Featured Are you Emergent?

The Emergent church or movement is alive and well. The main authors are professors in our Christian colleges. Most of what I've read is that the bible is to be taken as a group of parables. Events that did not actually happen, but are an example of what God wants us to know. They started with the story of Adam and Eve. The garden was not real, but a representation.

 

To go further, why would a Christian college teach psychology alongside Jesus heals? To me, this opened the door to "anything manmade is welcome here" many years ago.

 

This is a Fact....

...I know several pastors that went on to graduate school and seminary, and they all attended a well named school in Claremont, CA, and they told me that they NEVER once opened their Bibles, or had need for the Bible.

It is their statements that have caused me to rename seminaries to "cemeteries!

Now this is just sad :tear:

 

"Cemetaries" lol, I'm going to remember that one, so true in many cases.

 

Would you consider this Emergent?

http://www.liquidchurch.com/first-time/what-to-expect/

 

Would someone share a list of properties or characteristics which aid in defining "Emergent Church". I have seen this term on several occasions and as of yet I have only a nebulous concept as to what it is. Thanks in advance.

 

Let's remember that there is a BIG difference between CULTURE and DOCTRINE.

Any congregation or leader who is tagged as "Emergent" needs to be emergent in DOCTRINE not just in culture.

Sojourn Church in Louisville has been accused of being emergent by some who have never attended there or listened to a single sermon from the church because the CULTURE appears to be emergent, but the DOCTRINAL STANCE is far from it, and is in fact Reformed and Biblical without apology.

One cannot get very far AT ALL in that church without a Bible. The Bible is the center and focus of all they do, and yet they CULTUALLY do a lot of practices that appear to identify with the Emergent Movement.

I only use Sojourn as example because I am so intimately familiar with them. Others are likewise, and not, based on their actual DOCTRINES.

 

The emerging church is primarily a response to perceived "modernism" in evangelicalism and Christendom in general. Some of the following characteristics and buzz-words I find helpful in understanding the emerging church.

1. postmodern: being Christian in a postmodern and post-Christian world. Deconstructing church.
2. missional: seeing all Christians as missionaries and every day living as missionary work in contrast to "professional" missionaries.
3. narrative: to read scripture as a story as opposed to a document from which to draw principles for a systematic theology
4. conversation: multiple voices contributing to something continually developing with an openness and respect for differing opinions.

Andy Crouch wrote a good article back in 2004 on Christianity Today that might help some to wrap their minds around the emerging church.

Emergent usually references the specific community Emergent Village.

 

Just want to let you know that the purpose of that blog is listed on that page as:

It is not meant to be a treatise on Emergent Theology.

 

i would suggest that none of what you propose above necessarily makes up an emerging church. Additionally, things have changed since 2004 in the movement. Part of being "emergent" is radid change for the sake of change.

Edit to include comments from the article cited above:

The quote above from the article rather sums up what I have been saying about the true emergent church and ALL the other congregations who happen to have a couple of cultural qualities in the same light as the emergent church. In other words, DOCTRINE MATTERS, not what we wear, the length of our hair, whether we do "church in the round" with dimmed lighting and candles, with indie genre music. It is what is PREACHED from the BIBLE (versus what is made up from one's own ideas, then covered over with a "See, even the Bible agrees with me" eisegesis effort) that matters.

That those standing on the outside looking in cannot tell the difference is the problem of those standing outside. They are JUST as locked into a particular culture as is the postmodern congregation, and in fact, often more so. WHO EVER SAID that suits and ties for men and dresses for women, hair styled "just so" and often slicked with hair products to hold it in the style of the late 1950s, is THE only correct culture for a worshiping body of believers. EVERY AGE would belie the culture that has right now effected the current church in America, for in EVERY AGE the church has looked RADICALLY DIFFERENT from the way it looks today. That, however, is conviniently forgotten as the gossip and slander extends toward the congregations that are INDEED reaching the latest generations for Christ -- something that the traditional church will never do, nor every understand why they do not. Far easier to look at someone else and pass the blame than to examine one's own culture to see if it is utterly anachronistic.

 

The writer of the article names names. They are familiar and of late have come out as decidedly heretical in nature. But, again, don't paint ALL with the same brush. You would be slandering brothers and sisters in Christ!

 

If that is the "defining" criteria, then I am close. Don't understand either, what "postmodern" means. I attend a "contemporary" church. I do see my role as a believer as "missional" where ever I am. I do see "narratives" in scripture, scripture is bigger than both being a narrative and being a set of properties from which to design any systematic theology. Not sure about the "conversation" thingy.

 

Indeed, one can be all of those things -- I am as well -- and yet not be emergent, because DOCTRINE DECIDES, not culture and all of those things are mere cultural issues.

 

Think have to realise that the Emergent churches seek to accomodate Christian to a post modern cultutre, so they seek to reinterprete bible based on current contemporary views!

So they tend to "water down" greatly concepts such as jesus ONLY way to be saved, that there is Hell, and that that the Bible infallible inspired word from God!

basically, they seek to rewrite theology based on how they view it would had been down if Bible just wriiten today!

 

Think that the Emergent church is attempting to find a "compromise" bewtween they perceive as conservative/liberal wings in Christiandom...

So they rtry to mediate a stance, but problem is that they do redefine chriatian terms/theology to be "easier' for people to digest, such as eliminating hell pretty much, refinelifestyle choices, and have the bible as saying some good things, but NOT inspired/infallible, so we take out what matters to us, and redefine it when it sounds wrong to us for today!