Yesterday I was in Örebro to listen to Doug Pagitt pastor of Solomon’s Porch in Minneapolis Minnesota . He is one of the leaders in the Emerging Church movement in the USA. Doug spoke in the morning session to the students about the Emerging Church or about his Church which is quit unique, it looks like a living room with sofas and tables in a round with the speaker in the center. I wasn’t there for the first meeting so I am not sure what they talked about. In the afternoon meeting he talked about “preaching” from his book; Preaching Re-imagined. He spoke about how preaching should be relational in a dialog and not just a monolog speech, he calls this preaching technique; Progressional Implicatory Dialog. This is about not how the story or the Gospel is applied to our lives but how our lives become a part of the story. It takes a more narrative approach to the understanding the Gospels instead of systematically braking the Bible down to a “how to” book. I guess you will need to buy his book to understand this better.
After the session Doug had to rush off to Oslo but some of us stayed around for a short discussion time which was quite interesting. It seemed that this seminar stirred up a lot of questions which is good. What I heard in this conversation was leaders trying to understand all this but with a modern epistemology. One needs to understand post-modernism and the cultural shift to understand this new kind of Church in a postmodern context. If we continue to think of church in its institutional forms and functions we will continue to miss the point and only become critical of this new approach. Before one criticizes the emerging Church movement one should first study the culture it is trying to reach.
Well now I have a lot to say so I think I will break it down into smaller blog post. I met a blog friend Joachim Elsander at the seminar. Always fun to meet a fellow blogger in person. I told him I like to keep blog posts short and simple and to the point. So there will be more to come later.
