praxis

Dan Kimball, the evangelical ‘expert’ on the emerging church in America, wrote that the emergent church is concerned with ‘radical holiness’. Is it?

I often find in much emergent literature a sort of contempt for the holiness traditions of historic evangelicalism (especially of the Anglo-Saxon variety). No doubt many within the emergent church movement view such traditional conceptions of holiness as on par with that of the Pharisees’, illustrated in their taking offense at Jesus’ table-fellowship with sinners and publicans. But is this fair or accurate?

At Our Place, our gatherings culminate each week in what we call "Responding Time". It is a time of personal and corporate worship, where people are encouraged to listen to God’s voice and Respond to Him.

Responding Time usually lasts 20 minutes, and during that time there are a variety of ways that people can choose to respond. We have a prayer station near the front that has a large wooden cross surrounded by rugs, pillows, communion elements, Bibles, annointing oil… It is a place for people to come and pray, and to be prayed for.

In the Reformed tradition, thanks to Karl Barth, we are often referring to the three-fold witness of the Word.  That is, 1) the Word that took flesh in Jesus Christ, 2) that is witnessed to in Scripture, and 3) that is proclaimed in Word and Deed by the church.  I’m particularly interested in your thoughts on the third (if there is a similar thread, please let me know).

Specifically, what form will preaching take in the emergent church?  In our tradition, the sermon has always taken center stage.  As a pastor who preaches every Sunday I’m starting to become a little dissatisfied with the practice.  I stress "a little."  I look forward to doing it, but the results are anti-climatic.

Is it dreamy and outrageous to consider going through bible school, when the people and culture around you are suggesting a secular university education instead?

Ok, so the first day of the 2006 Emergent Conversation at Yale University is over and it was a very cool and exciting thing to be part of. The Divinity School at Yale is a very unique setup, with a beautiful chapel at its center. It is located outside the campus, not "downtown" as they call the main campus, and Dan (a graduate student we spoke with) told us that he feels like that’s a great metaphor for how Christianity is generally treated at Yale.

It would appear that what is at stake here, and has been for almost 1900 years, is "the way".  When you look at the Gospels and Christ’s message to repent for the Kingdom of God is at hand it seems like an odd way to "evangelize".  Where’s the four spiritual laws and the Roman’s Road?  But what if we were to realize that this Kingdom that he speaks of is not something future, or just while He was here, but something he…

John, with respect to persecution, I’m afraid that another social reality is that we, as Christians have been the biggest persecutors of modern times, with state sponsored persecution in most European countries well into the 19th century. Through the hypocrisy of our recent parents in the faith, we have been robbed of any power in dealing with this problem. Any attempt on the part of westerners to prevent persecution smacks of the cultural if not actual imperialism that most of these countries have suffered. In fact, some of the persecution is exactly because Christianity is seen as an imperialist Western faith. To a large extent, we are the direct cause of much of the persecution of Christians in the world.

Thousands of people fill the streets of the city. The mood is festive, the scene chaotic. Music and laughter mingle with animated conversation and the cries of children to create the cacophony that is contemporary society.

Suddenly, Jesus enters the city, riding a donkey. And no one cares.

There are no shouts of “Hosanna,” no waving of palm branches, no hopes that the Messiah has come. No one cares because the setting is not Jerusalem in the first century, but Brussels, in the 1888 masterpiece, “Christ’s Entry Into Brussels in 1889” by Anglo-Belgian artist James Ensor.