The folowing is an excerpt from my upcoming article on the Emerging Chruch and Southern Baptists: 
 I “had thought” my exposure to Mars Hill marked my introduction to the emerging church only to realize later that Donald Miller’s bestselling book Blue Like Jazz had already brought me into that world. But not so fast. The taxonomy troubles […]

The following excerpt from Christianity and Culture of 1940 is one example among many of Lewis’ fascinating and nuanced takes on the relationship between culture and Christianity (in this case culture understood as study and enjoyment of the arts):
“There is another way in which [culture] may predispose to conversion. The difficulty of converting an uneducated […]

C.S. Lewis was not known for aggressive proselytizing during his tutorial sessions at Oxford and Cambridge. J.I. Packer once had the privilege of attending a Lewis lecture. “There was no clue that the man might be a Christian” Packer reports. There is nothing new here. It has long been known that Lewis, as Packer puts […]

“Mystery.” I encounter this word periodically in my research of the emerging church movement and the emergent conversation. D.A. Carson is correct that a protest posture shapes many of the leaders and shapers of this broad and diverse phenomenon (I think this protest aspect accounts for much of what is most unattractive in the movement […]

Like so many attempts to understand a currently developing and growing phenomenon, the quest to comprehend the emergent/emerging church proves frustrating and often elusive. Emerging Churches: Creating Christian Community in Postmodern Cultures by Eddie Gibbs and Ryan Bolger promises a comparatively more accurate window into the world of emerging churches because it taps a wealth […]

***Must evangelicalism and emerging churches be enemies?
Thomas Oden views modernity as the dying intellectual and cultural framework beyond which postmodern believers may move for the recovery of ancient, orthodox and yes, evangelical Christianity. He defines modernity according to the following four substantive or ideological commitments: (1) autonomous individualism (Sartre, Nietzsche, Hemingway) or in the East, […]

***“Standing up for truth… has no appeal to emerging church leaders” (Gibbs-Bolger, p. 124).
Dan Kimball objects to the stereotyping of emerging churches and who can blame him? Effort to understand before critiquing is common courtesy; it is an act of doing unto others as we would have done to ourselves. In particular Kimball counters charges […]

***Some emerging communities in Britain make as much or more use of secular music as they do sacred—and they construct meanings of their own choosing. Such sacralizing of secular texts represents one example of Gibbs and Bolger’s second core pattern of emerging churches covered in a chapter entitled “Transforming Secular Space.” Would-be secular “texts” (whether […]

*** Scot McKnight points to Emerging Churches: Creating Christian Community in Postmodern Cultures by Eddie Gibbs and Ryan K. Bolger as the best place to begin if one wants to understand the emerging movement. I see immediately why McKnight prizes this volume so highly. Gibbs and Bolger commit themselves to primary source research and inductive […]

***Why sure. If I could believe the Bible with traditionalist, evangelical, Vacation Bible School naiveté without having to shove my brains in my pocket to git ’er done, I’d ah done it years ago. But I’m all growed up now, what with all the book-larnin and post-enlightenment storying and postmodern profanity and verb conjugating and […]