pat loughery

5 responses to “★ Five weblogs you should read to understand the emerging church”

1. 

   Mike Bishop

   May 4, 2005

   Pat,

   I'm interested…what was the example given?

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2. 

   dave paisley

   May 4, 2005

   Good choices, but I would add Adam Cleaveland and Karen Ward and Doug Pagitt.

   And yeah, what was the example?

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3. 

   Pat

   May 4, 2005

   There were a few things I left out of the notes today ;-). A followup chat with Rob Lewin inspired me to post this entry. That's about all I want to say in this forum.

   As to the example given – I'm not sure what or who it was. It was given as (depending on your interpretation) either a danger of syncretism in pomo theo, or an example of emerging church blogware.

   I thought that it was the latter; others in our crowd thought it was the former. I may have my hair-trigger filters at the ready.

   It was a strange choice; no address given but the blog description was of one person's journey to Jesus trying to integrate various spiritualities including Wicca. I read it as somebody who had left Wiccaism (is that the word?) and was following Christ and trying to figure out this whole spirituality thing in light of jesus.

   But in any case, I've never run into an "emerging church includes wiccaism" blog, and it certainly doesn't represent me or my beliefs.

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4. 

   some girl named juli

   May 7, 2005

   just fyi:
   your friends were right: i used the blog of choice because it illustrates a danger, i think, particularly because a typical reader has no way these days of determining who is close to the 'center' of the emergent dialogue and who is on the 'fringe'… because blogs by their very nature make everything that's written equally authoritative.

   however, the main reason that i used it was because emergentvillage had linked to this guy as one of their posts of the day/week/month. anyway, i was really surprised that they would link to a site that represented some of the stuff that it did. i chose not to include the name of the blog deliberately.

   so, i totally understand your feeling that i didn't represent the gamut of emergent discussion. that's only because my discussion of emergent stuff could only be peripheral to the entire message i was asked to prepare. in general, i found quite a bit of wonderful conversation, but probably just as much troublesome dialogue too. it's not too hard for me to distinguish between who's doing what well and who's going a bit nuts; again, my concern though is that so much talk has been created by this dialogue that with no center, it becomes increasingly difficult for the movement to actually be 'centered' (with regard to good theology and basically everything i did mention at the VCOC Conf.) and increasingly easy for the movement to become so fluid that it may become problematic.

   btw, the blogger wasn't an ex-wicca type or anything like that. he was rather, as best interpreted by me, interested in exploring other religions to see what they might have to offer his experience of the Christian faith.

   anyway, hope that clarifies my intentions and reasoning behind the use of the example.

   let me say again that i found lots of wonderful, humble and creative ideas and discussions taking place online as well. in no way did i mean for that example to typify emergent for folks listening to my talk.

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5. 

   Pat

   May 7, 2005

   Hi Julia – thanks so much for stopping by here. I'm looking forward to listening again to your talk since I picked it up on CD. You did a great job of presenting your content!

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