No Foolin'

I was doing some snooping around the Internet last night and got learning a little more about some of this emergent church movement. I'll admit, I'm still a newbie diving into this stuff, but I kind of liked what I learned. (If you want to see some of the places I was looking check out here, here, or here) Most of what I gleaned was from watching the video on Tony Jones' blog.

Here are a couple of the key points that I heard. The world is not black and white, but filled with much gray. Consequently our theology should be reflective of those shades of gray. (That sounds quite receptive to Lutheran theology.) I also heard about how as a culture we made a move towards "big" and things like "mega stores". The church followed with large denominations and churches that came to be known as "mega churches." Now there is a cultural movement towards smaller, local stores, etc. Consequently the emergent church is a move in that direction as well. (Not very Lutheran, but something that I like)

The bottom line, at least for me is, who cares about congregations, denominations, rules, structure and all of that other "stuff" that we tend hold up as so important. Sure, there is probably a necessary evil in needing some of that stuff, but we can't let that get in our way. What IS important is Jesus! It's about building a relationship with our Lord and Savior. How do we do that? If we trust in the wisdom of the Bible (and I hope you do) we just might see that we work this out as a community. Wasn't that largely the basis of the Bible? It was written to tell God's story to the community and then the community turned to each other and said, "Now what? How do we live this out?" Have we changed all that much?

I guess it turns out that I'm a Lutheran who is liking what he is hearing coming out the emergent church movement... No Foolin'!