discussing the emerging church

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In the last few weeks, in bible study, we've been conversing about the emerging church. Dan posted a great link to an article on the subject on his blog. Since then, I have been doing a lot of thinking and talking about it. Tonight, Dan had to go to a birthday party for his daughter, and so Sean pressed us into watching this sermon by a guy named Mark Driscoll, whom many people associate with the emerging church.

It might be helpful for me to point out that this is a very controversial topic. See, the emerging church seems to have become a buzzword for far left (liberal) Christianity. Apparently, there are several rather outspoken emerging church leaders who are saying and doing all manner of horrid things like: denying the Trinity, denying that Jesus Christ was (is) fully God and fully man, denying that homosexuality is a sin, and denying the legitimacy/accuracy of The Bible. This causes confusion, but, more importantly, this is teaching of false doctrine. This IS actually a turning of Christianity into a ministry of condemnation. Mark Driscoll, in the following sermon, very clearly separates himself and others from those radicals.

Perhaps I should also mention that the emerging church is very often associated with postmodernism. That's a valuable insight to have when addressing the topic. Of course, postmodernism can be most easily described in this context as a tearing up of old way, beliefs, and methods. People tend to rely more on personal experience than logical conclusions or tradition to understand the truth. So, people often try to reanalyze what they have been taught, and it often ends up being very destructive. Do you see how this could cause such controversy in the church today?

Many people believe that the emerging church is a destructive presence in contemporary Christianity. When you look at the radical liberal elements of it, there can be no doubt about that. But I think that, when one considers it in the postive sense Driscoll is talking about below (the first three lanes he discusses), it is actually a good thing. Maybe it's just a modern contextualization of the church. Maybe it's the actions of the Holy Spirit moving the church in the direction of revival. I'm not sure. But I do not think it is a manifest action of Satan to destroy the church though or that, if it was, it would succeed.

All that being said, I will leave you to the video. I warn you: It is about an hour long. But, if you have questions about what the emerging church is or what it means in the context of the future of the Christian church, I think you might do well to watch it. (Note: there seems to be downloads of it available as well. If you go here, you can find them)

Peace!

There is a strong drift toward the hard theological left. Some emergent types [want] to recast Jesus as a limp-wrist hippie in a dress with a lot of product in His hair, who drank decaf and made pithy Zen statements about life while shopping for the perfect pair of shoes. In Revelation, Jesus is a prize fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed. That is a guy I can worship. I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up. I fear some are becoming more cultural than Christian, and without a big Jesus who has authority and hates sin as revealed in the Bible, we will have less and less Christians, and more and more confused, spiritually self-righteous blogger critics of Christianity.

- Mark Driscoll (taken from the wikipedia page on him)