AG, I appreciate your frustrations and up to a point sympathize, but I’m not sure your rudeness is really going to help the situation.

I would guess that most people who have entered the emerging church conversation have done so because they believe that the way of faith that they have inherited from modern evangelicalism lacks wholeness and integrity. That may be a debatable point, but my impression is that by and large the emerging church is genuinely struggling to do faith better - at a very practical level, as a concrete expression of following Jesus.

Inevitably that struggle is going to entail first disentangling ourselves from the modern evangelical worldview and then slowly piecing together a belief system that is both true to scripture and which fits our minds. We are admittedly doing this in a very chaotic fashion - but I believe it has to be done.

I suppose you should ask some of these bloggers whether these online conversations actually help them to work through the real issues of life and ministry. Remember, you only see one small part of their lives exhibited in these blogs that you so deride.

The main point I’d make, though, is that much of the discussion above is about how we understand Scripture. How do we tell the story that makes sense of Jesus? I strongly believe that the tradition that has reduced mission to personal evangelism has not understood the biblical narrative well - and until we assimilate a better understanding of the biblical narrative, we will not do mission well. That may seem presumptuous - and it is one of the premises of the emerging church that needs to be tested. It is good that people find Christ - I happily praise God for your testimony. But for too many people at the moment the really urgent question is: What are they being saved into?