Still can’t find a good primer on the Emerging Church?

 

So you are still unfamiliar with the emerging church? Don’t want to read a lot of long books to learn about it? Smart enough to realize that a few minutes of nasty one-sided bashing can’t possibly give a fair portrayal of what something… anything is?

You are not alone. There are very few people I have met who have much of any idea what the “emerging church/conversation/movement/non-movement/whatever you want to call it” is.

This all round unfamiliarity with the emerging church, and the fact that the movement gets accused of many bad things, leads me to look for resources that can help to lend understanding.

Below I have just that Seriously. If you were only ever going to give up a couple of hours of your life to learn about the emerging church, what I have linked to below is what you must to give that time to.

This is a recording from AAR (American Association of Religion), a panel of three talking about all things emerging.

Here are the reasons you should put in the time to download it and listen to it on your mp3 player:

1. It is easy to understand, because it was mostly intended for those who were unfamiliar with the subject in the first place.
2. The first long portion of it is each person telling the story of how they each got involved in the creation, or ended up in the emerging conversation. Seriously, good stuff. One person is from the more liberal Christian world, one from moderate, and the other from conservative.
3. There is a decent history of how it came to be, and where they think it is going (keep in mind this panel was in late 2007).
4. There is a very good sampling of the varying opinions and discussions that have been going on in the emerging conversation, plus some good disagreement amongst the speakers about a few things.
5. This will definitely give you a feel for the movement, at least in part.
6. This will give you a good head start amongst most people in understanding the kinds of things that go through my own head.
7. The hearts of the people in it are different and beautiful. And they don’t always agree.

 

AAR Panel (to download – right click and click “save link as”  –  For Mac users – “Ctrl”+click)

Part 1

http://cdn4.libsyn.com/emergent/ep-2007-12-15-AARPanel-1.mp3

Part 2

http://cdn4.libsyn.com/emergent/ep-2007-12-29-AARPanel-2.mp3

 

Both of these  podcasts are property of Emergent Village. http://www.emergentvillage.com/

Advertisement