A Conversation on the Emerging Church

I told Mr. Spence that I would post clip. I am not sure what he are anyone else will think of this. As a fan of Ravi Zacharias I was interested to hear what he thought.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv6uxCch7oc&feature=PlayList&p=82B45440C71F4529&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=9

My reservations about some aspects of the emerging church do not mean that I think the rest of Christianity has got everything in order. I think my own denomination has big questions to ask of itself. Although I think my solutions to our problems may be different from many others.

Now that I have written the above paragraph I better share a little of what I mean.

I think that Methodist Church cannot afford to be complacent. The age profile of many of our churches points to the fact that we are not connecting with certain age-groups. Many of our churches are going to struggle to maintain themselves in twenty years time. The emergent types are at least connecting with a demographic that we seem, at times, to be unable to relate to.

That been said I think that the Methodist Church is putting too much hope in structures rather than content. I realise that this is partly because we are a broad church. If we are not in agreement about what the message is then we can't emphasise the message as being the solution. As a conservative evangelical I am longing to see people emphasise such things as expositional preaching. We have had Connections (I can see some good that has come from that), we are encouraged to do Fresh Expressions of Church (we do a regular service that could be described as a Fresh Expression), we are now thinking about restructuring the circuits (jury is out on this one). They are all structural rather than content solutions for our church.

I also think that itinerancy is a crippling non-necessity. But if i start on this topic I will start rambling!