This may be of absolute no interest and incredibly irrelevant to many people. But for those who do find it of interest, this is the the video of the panel on the "emerging church" that Scot sent me an email about and I quoted him from that email in my last post. The whole panel discussion was videotaped and can be viewed here. The panel discussion itself didn't cover anything new and was the same rehashing of what is or isn't emerging or emergent - but I felt the ending and what Scot said is worth watching and almost made me cry.
The panel addresses the usual "what is the emerging church?" questions - and the best thing about it was how Scot in particular kept coming back to pointing out that the emerging church unfortunately was defined primarily by its critics. And that the critics generally paid attention to what and who they disagreed with rather than looking at the spectrum of all those in the emerging church and what they may even agree with. So the attention was always on the negative of what they didn't like and they painted a slanted view of the whole thing which then defined the whole. Scot even called the critics "uncharitable", not that they criticized it, as criticism is a good thing. But when they were personally talked to and corrected about the inaccurate stereotypes - yet many still went ahead and continued to stereotype everyone and everything together is when it became uncharitable. That's the mess of it all and why I have stopped using the term for the most part.
The best moment to me by far was Scot's concluding remarks and they are worth watching if you speed up to 81:13 on the video. After the whole discussion he brings it back to what is most important and the most important "e" word we should be discussing and focusing on. I'll quote a little of his concluding words - it practically made me cry watching it:
"My heart is with 20-somethings.....I preach the gospel and I see between 10 and 20 kids (college-age) become Christians and give their life to Christ every year.... I preach the gospel and I preach orthodoxy and I believe it is important to defend orthodoxy....I believe that we have to speak the gospel to 20-somethings with an urgency today that we have never seen in American history."
If you watch that clip, you can see Scot's passion rise here. He serves with 20-somethings every day and he knows the reality of what is happening. So all this talk of emergent and emerging is really trivial and trite when compared to the mission we are on - which isn't about what is or isn't E-merging or E-mergent but what we need to focus on is E-vangelism. This is people's lives he is passionate about and those who do not know Jesus yet. Those for whom we must get beyond all the trivial things and move ahead on mission to. While we debate and talk, people are experiencing life without knowing Jesus. We must "urgently" remember those who don't know Jesus and as so much is at stake.
That's really what birthed this new network too. We wanted to get back to mission and evangelism. Scot is part of our network's leadership team which is coming along in prepping for a formal launch in a few weeks. Jeanne Stevens has become part of the Creative Team for the network which is a wonderful thing. I have gotten to know Jeanne and Jarrett Stevens over the past several years and they are a very mission-minded couple. So it is great Jeanne is part of the leadership team. May we do what Scot says and:
I believe that we have to speak the gospel to 20-somethings with an urgency today that we have never seen in American history."
Amen.
