What Can Adventists Learn from the Emerging Church?
I’ve been following the series by AToday blogger Herb Douglass on the “Emerging/Emergent Church” with interest, and would like to offer some of my reflections on the subject. Like Herb, I’ve seen enough fads come and go that I have become a little cynical. And he’s right–a lot of the fads that are becoming popular within Adventism today passed their prime years ago in the churches where they originated. It just goes to show that we need to restrain our desire to grasp excitedly at what seems new to us, and take time to examine how these things have played out over time. “By their fruits you shall know them,” Jesus said. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I think any discussion of “the emerging church” has to start with a consideration of the world around us. I wrote about this in my last column. The world is changing rapidly. We find ourselves in the situation of the earliest Christians as they stepped out into the frightening pluralism of the Mediterranean world of the first century. L
