A Generous Critique of "A Generous Orthodoxy"

Now that we have our podcast up & running, I'm in the process of uploading many of the past sermons from 2.22. One of the first "retro" messages we're making available is Jeff's book review of "A Generous Orthodoxy", by Brian McLaren. You can stream the audio from our mp3 player in the sidebar, or download the file (33 MB) below. This message was given back in 2006 at our Church Emergentcy conference.





Download this sermon (right click and save)

Also, Jeff has made available the printed form of this message. Here's a snippet:

So what’s the big deal about McLaren?

McLaren though it’s unfair to call him the sole spokesperson for the emerging church (or even who all in the emergent church would want to identify with), by writing ‘a Generous Orthodoxy’ has documented a personal confession or “’manifesto’ of the emerging church conversation. In other words, he’s a patriarch or founding father that’s actually articulated postmodern theology/thinking on paper. And I assume his influence isn’t going away.

Download the entire review here.

Though the book is several years old now, there are still a few other reviews available online:

Al Mohler

Tim Challies

John Frame

Above All Earthly Powers

The audio is now available from the recent Desiring God Conference on The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World. You will be hearing more from Pastor Jeff in the near future, as he was able to attend this event.

Click here for all the audio, or click on the individual messages below.

David Wells The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World

Justin Taylor, John Piper, Tim Keller, Mark Driscoll A Conversation with the Pastors

Voddie Baucham The Supremacy of Christ and Truth in a Postmodern World

Tim Keller The Supremacy of Christ and the Gospel in a Postmodern World

Mark Driscoll The Supremacy of Christ and the Church in a Postmodern World

Justin Taylor, Voddie Baucham, John Piper, D. A. Carson, David Wells Speaker Panel

D. A. Carson The Supremacy of Christ and Love in a Postmodern World

John Piper The Supremacy of Christ and Joy in a Postmodern World Read or Listen

An Emerging Church Primer

By Justin Taylor

Some of you may be called to be experts on the emerging church. We need experts. But I'm not that expert. And perhaps it's good for you that I'm not. In conservative evangelical circles, we can be tempted to listen to experts so that we can hear the person's conclusions: "Just tell me what to think—don't bother me with how you got there." We want the Cliff Notes on the emerging church. We want to read the cast of characters—"this guy's a wolf, that guy's a sheep," and so on.

I'm not going to do that. One of my goals is to help you understand the "emerging church." But my deeper goal would be for us to become the sort of people who know how to think about things like the emerging church. After all, the "emerging church" is not here to stay. It's a movement, and this is its season. It might be replaced in a year or so; it might stretch out for decades. Yet one thing's for sure: Emerging Church Version 2006 is going to look different next year. And the next.

As Christians, we want to train ourselves to have the mind of Christ, so that we can respond like well-trained tennis players to whatever ball flies in our direction—no matter the angle, the spin, or the speed.

Read the entire article here.

Post-Everythings

Usually you post the first few lines of an article to peak the reader's interest, then direct them to the entire article for further reading. However, this time, allow me to post the LAST paragraph of this article by Tim Keller.
In this paragraph, Keller sums up his thoughts on how the reformed evangelical chuch already has some of the right resources to reach what he calls the "post-everything" culture, but also challenges us that we may not be engaging this culture correctly. He concludes his article by saying:

I see people who are desperately trying to reach the post-everythings who in their desperation are trying to throw out essential elements such as the substitutionary atonement, forensic justification, imputed righteousness, the Sovereignty of God, or the inerrancy of Scripture. Many of them are probably over-adapting to the post-everything situation. But while they do not have our theological resources, often we do not have their level of engagement with the people of the emerging society. To correct this, let us confess that we really have failure across all our parties to reach the coming
society, and let us resolve to use the premier resources of Reformed theology. If we can make these changes, then we may really start to see renewal and outreach, and we might actually be a resource for the broader body of Christ in this culture.

Read the entire article here & let us know your thoughts - especially as we're approaching the "Church Emergentcy" conference in June (more details to come).