Someone just emailed me this question: “What is an emergent?”
This is a sincere question from a friend of mine who is not a church attender who honestly knows nothing about the Emerging Church conversation. He is quite Biblically literate, philosophically deep, and a great artist and aspiring luthier to boot.
How would you answer his question?
Related posts:
- What is the “Emerging Church”? In my experience, having observed, engaged in, and written about it, the following are some important and often misunderstood facts about the movement: The Emerging...
- John Piper on “Emerging”, “Emergent”, and “Missional” John Piper has a handle on what these terms mean, and shows it in this post. I’m not in total agreement with his analysis but...
- Emerging / Emergent Roundup for January 2008 I plan on doing a lot of reading and writing about the Emerging Church this year. It seems there has been an ubundance of posts...
- Tony Jones Finds Audience, Loses “Religion” Emboldened by the added attention of a liberal-leaning audience since he moved his blog to Beliefnet, Tony Jones today announced a plan to review the...
- McKnight: “McLaren Emerging” Scot McKnight provides more of his trademark clarity in a recent article in Christianity Today: I maintain a crucial distinction between two related streams: emergent...
You might be a redneack…er… emergent if…
-Political concerns are poverty, AIDS, imperialism, war-mongering, CEO salaries, consumerism, global warming, racism…
-If you talk about the myth of redemptive violence and the myth of certainty
-If you lie awake at night having nightmares about all the ways modernism has ruined your life
-If you search for truth but aren’t sure it can be found
-If you loathe words like linear, propositional, rational, machine, and hierarchy and use words like ancient-future, jass, mosaic, matrix, missional, vintage, and dance
-If you like your theology narrative instead of systematic
-If you want to be the church and not just go to church
-If you long for a community that is relational, tribal, and primal like a river or garden
-If you believe who goes to hell is no one’s business and no one may be there anyway
-If you believe salvation has a little to do with atoning for guilt and a lot to do with bringing the whole creation back into shalom with it’s maker
-If it bugs you when people talk about going to heaven instead of heaven coming to us
-If you disdain monological , didactic preaching
-If you use the word “story” in all your propositions about postmodernism
- a partial list from Kevin DeYoung