Emergent Yes
The Emergent Conference starts May 19 in Nashville. Should be a great experience with great teachers. My best bet would be Alan Roxburgh and Doug Pagitt. The others are worth hearing also. This will be the last of the Emergent/Youth Specialties Conferences before their re-emergence in 2007.
UPDATE: Bloggers connect here.
Emergent No
EmergentNo is a blog dedicated to exposing flaws in the “emergent church” (american standard version). It can be a little extreme on the fundamentalist side, but the people behind the site are nice and they respond in person. As far as critical watchdog sites go, this one is my personal favorite (and i am getting a little addicted to it)
Emergent Hummm??
The A-Team blog have started a series on Emerging Church. Murdock is “not a fan of the emerging church” but thinks “perhaps theres not as much to worry about as we previously thought.” The thoughts are based on the recent Emerging Church conference at Biola/Talbot. I am curious to hear their conclusions. These guys just did a great [agreeable with me] review of Steve Taylor’s book “Out of Bounds Church? so they must be OK.
And if you like things that end in ‘NO’, then Radical Congruency‘s Justin has the JordonCooperNo site which will no doubt be amusing and may spark a trend of self-depreciating sites with a similar name. And please . .. let me do TallSkinnyKiwiNo by myself. Or maybe my wife should tackle that one???
hey andrew,
do you know any fellow bloggers that will be there?
I’m going to it and would love the opportunity to grab some coffee and/or steal some ideas if I had the opportunity.
grant, the bloggers always get together at these event – if i hear of who is organizing the group (which ALWAYS complains of the despicable lack of WIFI and power sockets in the rooms) then i will post the link.
thanks, bro! Appreciate it.
As long as it doesn’t interfere with my midnight attendance of the opening of Star Wars III…gotta have priorities..hahah
I heard Alan Roxburgh a few weeks ago. Roxburgh had some good ideas, but he was pretty down on simpler forms of church, including the emergent church. In fact, he spoke pretty degrading about both. Have you noticed this in Alan at all, Andrew?
steve – no – not in the slightest. alan has only been complimentary – maybe he was speaking of some other less-than-desirable elements of church???
alan has been a hero and friend since the 90’s. I was with him 3 weeks ago in Pasadena at the Emerging/Missional Conference for Formation of leaders. There were 40 or so of us. Alan was LEADING the conference. We all respect him and he respects us.
His book in the early 90’s where he mentions organic supermarkets as a cultural form was way ahead of its time, – we would be talking about Whole Foods and Cultural Creative 5 years later, but Alan beat us to it.
I’m not a big fan of critical blogs that end in NO. I think if you’re gonna be critical, you should have a more creative name. So, for example, rather than TallSkinnyKiwiNo, it should be ShortFatMango.
“Emergent Hummm??” is simply priceless. That pretty much sums it up 🙂
TSK
I’m glad that you’re able to read and perhaps interact with the emergentno site.
I find that it is toxic for me. I just can’t stomach it. Critique is great, but some of the generalizations and criticisms feel more like a punch in the gut than pulling the log out of my eye.
In reading the emergentno site I have realized how much it hurts to be misunderstood and misrepresented, and that has made me far more aware of how I present points of view other than my own.
Thanks for keeping us posted on emergent critiques, I trust God’s grace to lead us through the process.
I did not enjoy reading through the emergentno site. not because it criticised the emergent churches, but because the tone of “argument” was so mean and spiteful. However, reading the comments was fascinating and far more insightful and interesting.
Will Samson is heading up a Blogger’s Forum. you can read about it here.
ShortFatMango. I love it! lol
EmergentNo is a pearler! I agree that the posts are very mean, but the comments are lively and worth reading. I checked out the “nice people’s” profiles. One of them is a mother of 7 from Ontario. How are you supposed to argue with a champion like that? No fair! i did leave a comment though. Now I’m suffering from Chicken Little syndrome…