"Gone is the Pulpit."

I ran across that quote on an Emerging Church website yesterday, doing some more research after finishing Brian McLaren's A New Kind of Christian. I hope to do some more research into this movement, and then write a chapel on the topic for next semester. It's one of those things that if my aunt hadn't recommended the book, I would never have known about, even though it is one of those really important things that I probably should know about. Perhaps the Emerging Church people are right when they say that the church now is stuck fighting the battles of the Reformation and Liberal Christianity.

Whatever the case may be, I will do some more research, and write as coherently as I can on the topic. It is an interesting movement, and one that I don't think we can really ignore, as it seems to appeal mostly to younger generations of Christians (much like myself). It is a tech-savvy movement, one that is up with contemporary culture, and so the past, traditional way of doing things is being critiqued. And thus they see the pulpit as disappearing--no more lectures or sermons, rather we will have conversations and discussions. This view, among others, is problematic, but I will not get into it yet.

All I will say for now is that there is much that we can learn, and there is much (more) that needs to be critiqued. D.A. Carson has a book out on the topic, which I hope to get some time (no library in the vicinity seems to have it, sadly), but this article is a summary of it, and he makes some good points (some of which I had thought of myself while reading McLaren, others which I may not have come up with myself).