pat loughery

I want to point you to an excellent link: Bob @ Vanguard Church summarizes Scot McKnight’s take on the emerging church in a one-pager. I wish I’d have done this myself, but I didn’t, so I’ll point you at Bob’s excellent summary of Scot’s excellent critique.

Bob’s thing is here.

The second paragraph is:

After about seven months of deep engagement with the EC, Scot recently offered a four-part explanation of what he understands of the movement. Below is a summary of what was said in those posts. I strongly recommend you follow the links and read the posts in full.

A specific portion that caught my attention – somehow I missed Scot’s post on the EC’s focus on praxis (practice), which I think is a central point to the whole gig. I’m stealing from Bob’s summary below:

The Emerging Movement is a summons or an invitation for the Church to live like followers of Jesus in everything they say, do, and think. The Emerging Movement seeks to model that in its emphasis on relationships as the core of the work of God in the world today. One of the reasons so many are frustrated with the Emerging Movement’s definition is found here: it is a movement concerned with praxis and not simply theology. If the older fashion was to define others by their theology, the Emerging Movement wants to be defined by its behavior. This is a dramatic challenge to the Church.

(emphasis Pat’s)

That point should be emphasized. So I did ;-). It’s fascinating in the blogosphere to see so many debates and dialogs and personal attacks on a person’s theology, but I have yet to see one on a person’s praxis. For example, I see a TON of attack on Brian McLaren’s view of orthodoxy, but I’ve never seen an attack on his church’s practices of the faith. Perhaps that’s a good thing that people aren’t flaming on others’ praxis; perhaps it’s an illustration of Scot’s point above. I have my gut-feels on that one.

In any case, go check out Bob’s summary of Scot’s series.