Phil R. Johnson, host of the Spurgeon Archives, has posted Emergent-See Po-Motivators, a series of humorous but cutting inspirational posters for the postmodern emergent crowd, or as he puts it, the Emerging Chaos.
Phil used to blog at Pyromaniac but found the pressure to produce so great that he closed the site in January 2006 and started a team blog, Pyromaniacs.
Tags: Art, Emergent, Emerging Church, Postmodernity
Presbymergent.org is an online community for those involved in the Presbyterian (USA) church and in the Emergent conversation. The site was started at the end of January, in anticipation of the Mainline Emergent event at Columbia Theological Seminary on Theology, Practice and Hope.
The Presbymergent blogging community is growing under the editorial leadership of Karen Sloan, Jim Bonewald (thechurchgeek), Jan Edmiston (A Church for Starving Artists), Neal Locke (www.mrlocke.net), Seth Thomas, Adam Walker Cleaveland (pomomusings.com), and Brian Wallace (Wally World).
Just this last week Neal Locke has written up his reflections on Postmodernism and Perl computer language, engaging with a talk by of Larry Wall, the author of Perl. The transcript of the talk (1999) is online at www.perl.com. Neal has abridged the talk at his Wiki site and made connections with the emerging church scene.
It’s encouraging to see a group of mainline emergent bloggers keeping the conversation going, not only online, but also live in what they’re calling Presbymergent Parties. The same group’s hosting a Presbymergent Facebook Group as well.
Tags: Blogging, Emergent, Emerging Church, Presbyterian
Today’s Emergent/C newsletter gives a link to Tony Jones’ post at the Christianity Today Blog on May 23, exploring the suggestion/accusation that the Emergent Conversation (based in the USA) is the New Christian Left, aligned with Jim Wallis and Sojourners. Mark Driscoll has recently drawn a line in the sand between ‘emerging evangelicals’ and ‘emergent liberals’. Ed Stetzer has divided the emerging church into relevants, reconstructionists and revisionists.
Tony points out that there is a wide variety of theological and political viewpoints in the Emergent movement. That, it appears, is the problem. The people most likely to stick around in such a conversation are people who enjoy diversity and thrive when they sit alongside people who see thing differently. The Emergent movement, by its commitment to exploring a range of contextual interpretations of Christian faith, becomes unattractive and repulsive to those who have narrow definitions of what following Christ is all about. It’s this pattern that leads to labels such as ‘ecumenical’ being used in the derogatory sense.
In reading through Ephesians I’m finding a strong emphasis on unity in Christ. It appears as though the early Church had similar problems about lines in the sand between differing interpretations of faith. Paul says to do what we can to maintain the unity that has been established by Christ. That’s partly why I’ve made a commitment to turning up for conversations with people whose opinions I genuinely find puzzling or disturbing.
Tags: Emergent, Emerging Church, Tony Jones
