This Christian Life

Leaders call ‘Emerging Church Movement’ a threat to Gospel

From an article on bpnews.net:

A recently developed way of envisioning church known as the “Emerging Church Movement” deals carelessly with Scripture and compromises the Gospel, according to a prominent evangelical scholar and a Southern Baptist seminary president.

But Brian McLaren, one of the movement’s leaders, told Baptist Press that such criticisms are unfounded and that the Emerging Church Movement is “seeking to be more faithful to Christ” in the current postmodern cultural context.

Threat, shhhhmet. I think if there’s any threat that should be discussed in the church square, it is the threat to Christendom, as claimed by the authors of “The Shaping of Things to Come,” by Alan Hirsch and Michael Frost. They readily point out that the “institutional church” is quickly losing ground in today’s “postmodern” culture. The church kingdom (aka Christendom) that Constantine set into motion is based on an attractional method of ministry. In other words, if you build it, they should come. However, a missional, incarnational method (i.e.: going to where people live and reaching them there) of reaching people and doing church is more appropriate for today and happens to be more akin to Jesus style of ministry.

This should not be taken lightly. The problem is, we’ve been ignoring the incarnational concept for so long, few of us have a vision for it, much less does the word even show up in our proverbial dictionaries. Looking at the early church one would quickly realize the incarnational, missional model and the validity of it.

Let’s stop arguing about how church should be done and just get out there and start loving.