Response to Emmet B’s response to me ( I guess)

Well I certainly didn’t mean to have the tension that I observed on Wednesday turned into a straw man.  Straw men make the people on the other end of the discussion feel great, but the problem is they don’t address the issue because they don’t deal with anything substantial.  I never said that we as the church should abandon or shrink away from reaching out to those communities and relationships that we knew before coming to faith in Christ.  My question for the emergent church movement and for anyone is simply, how do we do that responsibly?  How do we successfully reach across those relational and communal lines?  How do we protect and disciple the new believer thereby equipping them to bring the gospel to their community?  It must go beyond simply saying, “I’ve seen a lot of situations just like yours work out, go get em tiger.”  It’s not about “fear of failure”, or a struggle between prudence and faith, as if the two are diametrically opposed.  It’s about taking the time to reflect on what it really means and what it really looks like to fulfill any particular call that God has placed on an individual or a community.

1/7-1/9 Reflections.

The first day of class honestly had me considering dropping. I was somewhat confused about some of the names that were being dropped left and right. I thought to myself, “should I already know these people”, and by the apparently confident gazes of all of my classmates I thought, “yes, I should and I don’t, sucks for me.” So the first day I found it incredibly difficult to take notes. I didn’t know how to structure any notes, and maybe monday was not a day meant for taking notes. After all , how many notes can you take on the syllabus, because that’s pretty much all we covered.

Okay so now that I’m done regarding monday, Wednesday was a delight. I thought the discussion about the emergent church was extremely challenging for one reason in particular. The tension that I kept running into was what about those people for whom it is impossible to simply stay in the same environment they were in prior to coming to faith in Christ? What about the drug addict for whom the corner would be a failed temptation every time, or the alcoholic for whom the pub would serve as a constant barrier to a genuine relationship with Christ. I honestly believe that people do come to faith in Christ through relational lines, I myself found Jesus this way. Yet I would like to explore more about how the emergent church deals with this obvious problem.