James MacDonald’s comments on the emerging church have attracted the attention of Scot McKnight, once one of James’ professors at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. The debate about James’ article seems to have largely migrated to McKnight’s blog, Jesus Creed, with James himself showing up there to defend his views against some fairly scathing criticism from McKnight and others.
I think some of James’ remarks suggest that he may have overestimated the capacity of the written word to convey some of the subtleties of sarcasm, especially in public. I suspect he may regret making references to “butt kissing” “ministry wannabees” … … and “the enclave of arrogance that is Christian higer (sic) education”. Ouch!!
That aside, It seems to me that the substantive debate about the strengths and/or limitations of the emerging church movement is still not being addressed very effectively. So far I’ve made only a very preliminary exploration of some of the material on this subject around the web and haven’t yet found much that I consider to be very helpful. I did find a couple of interviews with Scot McKnight though that provide a little bit of insight -
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week845/interview3.html
http://www.the-next-wave-ezine.info/issue82/index.cfm?id=5&ref=ARTICLES%5FINTERVIEWS%5F80
I’m very open to learning more about all of this. However, so far, for what it’s worth, my very, very tentative impression is that the emerging church movement may be in danger of focusing unduly on things that at best are of second order importance. Despite frustrations of my own with churches I’ve been to, frankly my big problem is not with the church. It’s with my own failures, my selfishness, my sin. And I believe that Christ’s death and resurrection is absolutely the fully sufficient solution to that. Ok, there are all kinds of problems in the church and we need to talk about that. But let’s not get this out of perspective. God has done something incredibly wonderful for us1, and I would be concerned about any dialog that neglects, minimizes or deflects attention from that central truth.
1 and by the way, for the past several generations, the evangelical church, probably more than anything else, has been the instrument God has used to convey the knowledge of that to us.