Welcome Emergent Village to Patheos

Patheos has partnered with Emergent Village to create a new portal for innovative and experimental thoughts around church, mission, and faith.  It’s called the Emergent Village Voice, and it’s a community blog that launched just this week.  It will be created by dozens of contributors.

In his initial post, Andrew Jones draws a line between the ECM and café churches in Asia:

“Why are people so upset at the emerging church?”, Tim Wong asked me last night over a mango juice at a Balinese party.

We didn’t have time to plummet the jelloed depths of EC criticism, although I do enjoy the subject. But we did discuss cafe churches and how they have evolved from cheesy church-basement services in the 80′s [GUILTY AS CHARGED] to state-of-the-art, Über-Funky couch-clad temples of Java and Bible that they have now become. Even here in Asia. Particularly in Asia, where cafe churches are sometimes accompanied by coffee roasteries, coffee bean farming, and associated businesses.

The emerging church in Asia has been an inspiration to me for a long time. I have been greatly sharpened by the holistic Christian ashrams in India, the alternative Christian house-parties in Japan, the micro-business based youth churches in China, and the social-enterprise based churches coming out of Indonesia’s punk scene that I met a decade ago. And of course the cafe churches which are found all over Asia.

Read the rest at: Growing Cafe Churches Singapore Style | Emergent Village.