***When Richard Land (Southern Baptist), Jim Wallis (Sojourners), and Dwight Hopkins (University of Chicago) speak with a single voice, it’s news. All three gave a big thumbs down to the health and wealth positive thinking message of Joel Osteen over the holidays on CNN. Osteen’s messages would leave me buoyant and energized if he would […]

***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. […]

Pray for Rick Warren. The mega church pastor of Saddleback Community and author of “The Purpose Driven Life” the best-selling non-fiction hardback book in American history deserves our support, gratitude and prayer. Here’s why. So far, Warren is refusing to snatch at politically correct respectability, however alluring such a stance might appear. The price for […]

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 […]

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 […]

Dr. Mark DeVine is currently Associate Professor of Christian Theology at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminaryand Bi-vocational Pastor of First Calvary Baptist Church in Kansas City, Missouri. He returned to Midwestern after serving with the International Mission Board in Bangkok, Thailand since 1998. He taught theology from 1994 to 1998. DeVine received his undergraduate degree in […]