This is the Gibbs/Bolger definition of “emerging churches” as reported by Scot McKnight:
Emerging Churches are those:
1. who take the life of Jesus as a model way to live, and
2. who transform the secular realm,
3. as they live highly communal lives.
Because of these three activities, emerging churches
4. welcome those who are outside,
5. share generously,
6. participate,
7. create,
8. lead without control, and
9. function together in spiritual activities.
Boiling it down to one sentence: Emerging Churches are communities who practice the way of Jesus within postmodern cultures.
Not a bad definition, I could sign up for what this is all about.
speaking of Scot… Look down your feeds on the right hand side…
Looks like JesusCreed has morphed into
“hot babe Irina Voronina
It all started when I was about two years old, rea…”
I’m sure that’s not the link you wanted :)
Thanks for the heads-up, Bob. The link was to Scot’s old blogger account – he needs help “flagging” it again, as a new pr0n site has set up there. The RSS feeds in my sidebar were driven by the bdp-rss-aggregator WordPress plugin which I was annoyed with because it won’t delete a single feed — all or nothing. I just disabled it, but maybe I’ll go and see if there’s an updated version. Problem solved for now though.
I still have a problem with postmodernism being such a focus in this thing all the time. I’ve talked about it before so I won’t take up your comment space with all that. Does anybody else feel this way sometimes? Wasn’t there anything to emerge from and toward outside the context of the postmodern cultural shift (so defined by some people who wrote things and got published)??? Seriously, isn’t what we’re doing more than about that? I should hope so or we shouldn’t expect any of it to last very long.
Alan, I think you’re right on this, though I’m not as sensitive to it as you are ;^) As important as postmodernism is in the current times, it’s not the thing. It’ll pass away just as modernism will, and we may as well not get tied to it. I debated snipping this last bit from the quote, but since it was there in the original… I don’t think it follows. I like the stuff with the numbers, but the postmodernism seemed an odd introduction at that stage, since the first part doesn’t mention it.
For my part, snip everything after “Boiling it down…” and I like it.
Yeah, Boiling it down – sounds good. We can do that in or out of any shift. I think people introduce this phenomenon with the pm thing because that’s what’s popularly out there and it’s easy to talk about. It does seem an odd add-on sometimes. Peace to you.