church, the people themselves, would be so intellectually, morally, emotionally, and spiritually lost, confused and uncertain, that they would be incapable of doing hardly anything more than inviting their Muslim oppressors in for a cappuccino and a good conversation about the sociology of knowledge, the absurdity of propositional truth, and the misplaced certitude of the Muslim metanarrative. All the while, no doubt, nodding in agreement that America probably deserved to die and mumbling something about carbon footprints.

I personally think Pastore is a little to hung up on his American patriotism and the idea that only conservative, evangelical Christian Americans can save the world from Al Qaeda.

Only the United States, and more specifically, only the conservative, evangelical Christians of America are who stand between radical Islam and their quest for global domination.

It’s too bad that other people aren’t concerned about the safety of their of country like conservative, evangelical American Christians (lets just call them CEACs). I guess that’s why Britain has sent so many soldiers to Iraq and why other countries have sent their own soldiers to die in Iraq and Afghanistan.

If the world is to be saved from Muslim conquest, it will be America who does it. And if America is to be saved, only conservatism can do it. And if conservatism is to be saved, it will be those Bible-believing patriots who do it–those conservative, evangelical Christians who are the bedrock of the American way of life.

Why? Because only Christianity has the intellectual and spiritual horsepower to defeat radical Islam and prevent the world from returning to the darkness of the 7th century.

It would also appear that Pastore is of the belief that CEACs should be an exclusive club. Only for the elite and those who believe exactly as we do.

Bottom line, it’s feelings over thoughts, the heart over the head, experience over truth, deeds over creeds, narratives over propositions, the corporate over the individualistic, being inclusive rather than exclusive, with none of that offensive “in versus out” language, such as those who are “saved” and those who are “not saved,” or even the most divisive of all referents–“Christian” and “non-Christian.”

The emergent church and its allies on the religious left are to Christianity what termites are to wood. They devour it from the inside out, little bit by little bit, and you don’t notice it until it’s too late–unless you look for the droppings.

Maybe he missed the scripture that reminds us in Psalms 24:1, “The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it.”

That’s too bad. Good thing God’s a very inclusive God to make up for all the CECAs who aren’t.

Granted I’m sure that will open up a can of worms right there. I’m not saying anyone and everyone is a Christian – I’m saying that I believe that we as Christians should be inclusive of the poor, the downtrodden, the sick and the needy. We should love our neighbor and brothers. We should allow them to join us in our search for God – not shun them because they believe something different than us or come from another background, culture, country or faith.

What are your thoughts?

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