The Four Streams of the Emerging Church and the Pollution of the Emergent Stream

This is Driscoll talking about the various streams that exist within the Emerging Church - where all four of these come together is a desire to see followers of Christ live as missionaries within their cultural context where they live, work and play:

I felt like that needed to be posted because at the end of Tim Challies' very helpful review of Brian McLaren's new book, Everything Must Change, he summarized the book this way:

It seems increasingly clear that the new kind of Christian McLaren seeks is no kind of Christian at all. The church on the other side of his reinvention is a church devoid of the glorious gospel of Christ’s atoning death. It is a church utterly stripped of its power because it is a church stripped of the gospel message. McLaren’s new gospel is a social gospel, a liberal gospel and, in fact, no gospel at all. This Emerging Church has managed to do something remarkable—it has emerged into something the church has already seen, has already wrestled with, and has already defeated. The Emerging Church has gone suicidal.

I completely agree with Tim's assessment of McLaren - the more he talks and writes, the further he moves away from biblical, historic orthodox Christianity and the angrier and more insistent he becomes in talking about it. Where I struggled with Tim is in the lumping in of all Emerging Churches into McLaren's camp - that would be like saying that all Calvinists ignore evangelism when only a particular thread of hyper-Calvinism actually does so. So keep Driscoll in mind when you read Tim's review of McLaren - the first stream of the Emerging Church (frequently referred to as Emergent - I know, very confusing) is where these massive problems are bubbling to the surface.

Oh, and in terms of the Emergent guys becoming more insistent and clear about their differences with biblical Christianity, here's a post from JT about Doug Pagitt's rather blatant statement of separation from any reasonable explanation of the gospel from a biblical perspective.

Comments

[Pastor Chris]

This is awesome in helping to clarify some of the themes.

Pastor Chris
EvangelismCoach.org

[Matt Adair]

Chris - glad it helped. Ed Stetzer has also written on this and there's an issue of the Criswell Journal from the Southwestern Baptist seminary where Driscoll wrote on this at some length.

[Matt Adair]

My understanding is that Justin took down the post that contains the Pagitt e-mail. Apparently, Justin was unaware that this was private correspondence and rightly removed the link once he found out.

[Ken]

I am glad I ran across your blog and watched video. Great resource to inform others. I don't know how much I concur with Tim Challies review because I find it undermines our call in some respects to avoid having a religious spirit that has seeped into the church like never before. While I don't agree with Mclaren's doctrine and don't even know what he stands for lots of times, I think he is right in looking at these religious institutions in the church. I don't see this religious system in the early church, and a great read on this is Alan Hirsch's "The forgotten ways". let me know what you think or know of it.

for the fame of JESUS!
Ken

[Matt Adair]

Ken - thanks for the comment.

I like Hirsch's book - we're actually using it to help us think through some pretty critical things in relationship to how we lead and shape our church.

That being said, I think Hirsch is a bit hyper-critical about 'the institutional church.' Our context is different than the early church so we shouldn't expect the way we do church to look just like the way church was done 2,000 years ago.