Reading Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz, though I had not yet heard of the emerging church movement, was my introduction to that movement. Donald Carson’s Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church: Understanding a Movement and Its Implications was the first serious treatment of the movement I encountered. That was almost two years ago. Since that time […]

Click here to read my article published in The Pathway: Newsjournal of the Missouri Baptist Convention.

A portion of Brian McLaren’s account of an encounter from a couple who visited his church and asked about the policy regarding homosexuality:
 
“. . . the young woman explained, ‘This is the first time my fiancé and I have ever actually attended a Christian service, since we were both raised agnostic.’ So I supposed they […]

Morris Chapman, President and Chief Executive Officer of the SBC Executive Committee, is saying some very interesting, helpful and hopeful things these days. Let’s review a few of them:
“. . . dare we as biblical conservatives to speak of the love of our Lord Jesus Christ and let the world see our love? Do we […]

A couple of weeks ago, I addressed the Theological Sub-committee of the Missouri Baptist Convention on the question of the emerging church. My article on that subject was copied and distributed to the committee of four persons and also to around 10 or so others who were in attendance.
Yesterday this press article appeared on The Pathway […]

My interest in traversing the emerging/missional landscape involves several factors. I am bi-vocational pastor of an inner city Southern Baptist Church, and in my search for help I found Acts29. I was intrigued because of their success in the city combined with unashamed embrace of a fully-orbed evangelical confessional statement versus the doctrine-ophobia I have […]

Congratulations to Ed Stetzer and to Southern Baptists. Ed Stetzer, missiologist and Senior Director of the Center for Missional Research at the North American Mission Board (NAMB), will become director of LifeWay Research as part of a three-way collaborative effort between NAMB, the International Mission Board (IMB) and LifeWay Christian Resources, all SBC entities. I […]

Check out this very helpful interview with Ryan K. Bolger, one of, if not the most impressive among the various observers of the Emerging church phenomenon. This interview has prompted me to begin work on another article on the emerging church. Here are some of the issues and questions the interview stirred up in my thinking:
1. It […]

Go to Free Theological Resources on this site or just click here to access my article forthcoming in Midwestern Journal of Theology.

I want to work through the implications of my last post in a different way. This is my thinking given my reading of Gibbs/Bolger:
1. Gibbs/Bolger are concerned about the decline in numbers in the church in the West.
2. They believe the shift from the modern world to the postmodern world is the main factor determining the viability of […]