In case you still have not been persuaded to read the article, here’s more…
One youth worker expressed his appreciation for The Emerging Church by explaining to me, “What appealed to me about that book is that I grew up in a conservative church where people were closed-minded, hypocritical and very judgmental, and I think that people such as Dan Kimball and Brian McClaren are trying to say this is a new kind of church, a new way of thinking about church.”
Here’s the problem: If part of the church is the emerging church, who or what are the rest of us—those of us sinners who are occasionally close-minded, hypocritical and judgmental? Submergent? Divergent? Convergent? Detergent? What this view of the church doesn’t seem to comprehend is that we’re all one body, and a hipper-than-Thou identity betrays the basic theological fact that we are all one (Eph. 4:1). Those closed-minded, hypocritical, judgmental people in the “old kind of church” happen to be in the “new” church whether we like them or not.
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