Not to mention critiques of critiques. From a few days ago, we have Ken Archer’s Review of D.A. Carson’s Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church, a good thorough piece. Then there’s What Should We Think of the Emerging Church? Part One, an article in Christian Post by Al Mohler, which is more DA Carson confronts McLaren.
Taken together, they’re not quite the spewing and eschewing of DA Carson, but close enough. A little too light on the eschewing for my taste, I guess.
I noticed today that Frank Viola’s critique of EC has (unfortunately) been republished at emergingchurch.info. This is the same piece we discussed here in April, and still, I’m not that comfortable with his critique.
The odd thing is that yesterday, due to the way the dates have been occasionally off-kilter on Planet Emergent lately, I spotted this blog post by Karen Ward which led me to this post by Si Johnston from last month, which considers the differences between the emerging church “moversation” (“convement?”) and the house church movement of the late 70’s and 80’s. Timing is everything sometimes.
thanks for the round up Richard.
sorry for calling you richard, the danger of news aggregators :-)
It’s also interesting to note that many of the same concerns that are driving the emerging church at present, were the exact same concerns that were the driving force behind the Shepherding Movement, which is where the majority of house/cell church ecclesiology came from in the 70’s and 80’s.
Rob, isn’t that a loaded comment?!
I might have said that some of EC is driven by some of the same concerns as the house church movement… care to elucidate, or do we have to wait for the full PC series?
Oops, sorry, wasn’t trying to leave loaded comments!
The concerns were basically: clergy/laity distinctions that were preventing gifted laypeople from exercising or growing in their gifts, an anti-educational (ie. seminary) mindset of “you don’t need a degree to be a minister”, a commitment to relational authority instead of heirarchical authority, and a strong conviction that true biblical community could only be lived out in small groups or house churches of like-minded people in mutual submission to each other, where shared meals and honesty about life’s struggles were shared weekly in the context of community.
Interesting to see how they ended up so badly. I don’t think that ec groups are necessarily in danger of following the errors of the Shepherding Movement (although I’ve seen a few groups that have already crossed that line), but I wonder where our blindspots are when we are attempting to deal with almost exactly the same concerns that were the impetus behind much of the Shepherding Movement?