Just visiting Yasmin for a couple of days as it's her husband's birthday. On the way down yesterday (while Zoe was fast asleep) I listened to Brian McLaren's third lecture on Emerging Church, which he presented at Grand Rapids a few weeks ago. He raises a couple of really useful points. Firstly, he responds to the question, "I know what it is against, but what is the emerging church for?" by saying that at the start of most movements, comes rebellion. So think about the reformation; it was first about Catholicism being wrong before it was something constructive. In my thinking about emerging church i find this helpful. Currently, I find myself being quite critical and I've always seen that as something bad, but perhaps that is just a starting point and sooner or later I'll get more constructive.
Secondly, I was interested to hear McLaren describe a key mark of the emerging church as 'integral mission'. To describe what he meant by this, McLaren talks about the Spanish translation of the phrase, which is 'Misión integral'. On hearing this, McLaren argues, a Spaniard would think immediately of 'pan integral', wholemeal bread- bread that hasn't been fiddled with, but is just the way it was made to be.
Thirdly, he speaks about post-colonialism in a really powerful anecdotal way... well worth a listen!
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