The Emerging Emergents
He wants to teach your group that nobody needs God's forgiveness.
It’s fascinating to watch disenfranchised evangelicals come out to play in the secular-tinged realm. The Emergent Village people like Brian McLaren sparked the first wave in the ’90s. Welcome to Emergents: the Next Generation, starring a Baptist minister who goes by the very un-Baptist title of Whiskey-Preacher.
He’s an eclectic mixture of pro-gay “fundy” (his own label) wrapped in a Singing Worship Service, liberally-seasoned with alternative “worship events,” his Web site claims (like liturgical labyrinths?)…
Pastor Phil Shepherd was groomed at Solomon’s Porch, an emerging breed of church (thus the term “Emerging Church”), starring liberal luminaries from the Emergent Village like Doug Pagitt and Tony Jones . How tragic it is the disenfranchised can only find such banal alternatives to their tribal Christian upbringing. Certainly reaching the lost for Christ is not on the agenda!
Liturgical Labyrinths of emotional goop
Listen to Pastor Phil trash the Atonement (shortened version here, excerpted from the Apprentice of Jesus podcast) Phil is the voice on the phone interviewed by an Emergent pastor from nearby Youngstown). He tells us the Bible’s teachings that Jesus died for our sins is a childish and silly thought, much like sticking a “Cosmic Pacifier” in God’s mouth to keep an infant happy. Especially since God is already happy with us, Pastor Phil explains, the Cosmic Pacifier is not only unnecessary, it is insulting to God.
While the two pastors chuckle over the Cosmic Pacifier joke, their audience is expected to believe Jesus made a tragic mistake by giving up his life “as a ransom for many”, as Jesus claimed. Apparently Pastor Phil knows God better than Jesus, because God never needed to forgive us, he claims.
But the crucifixion was not a complete waste, he says, because it will always be a testimony of God’s love for mankind! This obtuse thought is not explained further, for obvious reasons–without the Atonement, the crucifixion was a tragedy of epic proportions! Listen to the attached podcast, and watch these amazing pastors dance around the crucifixion with a lively display of amorphous thought.
One wonders what will emerge from the Emerging Emergents?
2 thoughts on “The Emerging Emergents”
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This is so dumb. Why would I go to an emergent (or fundy) church and listen to Whiskey-Preacher when the world does what their doing, only so much better? Why not screw church altogether? I don’t understand what the draw is if Christ didn’t come to die for our sins?
A very astute question, Andie. Thus, the effort to create “worship events” will possibly suffice to draw people. I don’t know.