Quote:
Originally Posted by George
Go to your local Bible bookstore and you should be able to find an entire section of books devoted to "Emergent Church." At my local Bible bookstore, there are at least 75 books concerning this topic and I have read several of them. Do your own research. I'm not basing my opinions from websites, blogs, and forums.
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I too have read the books and I have gone to seminars and conferences where many of the emergent guys have spoken and a couple of the more prominent guys I have taken to lunch and talked personally and corresponded with in email. So, my information is first hand. There is no "Emergent Church" and there is no doctrinal forumulation that's normative for all emergents. The EC is a movement, not a church. It's ideas are constantly in flux and nothing is set in stone. At this point it's just a bunch of people thinking aloud and bouncing ideas off each other, hence the term 'conversation'.
There are two streams within the EC movement. One is, from an evangelical pov, somewhat liberal theologically and they are questioning basic orthodox positions on hell, soteriology, discipleship, etc... These guys are the founders of the movement and they have organized and can be found online. Their leaders include Tony Jones and Brian McLaren.
The other stream refers to itself as 'emerging' (as opposed to 'emergent') and is led by people like Dan Kimball, Scot McNight and others. This stream is not organized and is more a loose knit group that mixes with the other group but distances itself from the others more radical theological ideas and prefers to be distinguished from them by the term 'emerging' instead of 'emergent'. These guys are solidly fundamentalist, evangelical, conservative in their theology but open to revisiting church/worship praxis in order to continue to connect to emerging generations.
This is the common thread between the two. They are both convinced that the current model is dying and that it needs to be re-engineered in order for the church to continue to be 'relevant' in post-modern culture. Otherwise, they fear, the American church will suffer the fate of the European church that didn't see post-modernism coming and didn't adjust and the church there is all but dead and it's becoming and increasingly pagan enclave in the world.
Culturally, the US is always about 15-20 years behind Europe and since this happened to Europe beginning in the 60's and 70's the cultural wave is hitting us now and the American church is trying learn from the mistakes of the European church and adjust. That's common thread between the two groups. As usual, the movement is split by conservative and progressive povs. That's human nature and bound to happen.