Fred Schmidt Questions the Emerging Church Movement

Coming off an emerging church conference featuring Brian McLaren and Nadia Bolz-Weber, Fred Schmidt is ambivalent about the ECM.  And he’s got some questions:

If the Emerging Church movement has a contribution to make to Christianity, it is in reconnecting the spiritual and religious dots. It will need to demonstrate that it is not only possible to do God and church, but that it might also be necessary.

But the Emerging Church movement has its own challenge: If, as some have said, emerging Christianity is “evangelical, Protestant, Catholic, post-evangelical, anabaptist, Adventist, liberal, post-liberal, reformed, charismatic, neo-charismatic, post-charismatic, conservative, and post-conservative“—and that’s a quote—then the problem is obvious. How do you belong to a movement that is all of these things and none of them, all at the same time?

I can’t say what that answer will be. But, from where I stand, meeting the challenge lies in the ability of the movement to connect the dots for itself and for others:

1. Can the church explain how doing God and doing church are related?
2. Can it create a community that is genuinely grounded in those priorities?
3. Can it draw effectively on its inheritance? [Read the rest at Patheos: Doing God and Doing Church]