Emerging Generations
Commentary, Emergent/Postmodernism June 11th, 2008I’ve been at the Envision 08 conference the last couple of days. I’ve had lots of great and challenging conversations which I’m still processing. There’s a good overview of each session here.
While there I met some amazing college students. We had some great conversations–needless to say, they all left with Irresistible Revolution in hand. None of them knew what the emerging church was, so, at their request, I clumsily tried to define it.
The neat thing was, though none of them knew the term “emerging,” our conversations revealed that the concepts spoke of most often in emerging circles were in no way foreign to them, in fact, they were givens in their conception and understanding of God.
Many people think of emerging as a movement to do something different and shift thinking in the church. This tends to be less and less the point the younger the person is.
I didn’t have to introduce my new friends to the concepts of emerging. I didn’t have to show them how to be emerging. At core, they culturally are already emerging.
June 11th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
hey matt. right on.
i love it when people dont’ know the lingo - don’t know who brian or tony or peter are - don’t know its “a dialogue” - but are somehow *there* regardless. makes it all feel somehow more legit to me when that happens.
i met my wife when she was living in the middle east. she was in the dark about this thing. didn’t have the definitions. didn’t know the authors. and quite honestly, doesn’t really care to. but she was already there non-the-less… just because of the fact that she had lived outside of the country, and thus outside of the christain bubble, and had a different context to speak from.
she could look back at america from swimming in waters outside of our fishbowl and see our consumerism in a whole new light - like some of the dollar figures attached to some of these building programs. and was more than ready to meet in a coffee shop and talk about her experiences with people who didn’t necessarily have seminary degrees. and also more than ready to speak arabic with the iraqi family who was abandoned by our government after being given amnesty and showing up next door to some of our people.
its a big wonderful mess of a conversation.