The danger of key emerging leader's teaching
Emerging, emergent - perhaps you have heard these terms or labels. Although they used to refer to different groups they are now often used synonymously. An emerging church or leader would be one which believes the church needs to 'emerge' out of the beliefs and practices that have characterized it over the past decades and transform itself to reach the 'postmodern' (click
HERE to read a description of what this is) world we live in.
It is not easy to categorize or group emerging leaders or churches as there is a lot of variety and they don't even want to be called a 'movement' but rather simply a 'conversation'. However, there are certainly some common characteristics among the most influential of this conversation.
They believe a radical overhaul of church mission and purpose, evangelism, worship, leadership and community is essential. This involves, for the most part, a throwing out of much of what most would recognize church as being. For sure we believe there are valid criticisms of how we all do church and we must not only accept critique from others but should be tenacious to ask ourselves the hard questions about what we do and why we do it.
However, we firmly believe that much of the emerging/emergent thinking is a repackaging of the liberalism which plagued churches 50-100 years ago. There seems to be a desire and willingness to throw out all that makes us evangelical in trying to emerge from the church of the past.
Click
HERE for a site with lots of Biblical critiques of the emergent church if you want more info than this.
The reason for this article is to show you an example of how distorted, twisted, unbiblical and heretical some of the key emerging leaders have gotten and to warn you of the dangers of this conversation. Yes ask questions, yes critique and challenge, yes seek to always grow and learn but no, we cannot throw out the Bible nor the core commands of Scripture for the church in this quest.
Of all the emerging authors, speakers, thinkers and bloggers the most widely known and influential would be
Brian McLaren. Here is an honest and trustworthy critique of one of his latest books. The author of this review is Kevin DeYoung who along with Ted Kluck wrote a very fair and insightful book examining the emerging movement and one I would recommend as a starting point for those wanting to read more deeply about this approach to church (or better said, about this desire to deconstruct the church leaving little useful for the advancement of the gospel). Their book is called, 'Why we're not emergent: by two guys who should be".
Click HERE to read Kevin DeYoung's review of Brian McLaren's book, 'A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions that are Transforming the Faith'. I think you will be shocked to see how twisted and unbiblical his thinking is and yet you can find his books in most any Christian bookstore, many church libraries and he is widely embraced as a conference speaker and 'expert' on church ... very sad. This demonstrates the need in our day-and-age for Christians to be more discerning as not all who claim to be Christians adhere to a Biblical definition of what that is.
I can't end this without recommending two more great books which point out the dangers of the emerging movement which also show Biblically what we should believe about church.
- The first is D.A. Carson's book called, 'Becoming conversant with the emerging church'
- The second is John MacArthur's called, 'The truth war'
Norm