Jesus Creed

No, this is not about American politics: the Emergent movement, in many of its local shapes and variations, often (though not uniform) will have a sense that the Church is a body and that it only functions best when it is thoroughly democratic, and that term means “governed by the people.” In more theological terms,…

This generation of Christians, for a vareity of reasons, including an awareness of the social and physical sciences, contends that the gospel addresses the “whole” of the human condition — heart, soul, mind, body, community, society, and environment. One of the features of Doug Pagitt’s Reimagining Spiritual Formation is an attention to holism. Again, holism…

One of the most important elements of the Emergent movement, an element that DA Carson unfortunately didn’t address, is that many of these folks think the gospel has to be worked out at a local level and in a particular place. DA Carson’s book focuses on the epistemology of Brian McLaren but, in so doing,…

One of the biggest surprises I had in reading Doug Pagitt’s Reimagining Spiritual Formation was the emphasis at Solomon’s Porch on Scripture and on Spirit, even if for some there may be some blurry edges for those who come at things looking for specific doctrines to be expressed. (I’m not sure why I was surprised,…

One of the most interesting and provocative and challenging features of Solomon’s Porch, at least to me, is the interest in and working out of “embodiment” of the gospel in that local gathering of Christians. So, I’m grateful to Doug Pagitt for setting out this theme so clearly in his book, Reimagining Spiritual Formation. What…

No Evangelical or post-Evangelical group believes more in the Church than does the Emergent movement, though there will be plenty who would like to resist this claim. And I do not mean at all to suggest that anyone else doesn’t believe in the Church. All I mean by this is that Solomon’s Porch puts its…

I’d like to suggest in this blog one of the underlying themes to Solomon’s Porch, and perhaps to the Emergent movement ecclesiology in many of its shapes and forms, and this first theme (there’ll be about ten) can be seen in these three terms: Reaction to perceived weaknesses and problems and shortcomings. I read Doug…

I’m up here in Seattle, and Doug Pagitt’s heart-felt record of his church’s, Solomon’s Porch, work, called Reimagining Spiritual Formation, which for many Emergent folk is “old hat,” was a wondrous read and gave me many things to think about. But I begin with this one and it is a Question: What should 50somethings say…

For a long while I have been teaching and preaching that all the Church really has to offer to anyone (and everyone) is Jesus Christ. That is all it has to offer. Nothing else, nothing less. Once the Church separates itself from Jesus, the Church becomes a clanging cymbal or a noisy gong of a…

With all my speaking in various places of late, I’ve had a hard time getting to the next topic I’d like to blog, namely, the “ecclesiology of the Emergent movement.” It would be foolhardy to think anything like an extensive coverage could be blogged, so what I want to do is to take a fair…

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