Jesus Creed
Kris and I, with Laura and Mark, went to Willow’s Easter service last night. Splendid intergenerational music and remindings of the resurrection. |inline
Kris and I, with Laura and Mark, went to Willow’s Easter service last night. Splendid intergenerational music and remindings of the resurrection. |inline
I’m on Spring Break this week, so I’ve had more time for reading blogs.
Blog post of the year for me: Dawn Husnick’s story of the ER. |inline
Emergent’s national coordinator is Tony Jones, and Emergent Village has a line-up of significant leaders, and then there are others who exercise leading voices like Brian McLaren and TSK and Steve Taylor and Jordon Cooper and I’ll not try to be even representative because there are so many. But there is one no one talks about: |inline
Some of you may be interested in the Critical Concerns Course that Zondervan sponsored for pastors who wanted to come a day early to learn about the emerging church movement. First off, I’m grateful to Zondervan, John Raymond, and to Tony Jones for inviting me. It has been a blast so far. Personal notes at bottom. |inline
There has been a flurry of blogging about (mostly) mega-churches that have opted not to have a Sunday service in light of their attention to Christmas Eve services. Most of the blogging has been negative, some of it sharply so. Iâm thinking here of Ben Witheringtonâs blog â and Ben is a friend and a fellow NT professor. He has been forthrightly against the mega-church decisions, and he has drawn a number of comments along the same line. Steve McCoyâs blog also has had a similar set of comments. I set up a poll on my blog to see what is going on â and it suggests that more than mega-churches are doing this. (I remember as a little guy that my Baptist church, which didnât give into much, did not have a Christmas service one Sunday morning, but I could be wrong. Memories are hardly infallible.) |inline
The following is a slightly-adapted set of questions I used for a discussion with two others at Willow Creek Community Church’s TruthQuest event last spring. My responsibility was to take the pacifist side. I took the tack of asking questions, and I include here the outline I used that night. Some of the questions are more penetrating than others, but together they ask (for me) the right questions. This is an outline, not a full discussion. In light of my last post on the Sermon on the Mount, I thought it might be time to put this issue on the table. |inline
My conversation last week with a pastor of a mega-church, with my contention that a caricature was being used and his and others’ justifiable question, “Well, then, what is it?” leads me to a few posts this week that will attempt to sketch the movement in three categories: praxis, protest, and postmodernity. I am speaking for no one else and not for the Emergent Village or Emergent US or Emergent UK. This is my take on the movement. |inline
Pastors have a nearly impossible task. Especially pastors of mega-churches. Because they are asked to do so many things, speak at so many other functions, and render judgment on nearly everything that comes along, pastors can develop one of two orientations: humility about the task or what I call “P-Bics”: Pastors of Big Churches Syndrome. |inline
Pastors have a nearly impossible task. Especially pastors of mega-churches. Because they are asked to do so many things, speak at so many other functions, and render judgment on nearly everything that comes along, pastors can develop one of two orientations: humility about the task or what I call “P-Bics”: Pastors of Big Churches Syndrome. |inline
This little series on prayer comes out of Praying with the Church: Developing a Personal Prayer Life, which I am hard at work on my off days now. The section I wrote yesterday, on hope, will be changed, as may this section today, on honesty. But here it is in its present shape. (more…)
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