***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 […]

***My fascination with the emerging conversation continues. A cluster of insights, critiques, and values (mainly ecclesiological, methodological and cultural ones) intrigue and attract: (1) the missional seriousness, (2) the recovery of mystery and the arts, (3) the endorsement and embrace of narrative, (4) the commitment to a nuanced and discriminating assessment of the significance of […]

***Thank you Scot McKnight for working so hard to understand and interpret the emerging movement to a widening audience. As a professor in a Southern Baptist Seminary I am doing my best to correct Donald Carson’s distortive reduction of the movement “almost” to the writings of Brian McLaren that too many evangelicals have already accepted. […]

What have I gotten myself into? Do you guys realize that I have a wife, two kids and a full time job teaching theology at MBTS? Do you realize that I am bi-vocational pastor of an urban core church which I am trying to find an ACTS 29 person to re-plant? Do you realize I […]

Don’t deny the dangers of doctrine. They are deadly, and chief among them is that they divide. Doctrine divides otherwise happy communities of believers by exposing and then exacerbating contrary convictions about everything from baptism to birth control; from the way we worship to whether we welcome wine.
The danger of doctrine is not lost on […]

Can we predict the trajectory of a given community of faith? No. Not perfectly. But the robust original form of Protestant Liberalism continues as an uncanny harbinger of where many communities eventually settle in. I’m not thinking of the wimpy, sissy liberalism I sometimes encountered as a student at Southern Seminary in the mid 1980’s. […]

No I am not completely up to speed on the emerging/emergent lingo but I have a strong suspicion that there is a “right wing” to this movement. I think Ed Stetzer puts them under his “relevance” category (the other categories are “revisionist,” and “reconstructionist”). And as I learn about these right wing emerging pastors and […]