Andrew Jones Recommends...

...the top 5 books on the emerging church.

Scot McKnight on His Experience @ Westminster Theological Seminary

"I think it is only honest to say that a few faculty, who have written against emerging/emergent, protested the event by not attending the sessions — at least so I was told. Sadly, I think — why? Because they are the ones with whom I would have most especially enjoyed conversation, and the ones who perhaps could have learned from the discussions."

- all his reflections

On Multi-Site Churches

Leadership Network asked me to work with them to put together a piece designed to help church leaders who are considering going multi-site, which has just been published

Some have commented that the emerging church phenomenon is partly a response to the megachurch movement. As a consequence, doubtless the megachurch to multi-site church shift that's currently happening in over 1000 churches in North America will not be viewed favorably by some in the emerging church conversation.

I see the expansion of the multi-site church as spiritually agnostic. It intrinsically isn't a good thing or a bad thing. The value of the growth of the multi-site movement toggles on the mission, health, and motivation of the individual churches doing the expansion. It's easy for me to see how an individual pastor's decision to move his church to multi-site might primarily be an expression of his desire to establish his own dominion on earth. On the other hand, the move to multi-site could be a more efficient means for a healthy, dynamic, life-changing church to extend its kingdom-impacting reach.

I lump local church setup, megachurch, and multi-site church organizations all under the same category: they are means of increasing efficiency. I see the local church, the megachurch, and multi-site churches as potential contexts for spiritual stuff. The building of buildings, the setting up of organizational connections between disparate locations, the hiring of staff, etc. - none of those things are the spiritual stuff. They are part of the context within which spiritual events - expressions of love and worship - may or may not occur. (I'm not suggesting that the hammering of a nail can't be a similar expression). The value of the local church, the megachurch, and the multi-site church is contingent on the maturity, passion, giftedness, and motivation of those who set them up. Mature leaders realize that local church, megachurch, and multi-site church organizations are tools for kingdom impact.

And some of these multi-site churches are doing great things. One such church I interviewed sent $1 million dollars last year to Waveland, MS after Katrina hit. When I was interviewing them, Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon were at war. This same church was preparing relief teams to go to both Lebanon and Israel.

The kingdom work of a house church with 14 members is not to be depreciated. But neither is the kingdom work of a far larger organization.

I've expanded on some of these thoughts in the Next-Wave article When the Church is its Own Worst Enemy.

Scot McKnight on the Emerging Church @ Westminster Theological Seminary

Scot has released the transcript of his talk on the emerging church that he gave Westminster Theological Seminary at their recent Emerging Church Forum. It's now posted on Mark Traphegan's site.

The audio of Scot's talk can be found here (though the recording cuts off the end of Scot's lecture).

Audio of Scot McKnight on the Emerging Church @ Westminster Theological Seminary

courtesy of Gideon Teo here.

ht: Andrew Jones

as a public service: firefox 2 and opening bookmarks in new tabs

The old extensions didn't work in the new firefox 2 but I finally found this. No more right keying on bookmarks to open them in new tabs!

Once downloaded, you have to open the file from within firefox (file-open) and then it will install.

Great Resources for New Testament Study

See this wonderful page by Roy Ciampa, who is Associate Professor of New Testament at Gordon-Conwell Seminary.

Among the many helpful listings are:

• Annotated Old Testament Bibliography (including a section on commentaries) @ Denver Seminary
  
  
• Annotated New Testament Bibliography (also with a commentary section) @ Denver Seminary
  
  
• The 26th Edition of the Nestle-Aland Greek Text with parsing and lexical notes when you place the cursor over a word. Wonderful.
  
  
• Resources for Textual Criticism
  
  
• and many, many other helpful links
  

ht: justin taylor

scot mcknight @ westminster

Andrew Jones has pulled in all the blogosphere comment.

charlie wear suggests it's time to become post-emerging

from the publisher of Next-Wave, which Andrew Jones says is "possibly the greatest emerging church online publication ever."

"Of course, it is now time to relabel this thing that God is inspiring, this thing that God is doing through those he has called to minister to their younger non-baby boomer peers. It is no longer "emerging" because it has "emerged." We can see it now, for sure. Why in some ways, it has become copyrighted, trademarked and branded! Critics are making a living from criticizing it. Publishers are making money by publishing about it. "

we've commented before on the post-emerging church here and, briefly, here.

The History of the Middle East...

...in 90 seconds.

A great find by Michael Kruse.

just entertainment: heroes

Beth and I have been totally enjoying Heroes. It's about several individuals who come to realize that they have different kind of superpowers. It's definitely comic bookesque but not unintelligent. And it's also a bit like Lost in that it's teasing out the larger story - not sure exactly what's going on.

The character we enjoy this most is a Japanese guy named Hiro who learns that he can bend time and space. He's completely hilarious and this is the fulfillment of a fantasy for him because he's a total comic book geek. And he doesn't yet speak a word of English (though last week we learned that he will).

There's also a je ne sais quoi ab the show that I can't quite put my finger on. If I read above, for example, on someone's blog, I'm not at all sure I would rush and watch an episode. I guess what I'm saying is that the only way to know for sure if you'll like it is to give it a try. If you want to catch up on the show, you can download episodes here (not sure if it's all of them or not).

In other TV, we also love Battlestar Galactica (simply awesome and nothing like the 70's series). I'm a big Sorkin fan but the bloom is coming off the rose for me for Studio 60. Loved the first episode but it's been downhill from there.

Walking with Grief

Steve Taylor provides us an excerpt of some writing by George McDonald in the book Celtic Prayer:

"Do not hurry
As you walk with grief
It does not help the journey

Walk slowly
Pausing often
Do not hurry
As you walk with grief

Be gentle with the other
Who walks with grief
If it is you
Be gentle with yourself
Swiftly forgive
Walk slowly
Pausing often

Take time, be gentle
as you walk with grief"

The Works of Jonathan Edwards Online

Yale is making the works of Jonathan Edwards available online and searchable. They write:

"The Works of Jonathan Edwards Online is the critical digital source for Jonathan Edwards texts on the web. Drawing heavily on the fifty-plus years of editorial work done by the Works of Jonathan Edwards project at Yale University, the Works of Jonathan Edwards Online will digitally publish manuscripts and edited versions of all of the 100,000 pages that Jonathan Edwards produced in his lifetime. Editorially tagged and fully searchable by chronology, theme, and scripture, as well as full text, the Works of Jonathan Edwards Online offers an expertly guided research experience in the papers of Jonathan Edwards. Please register today to use the Works of Jonathan Edwards Online."

Reformation 21 lets us know the current status of the project:

"The Works of Jonathan Edwards Online presently contains all of the Miscellanies (Edwards' private theological notebooks) and some two hundred sermons, many of which have never been published."

- The Works of Jonathan Edwards Online

The Amish say, "Thank you."

"Every Monday for more than 30 years, the Die Botschaft newspaper has gone into the mailboxes of Amish subscribers nationwide.

Filled with letters from correspondents across the country, the weekly publication prints information from the Amish, for the Amish.

This week's (Oct. 16) issue, though, is an exception. The front page of Die Botschaft reaches out to the English--non-Amish--world.

"Thank You," reads the simple headline at the top of the page. "

...

"It has never happened before. Never. This is very unusual," said the paper's editor, Elam Lapp, when asked when Die Botschaft last printed information aimed at the non-Amish community."

- Religious News Service link on BeliefNet

alan hirsch has...

...started blogging!

alan and mike frost wrote The Shaping of Things to Come.

books on the atonement

readers, what books do you recommend on the atonement? I'm looking for books that treat and honor penal substitution while incorporating learnings from the other theories?

thanks.

keeping up with comments

Back in the early days of emerging church conversation, a lot of the talk was in email discussion groups, like yahoogroups. Nowadays, it seems that most of it occurs in blogs.

When dj chuang and I had lunch some days ago, I was complaining to him about blogger's lack of comment notification and let him know I was considering moving to Wordpress. There's a great Wordpress hack (if it's not this one, it's like it) that lets commentors opt into automatic emails whenever a comment is added to a blogpost on which they've commented. Scot McKnight has this installed at Jesus Creed.

dj helpfully turned me on to cocomment, and I spent some time this morning playing with it. It's pretty cool but not everything that I'd like. It let's the person who signs up be easily notified whenever someone comments on posts on which they've commented, but it doesn't let blog owners in blogger offer this to readers. Each reader would have to sign up for cocomment themselves to take advantage of it.

I registered and while I can't offer this service to my readers, at least I can keep up with all the discussion on blogposts on which I've commented without having to revisit a blog to check and see if there's been any additional conversation. I can either go to a special cocomment page or - even better - my page has an rss feed and I can track all my comments using bloglines (my aggregator of choice).

I'd actually rather stick with blogger, so I'm hoping that blogger beta will add this functionality, or that I'll find a blogger hack that will let me offer this as a service to my readers.

If anyone has any suggestions as to the easiest way for me to enable my readers to opt into getting email notifications of future comments to blogposts on which they comment, I'd love to hear them.

i'm very late but...

...I just saw that carla et al have sort of shut down emergent no.

While Carla and I didn't necessarily always agree, what I do like about her is that I think she sincerely yearns for the truth.

slice of laodicea shuts down comments

Ingrid writes:

"As of today, Slice has become a non-interactive news and commentary blog. We deeply appreciate those Slice readers who have added intelligent and helpful comments to the body of Christ in the past, but due to the abuse of the comment section and its becoming a source of divisiveness and further confusion in the church, we have decided to permanently remove the sound and fury and get back to our main focus. We at Slice view what we do as a ministry, not a hobby. Our desire is to put forth information, sermons, articles and devotionals that will strengthen the body of Christ in our Laodicean times and warn about the encroaching error as well. We are not here to please people or to give a platform for the opinons of others. We're accountable before God for our own stands on critical issues and we are now limiting the site to those views. Anyone desiring to discuss a post or an issue privately with a Slice contributor can do so by email. If you want a public forum for your views, you can start up your own blog very easily. Thank you, Slice readers, for caring about truth in an hour when some groups are even debating its existence. Forward in Christ!"

- link

ht: charlie wear, who also reports he's had to get more involved in Next-Wave comments.

evangelicals for darfur

" We come to you from across the evangelical spectrum. We beseech you to act on your faith and do the right thing by leading the world to stop the genocide affecting "the least of these" in Darfur. To date, more than 400,000 people have been killed. 2.5 million displaced. Countless more have been raped, maimed, and tortured: Men, women, and children created in God's image, innocents all. Ending the atrocities will require your personal leadership in supporting the deployment of a strong U.N. peacekeeping force and multilateral economic sanctions. While we often disagree on matters of politics, we are united in the belief that your intervention can make the critical difference in Darfur. We join together now to urge you, in the words of Proverbs 24:11-12, to "rescue those being led away to death." We pledge to do everything we can to rally support in both Congress and the U.N. to support your leadership in ending the horror in Darfur. "

- we ran this ad today, as did many others.

- evangelicals for darfur