emergING not EmernGENT

Revelant Magazine had a good article on the Emergent movement, not to be confused with the emerging church. Emergent is the more formal organization that includes guys like Doug Pagitt and Brian McLaren. Just for the record, our community may be considered part of the emerging church, but we have nothing to do with Emergent. Personally, I'm not a big fan of the Emergent gang. I'm particularly concerned with much of their theological sloppiness and careless disregard for the importance of doctrine. We've been studying some church history in our gathering and tonight discussed some of the background around the Council of Nicea. They considered theological terminology & the finer points of doctrine to be very important, thankfully or else we might all be Arians instead of Christians. I get the impression from some of their recent writings that Pagitt & McLaren wouldn't necessarily be too upset about that as long as we could all just get along.

Anyway, there was a great quote from Len Sweet in the article, and I think it holds true for the emerging church as well as the Emergent gang. The article mentioned that Sweet was concerned that the overemphasis on how we do church has taken the focus off Christ. Then Sweet says:

"And that [the overemphasis on how to do church] brings me to a related issue: confusion between relevancy and recency. Some of the most relevant things are not the most recent, but the most ancient. Without a historical sense, or the spiritual discipline of histoical context, there's confusion between keeping relevant and just keeping up. we have to be in touch with the culture but in tune with the Spirit."

I've been thinking much lately about this kind of stuff; about being the church, about being community, about being connected to the larger Body of Christ, about theology and history, about worship and liturgy.