let me say that i love the current incarnation of abc's nightline. as a youth, i would have never watched nightline. really, a late night news show? when i could be watching letterman (college years)? but, in the last year, i've really grown to enjoy the show. not to long ago, ted koppel stepped down. he'd been the host since the inception of nightline during the iran hostage crisis. the sorta had different people as the solidified the current hosting group. and they've done a great job. anyhow, i was catching it, and tonight they had a report using the title above.
it was a brief look at newer, untraditional church styles. now, this is nothing new to me. but, for a lot of people, eyes are being opened. society, including the church, is undergoing change. it's not uniform change, but we are shifting between modernism and post-modernism. shoot, i had an art prof in college tell me that the demarcation date for postmodernism is 1983! i don't know if the shift started then, but it is happening. and it's good. not to say that modernism is bad, dead, anything. frankly, modernism has been great for the development of society. and yet things keep changing. but all change takes time, can be difficult, and will have people that knowingly or unknowingly resist it. back to the report: included in the report was an interview with brian mclaren, author and guru for the emergent church.
unfortunately, as any outsider does, they pretty much only focused the externals. "they've got individual stations for prayer and communion. they pod-cast. etc." these aren't bad things to note, but really they miss out what the emergent church is doing. simply lighting candles and incense, having stations, and being tech savy don't make you postmodern/emergent. if it's any one thing, i'd say that being missional does.
the other thing that i sorted winced at was the report saying that the emergent church is rebelling against the mainline church. i disagree. most every author in emergent circles say that they're not trying to rebel, or that what the previous/current church has done is wrong. what they are saying is that the strategies to speak to our generation are different than the ones of the previous. church and society of today aren't exactly like 50 years ago, 200 years ago, or 1000 years ago. the message of the good news remains the same, but the vehicle does change. so, if i consider myself a part of this next wave of church, it's not because i'm shaking my fist at the "old people". or because they've got it all wrong, i'm doing something new and different, and i'm right. no, it's because i'm trying to share what i know in the way i know.
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I wonder, however, whether in some rather high-profile cases the message of the good news has truly remained the same in the emerging church.
care to elaborate?
I caught the tail of that report, it was interesting. I didn't catch that they were rebelling against the mainstream church, more that the mainstream church was growing leary of the new movements. Brian McLaran was saying how traditional churches don't always understand what is going on and sometimes react negatively.
early in the report they actually used the word rebelling. that's what made me wince.
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