The Emerging Church

September 30th, 2005 | Comments (1) | Trackbacks (0) |

What on earth is the “Emerging Church”? Maybe you’ve heard of it, maybe you haven’t.

Brandon Barker says we are all nerds, just in different ways. Some people are music nerds. Some are baseball nerds. Some are skateboarding nerds, math nerds, cooking nerds, etc. I happen to be a Christianity nerd. Not just about my personal relationship with God, but about Christianity in general. One of the hot new topics in Christianity is the Emerging Church. The past couple of days I have been educating myself more on the topic and becoming more and more intrigued, and I am also finding that it is something I may have been looking for all along.

Rather than writing a huge post that tries to describe Emerging Churches, I will provide links for those who are interested.

  • Emerging Church mp3s: Full mp3s from a day of talks held at Grand Rapids Theological Seminary about the Emerging Church. I listened to the first talk, “The Emerging Church: Past, Present, and Future” by Brian McLaren. It was awesome.

  • Brian McLaren (one of the “leaders” of the movement) is giving a series of sermons at his home church called “What is the Emerging Church?” They are all available for download at his home church’s blog. McLaren is a great speaker and author. I highly recommend listening to these.

  • You might be Emergent…: A quiz on the Generous Orthodoxy Conference website which might let you know if you have an “emergent” mindset. The conference is so named because of Brian McLaren’s book entitled A Generous Orthodoxy: Why I Am a Missional, Evangelical, Post/Protestant, Liberal/Conservative, Mystical/Poetic, Biblical, Charismatic/Contemplative, Fundamentalist/Calvinist, Anabaptist/Anglican, Methodist, Catholic, Green, Incarnational, Depressed-yet-Hopeful, Emergent, Unfinished Christian (which I haven’t read, but would love to).

  • An image [below] Kyle Potter found on a church’s website. Read his commentary here.



    About the graphic, Andrew Jones says:
    What i want to know is this:
    - What is in that third cup under Emerging? I bet it is Chai. Fair-trade chai made from cruelty-free tea leaves and NOT purchased from Starbucks. Can I get a witness???
    - How can they expect emerging people to get up so early on a Sunday morning?
    - What happens when the emerging people want hymns around the organ?
    - What happens when the traditional people want to take their shoes off, paint Bible verses on the wall and drink some chai?

    • More Resources:

  • Kyle Potter - What is the Emerging Church?
  • Emerging Church @ Wikipedia
  • TallSkinnyKiwi: The Blog of Andrew Jones another leader in the movement
  • EmergentVillage.com

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    Comments

    Hey Jake,

    I resonate with that. Christianity nerd is a good way of putting it. I want to do theology as a profession, but it’s also my primary hobby, in addition to my faith committment. I keep telling people that it’s awful to be so bad at parties, because the only things I can really talk about are history or religion. I branch out to new interests and end up reading books on politics. That’s no better I guess.

    Thanks for the link!

    Posted by Kyle on October 1, 2005

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