Great discussion today with some heavy hitters on Café Theology. Its called A Symposium: Six Evangelicals Assess Their Movement The emerging church gets a mention by Denny Burk, as does Steve Chalke who continues to be mistakenly connected with the emerging church, despite his protests and the protests of others. Good to hear from John Franke.
Technorati Tags: christian, emerging church, evangelical, emergent
Thanks for linking to this symposium. I plan to read through it next week and learn something (since I’ve always thought of myself as an Evangelical). But I found some humour in this question posed at the beginning:
“How do you define “Evangelical” in a way that distinguishes Evangelicals from other believing Christians?”
Funny to me is the term ‘believing Christians’. Is there such a thing as an ‘unbelieving Christian’?
maybe this side of eternity.
thank god for people like franke who give hope to some of us struggling followers of the way that evangelicalism is not completely dead in the water. evangelicalism, sadly, is almost defined by its anti-intellectualism and fear of academic rigor. rather than involving itself in today’s debate with exciting thinkers such as derrida, zizek, badlieu and marion to name only a few, evangelical leaders seem to bury their heads in the sand and get nostalgic for the way things ‘used to be’! but the ‘good ole days’ were never actually all that good!
i thank god for the present debate which is finding ways to enable us to be shocked once again by the great god of scripture; to be surprised by the implications of the text once more. all things are indeed become strange – and this is to be welcomed and celebrated, rather than denounced and feared.
thanks for the link. interesting reading there.