I came across several new things on the Emerging Church this week – a topic I have an interest in mainly because it seems to want to challenge many emphases in contemporary evangelicalism.
Scot McKnight’s JesusCreed blog has four articles dealing with what the emerging church is. He covers the issue under four topics -
- What is the Emerging Church? – which interestingly received some postive follow-up comments from James MacDonald, with whom McKnight sparred a few weeks back.
I don’t have time to present a full analysis of these articles right now, but I would say that they probably represent the most comprehensive description of emerging principles currently available on the web. And in general my impression is that much of what the emerging church is said to be criticizing in the conservative evangelical church is really a bit of a straw man.
I also came across a paper today critiquing the emerging church – “An Ecclesiological Assessment of the Emerging Church Movement“, by John Hammett, from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.
Again, I don’t have time to give a comprehensive review here. However, one thing that I think is interesting is that Hammett responds to one particular thing that emerging church people talk about, which is the assertion that the church needs to be able to communicate the gospel to the postmodern culture. However what McKnight’s article makes clear is that the issue with postmodernism in the emerging church is actually that they believe it is necessary to adopt some of the philosophical approaches of postmodernism in order to apprehend the truth of the gospel.
As far as I can tell this is a wholly different issue. And if Hammett found much to express skepticism about in the claim that the church needs to do a better job of communicating to postmoderns, I think there is much more to be uneasy about with this deeper claim.