Perceptions from a Pewboy

On Sunday, I will leave for a special continuing education event at the Ring Lake Ranch (near Jackson Hole, Wyoming). The event is entitled “SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING: Music and Spirituality Crossing Over.” The facilitators of the event are Don Saliers (a professor of theology and worship at Candler School of Theology) and his daughter Emily Saliers (who is one half of the popular music duo known as Indigo Girls). The event is described as a unique opportunity to explore the spiritual bridge that postmoderns have built between the music heard in the clubs on Saturday night and the music heard in the churches on Sunday morning.

I will not be taking my computer with me, but I look forward to unpacking the event with you when I return next weekend.

By the way, are any of you fans of the Indigo Girls? I have enjoyed their music for years.

The emergent church is a topic that has…uh…”emerged” frequently in our blog conversations. Many of us, I think, are endeavoring to deepen our understanding of the nature and content of this important ecclesiastical movement. This is no simple task given the fact that the theology of the emergent church resists and even decries convenient analysis and typological pigeonholing.

That said, I recently read what, for me, was a tremendously helpful article concerning the emergent church. The article, entitled “Pubs, Clubs, and Alternative Worship,” is found on the website for the Generous Orthodoxy Think Tank. Written by Kevin Corcoran, a professor at Calvin College, the article is essentially a reflection on the emerging and alternative worship movements in the United Kingdom.

Particularly interesting to me is Corcoran’s assertion that “emerging Christians tend to be theologically pluralistic and quite suspicious of tidy theological boxes” and that “they believe that God is bigger than any theology and that God is first and foremost a story-teller, not a dispenser of theological doctrine and factoids.”

I am also intrigued by Corcoran’s suggestion that “emerging Christians are also allergic to thinking which fixates on who is going to heaven and who is going to hell, or on who’s on the inside and who’s on the outside. They stress the importance of right-living (orthopraxy) over right-believing (orthodoxy).”

If any of you choose to peruse the article, I would be very much interested in hearing your thoughts and reactions. The article can be found here.