Emerging/Emergent Church

By all accounts, Rob Bell, the founding pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church in Grandville, Michigan, is a very "hip" guy. As Andy Crouch, a writer for Christianity Today remarked, "You could say he puts the 'hip' in discipleship."[1] Bell's recent book, Velvet Elvis, is a hip attempt to help...

In a recent comment Steve Bush takes issue with the accuracy of some of my review of John Franke's The Character of Theology , which appears in Reformation21 . I take up - I hope in the spirit of generous orthodoxy - his three points in turn. Knowledge and context . It is said that the only...

"Deciding whether postconservatism is a 'movement' or simply a 'mood' is rather unimportant for our purposes. What is important - and what is by and large no longer questioned - is that a significant shift is taking place in some segments of evangelicalism" (1). In their book, Reclaiming the Center...

The Emergent (or Emerging) Church is hardly a dozen years old and already it is has reached a level of considerable importance. Indeed, it is argued that the term is out of date; it has already emerged! Its hydra-like nature makes analysis difficult--an inevitable consequence of a postmodern child...

The most fascinating thing about this book is that it is deadly boring. It took me two months to read its 197 pages, mainly because I kept putting it aside since, for sheer excitement, it couldn't compete with Bavinck's Prolegomena to Dogmatics or Kuyper's Principles of Sacred Theology . Yet if...

The theologian is often caught between a rock and a hard place, between the truth he holds dear and the society he loves and longs to see transformed by the gospel. This tension, though never easy, is right and good. It displays both a passionate commitment to the truth and a genuine concern for...