lifeasmission

Forerunners of The Great Emergence

December 5, 2008 // 8542 Comments »http://lifeasmission.com/blog/2008/12/forerunners-of-the-great-emergence/Forerunners+of+The+Great+Emergence2008-12-05+22%3A04%3A20JR+Rozko

2 quick observations about the day…

1) The Emergent conversation is providing an opportunity to those whom no one else will listen (because they just don’t fit) to be heard and embraced.

2) A unifying characteristic of Emergent type people is their distrust of any version of Christian faith that leaves little or no room for complexity and paradox. They would rather be shunned than forced to conform.

Posted in conference, emergent, emerging

The Great Emergence

// 853No Comments »http://lifeasmission.com/blog/2008/12/the-great-emergence/The+Great+Emergence2008-12-05+15%3A10%3A37JR+Rozko

With Memphis as the hosting city & St. Mary’s cathedral as a hosting venue, The Great Emergence conference is getting started.

Posted in conference, emergent, emerging

The Church Emerging and the Multi-Cultural Future of Western Christianity

October 30, 2008 // 7752 Comments »http://lifeasmission.com/blog/2008/10/the-church-emerging-and-the-multi-cultural-future-of-western-christianity/The+Church+Emerging+and+the+Multi-Cultural+Future+of+Western+Christianity2008-10-31+04%3A55%3A24JR+Rozko

On Saturday night at CCDA I was excited to hear from Soong-Chan Rah, a Korean-American professor at North Park University in Chicago (stinkin everybody at CCDA was from Chicago!) and he did not disappoint.

Soong’s main topic was the changing face of global Christianity. No longer a majority Western religion, Christianity is growing fastest in the global south and more than this, as the United States and other Western countries become increasingly multi-cultural, these non-Western believers are reshaping the future of the church.

What I was perhaps most interested in was Soong’s good critique of Emergent and the Emerging Church. Namely, that this group and its related conversation/movement are failing to reflect the seismic shifts of which he spoke.  This is most notable, says Soong, in that the leaders and the majority of EC supporters are white and Western educated.  Soong is right, there is little doubt about it.  However, I would be quick to respond with 2 caveats.  First, this critique is hardly limited to the EC folk.  The vast majority of the streams of western Christianity are dominated by white, western educated folks.  Second, a huge part of the EC conversation/movement has to do with pushing past forms of Christianity held captive by narrow perspectives and traditions.  What better soil could one imagine for the changes Soong himself describes?

Interestingly, I just noticed today that Ryan Bolger and Eddie Gibbs’ book, “Emerging Churches: Creating Christian Community is Postmodern Cultures,” was just translated into Korean!  Now, it may not be Asian theology, but talk about a great avenue to really get cross-cultural dialogue started.

In another shocking bit of news, Tony Jones, the national coordinator for Emergent Village announced today that he was stepping down from the position as Emergent undergoes some changes precisely to

allow more voices into the conversation and allow the network to grow in a more organic way.

As a final sort of corrective to this critique of the EC, I’d like to point others to Brian McLaren’s article, “Church Emerging,” (pdf) and draw attention to this quote

More importantly, though, I’ve become convinced that the conversation about modernity and postmodernity is the ‘tails’ side of the coin, and the ‘heads’ side is a related but different conversation. So I am hereby giving notice that I’m not interested in arguing with anyone about modernity and postmodernity, but I would very much like to engage in honest conversation about colonialism and postcolonialism.

As he goes on he draws from and quotes the work of Dr. Mabiala Kenzo, a Twa theologian from the Congo – a great example of one of the foremost leaders of the EC discussion seeking to listen and learn from those outside our own context in an effort to provide a corrective.

Soong was great – he made me wat to go back to school and take his courses.  More than this, his critique of the EC was a good one, but could have been levied against a larger population.  This was just the sort of talk that seemed unique to the CCDA confernece and I was glad to have been a part of it.

Posted in CCDA, church, colonialism, conference, culture, emergent, emerging, western culture

Scot McKnight – The Whole Gospel

July 16, 2007 // 398No Comments »http://lifeasmission.com/blog/2007/07/scot-mcknight-the-whole-gospel/Scot+McKnight+-+The+Whole+Gospel2007-07-17+04%3A25%3A58JR+Rozko

I just finished listening to this message/podcast by Scot McKnight (check out his blog here) entitled, “The Whole Gospel.” 

It is definitely worth a listen and I’ll be adding it to my audio page.  Incidentally, if you tend to only read my stuff through a feed reader, I have tried to catalog a number of good audio messages that you might want to check out – there’s stuff from Rob Bell, NT Wright, Mike Frost, John Piper, Brian McLaren and even (gasp!), Mark Driscoll.  The vast differences in the theologies of these presenters are perhaps surprising, and all I can do is say a hearty thanks to my professors from Malone and Fuller who have helped me become the sort of Christian who is able to pull the best from all sorts of different sources and drop the rest – thanks.

There’s one thing in particular that I’d like to humbly disagree with Scot on here.  Toward the beginning of his message he talks about the 20 million or so (says Barna in this book – my review here) believers in the United States who have chosen to live out thir Christian lives as part of house churches.  He seems to say that this is indicative of their individualistic tendencies as they have abandoned the more formal institutional form of church.  Quite the opposite, I’d venture to say that it’s specifically on account of the individualistic gospel proffered by these more formal institutional forms of church that has resulted in millions of believes seeking out smaller, more authentic and committed communities of followers of Jesus.  At least this has been the case for me and many others I know well.  Past that, Scot has a lot of great things to offer.  Enjoy and please offer your thoughts.

Posted in church, community, emergent, evangelical, fuller, individualism, malone, preaching/teaching, theology

Doug Pagitt is a Good Guy

May 19, 2007 // 365No Comments »http://lifeasmission.com/blog/2007/05/doug-pagitt-is-a-good-guy/Doug+Pagitt+is+a+Good+Guy2007-05-19+20%3A13%3A05JR+Rozko

I just finished listening to an interview by Ingrid Schlueter of Crosstalk and Slice of Laodicea with Doug Pagitt.  Look for the title, “Emerging Church Confusion,” on this page if you’re interested in listening.

I thought about going into detail about all the misconceptions, misunderstandings, straw men, exaggerations, false dichotomies, etc., that marked Ingrid’s assumptions and discussion with another pastor following the interview, but I just don’t want to waste my time.

Instead I just want to say sorry to Doug and others like him.  You are doing a ton of good for the body of Christ. Jesus is glorified in your life and ministry.  So much of what you stand for highlights the humility, compassion, and love that ought to mark us as followers of Christ.  Try not to let the negative sentiments of a few get you down or distract you from the course God is plotting for you.  There are plenty of us who are thrilled to be associated with what you’re trying to do.  Thanks.

Posted in Jesus, emergent, love

Strikes, Balls, and Dialectical Tension

April 24, 2007 // 355No Comments »http://lifeasmission.com/blog/2007/04/stikes-balls-and-dialectical-tension/Strikes%2C+Balls%2C+and+Dialectical+Tension2007-04-24+21%3A40%3A45JR+Rozko

It’s baseball season. I am from Northeast Ohio, so I am an Indians fan at heart, but to be quite honest I don’t follow baseball all that much. However, Tony Jones offered a good post with regard to a paper he delivered at Wheaton College, in which he likened Christian orthodoxy to an umpire calling a baseball game. His simple point is that while there is something of a strike zone which is meant to guide umpires as they make calls, really, each pitch, for all intents and purposes, becomes a strike or a ball when the umpire calls it as such. This has been the role of the people of God down through the ages – living in such a way so as to illustrate how God wants the game of life to be called.

Like Tony, I see problems with foundationalism as an epistemological system (sorry for the big words). Basically, it means that there has to be some universally agreed upon truth claim upon which all others can be built. Instead, I think we do the best we can with what we got, and for the Christian, we finally (and firstly for that matter) place our faith in God as a relational being as opposed to some propositional claim on truth.

So, there exists this dialectical tension between believers, denominations, Scripture, history & tradition, culture & context, and so on. The real matter, then, is not an emphasis on what constitutes a strike and what constitutes a ball (doctrine), important as that is as a guide, but rather an emphasis on what it means to be the people of God (formation), so we are better able “call the game.”

Posted in bible, community, emergent