Emerging, emergent, evangelical 2.0 or new reformed? Where does neofundamentalism fit in this scale?
My two cents: Today’s church in my experience does a very poor job making the Bible relevant to the world around us. Part of that is the shrinking role the church has in it’s own member’s lives and part of that is the rise of secularism in the world at large. Key needs for today’s Christian church: community, honesty and a meaningful infusion of Biblical truth into every area of life. Church should not be an awkward display of sporadic worship; it should be a celebration of a week’s worth of living like Christ. Also, the greater the divide between what we say to believers on Sunday and unbelievers on Monday, the less the world trusts us.
One genuine concern I have about being relevant to post-modernism is the huge cavernous gap in our epistemology. Post-modernism (or your word of choice for this ‘mood’) is essentially deconstructive by nature and really respects no authority whatsoever. How can we be missionaries to a post-modernist (or a post-post-modernist) when everything we have to share with them is based on the authority of Scripture?
I just finished up a really thought-provoking seminar at this years National Leadership Conference in Lansdale in which the instructor discussed presuppositionalism (coming into an argument presupposing that God’s Word is true) versus evidentialism (approaching an argument based solely on what a person’s evidence is). He made the point that arguing evidentially with someone like a post-modernist who doesn’t believe in the authority of the Scriptures will ultimately be fruitful. I’m not completely sold on the idea, although I know several good men (R.C. Sproul, Martin Luther) who hold to this approach. Either way you slice it, our churches needs a huge dollop of relevance, forward thinking and, above all, historical context.
Where does your church rank?
