Emergent/Emerging Criticism

I know a few of us asked recently about the criticisms being placed upon the Emerging conversation as well as looking for some responses. I've been doing a bit of reading myself in the area and so I thought I'd post up some of the beneficial conversations here (I find that much of the talk out there is simply time-wasting, i.e. both sides loose sight of Christ's mission for the world in us and begin simply trying to denounce one another). I began by reading "Our Response to Critics of Emergent" (which is also posted here at the Ooze) and found it to be helpful as a place to start looking at the Emerging conversation even though it was very vague(but necessarily so, seeing at there are many a critic out there and a large group of people with varying ideas was being represented). The response is from the core leaders at Emergent, a group of people in the Emerging conversation who are having a huge impact on the movement in the USA and the rest of the World but don't speak for all who consider themselves emerging (i.e. there would be many who would consider themselves a part of the emerging conversation but not agree with all that is Emergent - hope that makes sense). The A-Team Blog posted up a discussion-worthy response here. The comments in response to it are posted by some of the main Emergent leaders and I think help clear up a lot of where they are at. Another post, that I found read-worthy, was by Andrew Jones. I like his careful response to one of his critics in clarifying up some doctrinal issues. In doing so he lays out a lot of his theological biases. Read what he has to say here.

Hope this helps those of us thinking through God's heart for The Journey.

Matt

One other thing, here are some MP3s aggregated by Andrew Jones in which McLaren & Dobson debate the Emerging Church. Oddly enough, in my mind, both of these guys are on the extreme ends of either side (need there be "sides"?). The majority of people, I imagine, would fall somewhere in between these two.