There has been a great amount of talk(type) in blogdom recently about theology, what does emergent really stand for, methodology vs message, desire to begin the hard, fun and exciting work of theology. Check out Mike, Rachelle, Maggi, Justin and others I forgot to mention. So what does all of this mean? Why are we beginning to look more at Emergent and what we *actually* think. Well, I’m glad you asked, because I have the answer.
Ha. Fooled ya. Well, I have a suggestion, and I’m actually stealing Tony Jones’ (via TallSkinnyKiwi)words here, but I don’t think he’d mind:
I think the emerging church is entering a time of great watershed. On the one side of the continental divide are churches and persons who are willing to rethink methodology — on the other are churches and persons who are actually ready to rethink theology.
So what does all this mean? Rachelle wants more theology. Mike is going “anti-movement” and others are saying “yes, yes, yes!” It sounds (and I could be wrong) like people are tired of hearing “why” the emerging church is important at the conventions, but start to want to hear about what’s actually happening, who is doing what, how theology plays into this, etc. Like Tony said, there are some who don’t just want to be playing around with methodologies, orders of worship, scented vs. unscented votives, tapers or tealights (I vote for unscented!).
So what has happened? While deconsruction will always be important, it seems like we’ve begun the work of construction. We are finally under construction. We’ve been swinging the axes, hatchets and sledgehammers; we swung hard, and it was good and we’ve done our share of demolishing. And now we’re all standing around, getting irritated and wondering “so what’s next?” Like I said, this does not mean that deconstruction is done with, but I think there is a general feeling that we need to be doing our share of constructing now…
So let’s do it. Let’s join in and do the theology. Let’s move beyond methodology. Let’s dig deep.