TallSkinnyKiwi: How Your Emerging Church Can Stay in Calvary Chapel, Inc

great article on the inconsistencies the 'ic' is having with the 'ec'

TallSkinnyKiwi: How Your Emerging Church Can Stay in Calvary Chapel, Inc

why i am a friend of emergent

woot woot! great thoughts from leron shults on the emergent us site

emergent-us: Doctrinal Statement: "Such a move would be inappropriate. Various communities throughout church history have often developed new creeds and confessions in order to express the Gospel in their cultural context, but the early modern use of linguistic formulations as 'statements' that allegedly capture the truth about God with certainty for all cultures and contexts is deeply problematic for at least two reasons. First, such an approach presupposes a (Platonic or Cartesian) representationalist view of language, which has been undermined in late modernity by a variety of disciplines across the social and physical sciences (e.g., sociolinguistics and paleo-biology). Why would Emergent want to force the new wine of the Spirit’s powerful transformation of communities into old modernist wineskins? Second, and more importantly from a theological perspective, this fixation with propositions can easily lead to the attempt to use the finite tool of language on an absolute Presence that transcends and embraces all finite reality. Languages are culturally constructed symbol systems that enable humans to communicate by designating one finite reality in distinction from another. The truly infinite God of Christian faith is beyond all our linguistic grasping, as all the great theologians from Irenaeus to Calvin have insisted, and so the struggle to capture God in our finite propositional structures is nothing short of linguistic idolatry."

my arms are tired

i have recently realized that although i am 38 years old i am post-modern. i attribute this to the fact that i have had to work my whole life to "construct" the things my parents should have had in place for me. coming from a family of generational alcoholics i realized that i live 'deconstructed' in my natural state (i.e., no one watching).

it's the modern stuff i have to work at - try harder for and pretend at to make the modern people in my life (my church) happy.

i long for an emergent church in my area so that i can stop holding up the 'xian mask' and playing the nice game. it's exhausting. i used to think it tired everybody else out too - but then i realized they came from 'constructed' lives - deconstruction was too much work for them, they felt safer with the mask, and some even had it permanently etched to their faces.

i hope we find it soon, my arms are getting tired.