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Notes on Church

Emergent Malaysia

Emergent

Cityside Baptist

Solomon's Porch

The Simple Way

The Vine

Church of the Apostles

Common Ground

Please don’t stereotype the emerging church (Dan Kimball)

Emergent Village Goals 2007 (Brian McLaren)

Confession of Emerging Guy (Brian Ross)

The Emerging Church: A Pig in Lipstick? (Dean Tregenza)  updated link 9 March 2009

What is the Emerging Church? Protest (Scott McKnight)

Unraveling Emergent (Doug Pagiit)

Understanding the Emerging Church (Ed Stetzer)

An Emerging Church Primer (Justin Taylor)

The Emerging Church, Part OneJuly 8, 2005, PBS Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

The Emerging Church, Part Two July 15, 2005, PBS Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

The Emergent Mystique (Andy Crouch)

Absolutely Not! Exposing the postmodern errors of the emerging church (Phil Johnson)

Postmodernism and the Emerging Church Movement (David Kowalski)

The Emerging Church

"A Generous Orthodoxy" -- Is it Orthodox? (Albert Mohler)

A New Kind of Postmodernist (Douglas Groothuis)

Emerging Confusion(Charles Colson)

More Than a Fad: Understanding the Emerging Church (Walter Henegar)

The Jesus Creed

Quest

Five Streams of the Emerging Church (Scott McKnight)

The Emergence of Emergent (Christianity Today)

The Long View: The Virtue of Unoriginality (Mark Galli)

Has the Emergent Church Emerged? (Rob Moll)

Nomo Pomo: a Postmodern Rant (Kevin Miller)

Pomo Ponderings (Kevin Miller)

Is Pomo Nomo? (Chris Seay)

Leaders call 'Emerging Church Movement' a threat to Gospel (David Roach Baptist Press )

Emerging Church (excellent resources page by Church on the Threshold)

Bill Hybels on Preaching

5 Kinds of Christians ( Leadership Journal, Fall 2007)

The Future Lies in the Past (Chris Armstrong, Christianity Today, February 2008)

Faith Practices (Princeton Seminary)

McLaren Emerging (Scot McKnight, Christianity Today September 2008)

The Ironic Faith of Emergents (Scot McKnight, Christianity Today September 2008)
 

The Emergence of Emergent (Christianity Today)

The Emergent movement has stirred passions as a new way of doing church or yet another attempt to wipe the slate clean and start new. But the movement isn't really a movement, not yet, say its supporters. It's still a conversation, one that's taking place in books, articles, and weblogs. Christianity Today and its sister publications participated in the conversation with book reviews and articles. Whether you're a newcomer to the discussion or looking to dive deep, there's plenty of conversation fodder here.


Everything Hasn't Changed
An apocalyptic Brian McLaren strives to reframe Jesus and discipleship.
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Rethinking Church in an Emergent Salon
Rising from the Ashes asks emergent leaders about the impact of alternative worship on the mainline church.
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Technology and the Gospel
Phyllis Tickle, Brian McLaren, and others weigh in on worship and evangelism in a plugged-in age.
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Five Streams of the Emerging Church
Key elements of the most controversial and misunderstood movement in the church today.
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Emerging Confusion
Jesus is the truth whether we experience him or not.
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Emergent Evangelism
The place of absolute truths in a postmodern world—two views.
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The Emergent Mystique
The 'emerging church' movement has generated a lot of excitement but only a handful of congregations. Is it the wave of the future or a passing fancy?
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Theologian Stan Grenz Dies
Leading advocate of emergent movement mourned.
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Christianity Today Reviews A New Kind of Christian and the Sequel

The Virtue of Unoriginality
The old kind of Christian is the best hope for church renewal.
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The Postmodern Moment
Are Christians prepared for ministry after modernism's failure?
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A Story Darwin Might Love
Brian McLaren's evolutionary interpretation of the faith promises more than it delivers, but what it delivers is good enough.
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A Newer Kind of Christian
Brian McLaren's sequel to A New Kind of Christian touches other tenets of faith.
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Books & Culture and the Book that Started It All

Faithfully Dangerous
Christians in postmodern times
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Post-Evangelicalism
Last in a series of responses to Brian McLaren's book, A New Kind of Christian.
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Reformed or Deformed?
Questions for postmodern Christians
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Let's Get Personal
Yes, the church needs to get past modernity's impersonal techniques. But adding the prefix post doesn't solve anything
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Leadership's Emergent Wrestling

My Emergent Guilt
How did I get here, dancing off-beat, and out of touch?
Has the Emergent Church Emerged?
When newspapers pick up on a religion story, there's a good chance it's old hat to insiders. So now that the Denver Post and the Press-Enterprise of inland Southern California have written stories on emergent churches, are they really still emerging?
Nomo Pomo—a Postmodern Rant
Why we can and should talk about something else.
Pomo Ponderings
10 Questions about Postmodern Ministry
Is Pomo Nomo?
A postmodern pastor reaches out to the Mod Squad.
How to Evangelize Today
Reaching people who think negatively about Christianity.
Brian McLaren Says

Passionate, but Not for Mel's Movie
Why The Passion 'outreach' was all hype, and I didn't fall for it.
Bless This House?
Why efforts to renew the church are often misguided.
It's All About Who, Jesus?
If worship is for God, why are so many songs about us?
Emerging Values
The next generation is redefining spiritual formation, community, and mission.

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from smallgroup.com

Facing Shame Issues in a Small Group

Why some group members don't want to open up, and how to help

Mark Bonham posted 11/17/2008

How people's shame is responded to by a group and its leaders will determine how deep they or others will feel safe to go. What would make it safe to share issues of shame in the first place? Group leaders set the tone. When leadersare in touch with their own brokenness and can talk openly about it because they have received help and healing, they create space for others to do the same. If people are not bringing up realstruggles of the heart, could it bethat they do not feel safe because it has not been modeled in the group? We have been talking about shame over who I feel I am. But there is also legitimate shame over what I know I've done. It is not the goal of the group to talk people out of either kind of shame. Both expose what I am allowing to define me. In both cases, I have lost awareness of who I really am in Christ. Fortunately, once I have identified what is going on, I have the opportunity to go to the Cross and confess what I have believed. It is a beautiful thing when a group can go there together with one of their members, pour out their heart in confession, and, in exchange, have the righteousness of Christ poured out on them.

read more

This is especially relevent in Asia where we live in a culture of shame.

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from Christianity Today Missional Misgivings

Small, indigenous churches are getting lots of attention, but where's the fruit?

Dan Kimball posted 11/26/2008 11:51AM

I hope I am wrong. For the past few years, I have been observing, listening, and asking questions about the missional movement. I have a suspicion that the missional model has not yet proven itself beyond the level of theory. Again, I hope I am wrong. We all agree with the theory of being a community of God that defines and organizes itself around the purpose of being an agent of God's mission in the world. But the missional conversation often goes a step further by dismissing the "attractional" model of church as ineffective. Some say that creating better programs, preaching, and worship services so people "come to us" isn't going to cut it anymore. But here's my dilemma—I see no evidence to verify this claim.

read more

Dan Kimball raised some hard questions about the missional churches

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Conversations on Emergent, Missional and Monastics

 

Missional, Monastic, Emerging: A Traveler's Guide in the August 2008 issue of Next-Wave Ezine.

It’s helpful to characterize the four conversations as Sine did, with four streams denoted by emerging, missional, monastic and mosaic (Find Andrew Perrimann’s summary HERE). It’s even more interesting to observe the convergence of these energies, all birthed by the Holy Spirit. Each brings their own renewal dynamic to the broader church, and I’m convinced that the convergence zone is where some of the most creative experiments will occur. Convergence is evident in places like Life on the Vine, where monastic is meeting missional and emergent, or in kingdom initiatives like ALLELON, where a similar dynamic is at work...

After these observations I was left running a structural taxonomy in my head, so I created it in PaintShop. What this requires is some kind of consensus on essential characteristics of each stream...


 


 


 


 

Worthwhile to read the whole article.

 

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New Wave: Ten Years of the Emerging Churches

 

As Next-Wave turns ten years old with its January 2009 issue, it provides a good opportunity to look back over the short history of the emerging church in North America. Next-Wave, after all, is the publication most closely associated with the emerging church conversation and many of the movement’s most prominent leaders have contributed articles to the online journal over the years.

Ten Years Out: A Retrospective on the Emerging Church in North America


Brian McLaren – Named by Time Magazine as one of The 25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America and often considered the father of the emerging church, Brian’s books A New Kind of Christian and Generous Orthodoxy are considered by many to be two of the most important books published within the conversation.

Jordon Cooper – Canada’s Jordon Cooper is an influential emerging church blogger. Jordoncooper.com, which Jordon began in 2001, was an important early clearinghouse of emerging church information.


Tony Jones – Tony, the author of The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier, until very recently was National Coordinator of Emergent Village and has been engaged in emerging church conversation since the famous Dallas Pappasito’s Cantina meeting in August of 1998.

Scot McKnight – Scot, an author who serves as the Karl A. Olsson Professor in Religious Studies at North Park University in Chicago, is a prolific blogger who has been participating in the emerging church conversation for many years. Scot also serves on the Creative Team of The Origins Project.

Andrew Jones – Andrew is a New Zealander pastor and missionary who currently lives in the United Kingdom and serves as Director of the Boaz Project. An A-list ec blogger, Andrew was an early leader in Emergent Village and spent several years ministering in the United States.

Dan Kimball – Dan, who serves Vintage Faith Church in Santa Cruz, California as their Pastor of Mission and Teaching, wrote The Emerging Church. Dan’s also one of the founders of The Origins Project.

A Retrospective on the Emerging Church in North America Pt. 1


A Retrospective on the Emerging Church in North America Pt. 2

Alan Hirsch on Defining Missional

 
Evangelism

Defining Missional
The word is everywhere, but where did it come from and what does it really mean?
Alan Hirsch posted 12/12/2008


It has become increasingly difficult to open a ministry book or attend a church conference and not be accosted by the word missional. A quick search on Google uncovers the presence of "missional communities," "missional leaders," "missional worship," even "missional seating," and "missional coffee." Today, everyone wants to be missional. Can you think of a single pastor who is proudly anti-missional?

But as church leaders continue to pile onto the missional bandwagon, the true meaning of the word may be getting buried under a pile of assumptions. Is it simply updated nomenclature for being purpose-driven or seeker-sensitive? Is missional a new, more mature strain of the emerging church movement?
It's time to pause and consider the origin and meaning of the word that is reframing our understanding of ministry and the church. This tree diagrams the roots of the word missional and how its reach has expanded into different areas of ministry. Alan Hirsch, a self-described "missional activist," also provides a concise definition of the ubiquitous term. 

read more

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From Entertainment to Disciplemaking

 
 

"Showtime!" No More
Could our church shift from performance to mission?
Walt Kallestad posted 11/26/2008 11:49AM

Entertainment evangelism: The concept came together for me while standing in a line at a Dallas Cineplex waiting to see the Batman premiere. The only way to capture people's attention is entertainment, I thought. If I want people to listen to my message, I've got to present it in a way that grabs their attention long enough for me to communicate the gospel.

It was an epiphany, a breakthrough understanding for me. So our church strategy revolved around the gravitational force of entertainment for evangelism. We hired the best musicians we could afford; we used marketing principles and programming specialists—for the gospel's sake. Attendance skyrocketed. More people meant more staff, more programs, more facilities, more land, and of course the need for more money. We became a program-driven church attracting consumers looking for the latest and greatest religious presentations.


For us, worship was a show, and we played to a packed house. We grew by thousands, bought more land, and positioned ourselves to reach even more people. Not that any of this is wrong in and of itself—people coming to faith in Christ isn't bad. I told myself it was good—I told others it was good. But now I was beginning to wonder if I'd led my church down a wrong path.
The show was killing me.


Attracting consumers was consuming me—not in the way vision consumes a leader. It was the opposite of that—I was losing sight of the vision. Our church was a great organization. But something was missing. We weren't accomplishing our mission; we weren't creating transformed, empowered disciples...

In the old days, we protected people's anonymity; today we thrust them into community, doing life together. We used to invite them to attend church; now we invite them to be the church. I used to ask, "What can we do to get more people to attend our church?" Now I ask, "How can I best equip and empower the people to go be the church in the marketplace where God has called them to serve?"

read more

Personal sharing from a megachurch pastor. The mission of the church is disciplemaking, not entertainment.

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from Christianity Today

Missional Misgivings
Small, indigenous churches are getting lots of attention, but where's the fruit?
Dan Kimball posted 11/26/2008 11:51AM

I hope I am wrong. For the past few years, I have been observing, listening, and asking questions about the missional movement. I have a suspicion that the missional model has not yet proven itself beyond the level of theory. Again, I hope I am wrong.

We all agree with the theory of being a community of God that defines and organizes itself around the purpose of being an agent of God's mission in the world. But the missional conversation often goes a step further by dismissing the "attractional" model of church as ineffective. Some say that creating better programs, preaching, and worship services so people "come to us" isn't going to cut it anymore. But here's my dilemma—I see no evidence to verify this claim.


read more

Dan Kimball raised some hard questions about the missional churches

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The Other Side of Church Growth: A Theology of Extinction (CT March 2009)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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