What is emerging church? Is Emergent theology orthodox? Can a church be emerging and missional?
Here are links to my summaries of the "emerging church" talks from Tim Keller, Mark Driscoll, John Piper and David Wells at the 2006 "Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World" conference.
David Wells: The Postmodern/Emerging Framework
Present reality and ultimate reality are temporarily at odds, and that experience is therefore "ambiguous." This is the setting in which the gospel, and emerging church, must orient itself.
Tim Keller: Missional Evangelism & Emerging Church
In the post-Christian atmosphere of America, people no longer need to be "awakened" to Christ, but instead must be infected with the gospel despite previous inoculations.
Mark Driscoll: How to be "Emerging Church" and Orthodox
Christians in America should do for their neighbors what they would do for the nations, carefully studying cultures and subcultures in order to translate biblical truth into a given cultural stream.
John Piper: Evaluating Emerging Church Doctrine
Joy must be doctrinally based if it is to be in Jesus, and Christ-exalting. Chronic uncertainty is stylish, but it's not reality-based, and needs to be slapped back.
I also recommend the message MP3s, free for download. For those of you thinking about the current emerging church/Emergent situation, these are an excellent resource.
Monday, October 16, 2006
Emerging Church & Missional Thinking
from Keller, Driscoll, Piper & Wells
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5 comments:
Great list of links. Thanks for sharing them.
Sure thing. I hope they're helpful.
I love this question: "Can a church be emerging and missional?" What are your thoughts? Have you written about this in a past post that you can direct me to?
Later,
Horton
"Can a church be emerging and missional?"
I haven't written about this at length, but my response is Yes, certainly. "Emerging church" is a much broader term than "missional." In "Emerging" you find a wide variety of doctrinal (or non-doctrinal, in the case of the Emergent conversation) and stylistic positions. A unifying thread is the desire to communicate the gospel in culturally relevant ways.
"Missional" is a much more narrow concept, and "missional" people seem to talk about being "incarnational, messianic and apostolic". There seems to be some disagreement as to how the word "missional" ought to be used, though. In fact, a lot of the buzz regarding these ideas centers on semantics!
I know that Mark Driscoll incorporates missional thinking in his "emerging" church strategy. Take it for what it's worth. :)
Ariel,
Again - thanks for your time and your thoughtfulness in responding. I recently did a tiny blog entry regarding the suggestion that another conversation that is taking place is the relational conversation.
My struggle is that I have difficulty refering to the systems commonly referred to as a "local church" as a church. Right now I am working with THE Church = all believers and A church = all believers in a specific locality.
Thanks again for your time.
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