This article was referenced by Brian McLaren as he wrote about responses to DA Carson’s critique of Emergent Church. I have paid little attention to defintions of what emergent church is. I have read a couple of books by Brian McLaren (Generous Orthodoxy and Adventures in Missing the Point (with Tony Campolo….I miss Tony…. I haven’t been hearing much from him of late since his book about a year ago Speaking My Mind)

TheBolgBlog: D. A. Carson: Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church

I found this : “the transformation of secular space”
intriguing.

I had never heard this before in all my travels that bring me across various takes on Emergent Church (many of the blogs I read speak of it a great deal. I will go to a Nashville lunch this week to meet some folks and perhaps catch up on what’s being discussed “amongst” the Emergent folks. Judging from my affinity for the types of things Brian McLaren is saying (I heard him live in a rather small group presentation back in January of 2004 up in Cincinnati at Old Saint George, and got the chance to sit and talk with Brian with a freind of mine who is the Director there. Ever since then, I have been intent on learning more about “Emergent” (as in “Emerging Church”).

The most interesting aspect of this reviwer’s take on Carson’s Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church: Understanding a Movement and Its Implications is this:

At the outset, I must say that the methodological approach in Becoming Conversant falls short, if the goal is to understand the Emerging Church movement in its entirety. The book does not feature interviews with Emerging Church leaders nor were Emerging Churches observed in any systematic way.

This does seem rather curious that Carson can lay claim to be “being conversant” while omitting these two features. It is basically a retort to a few of the books from Emergent Leaders (one being McLaren’s A Generous Orthodoxy)

This list of authors who have influenced many emergent folks included three that I was not aware were big in the emergent movement:

My research among more than one hundred emerging church leaders indicates that other authors have had significant impact on emerging church thinking, authors such as Jack Caputo, Stanley Hauerwas, Alasdair MacIntyre, Nancey Murphy, Henry Nouwen, Miroslav Volf, Dallas Willard, N.T. Wright, and John Howard Yoder to start.

Not a big surprise, I simply wasn’t aware of it. Also no big surprise since I like a lot of what Mclaren, and Campolo, and Hauerwas write (Hauerwas quotes MacIntyre a lot) and Yoder (from whom I have read The Politics of Jesus

but people still communicate texts, the church simply needs to be more creative in creating indigenous forms of communication for God’s Word

This has been a long time BIG QUESTION for me, especially since my initial study of the communicating the gospel in modern culture that was the ground of most of my Religious Communications degree at United Theological Seminary (Dayton, OH) in 1991, directed by Dennis Benson and Ken Bedell. I have often pondered the impact blogs may have had on how the Bible came to be, had it been a part of the cultural landscape instead of the infancy of the printing press. Many have drawn a parallel between the Web, and again more recently with blogging, and the Printing Press as a cultural revolution. Certainly the immediacy and the interactivity of Blogs would have accelerated what happened with the printed word, and even further back, with the “written word” as Paul took to the road and wrote to the churches.

More in a bit