I’ll be participating in the afternoon panel discussion at the Worldview Conference, Another Brick in the Wall by Institute of Christian Studies on Saturday, Sept 27, 2008. We’ll see how I hold up there. We’ll be chatting about a paper by Bob Sweetman. Here is the description of his afternoon paper.
The difficulties faced by all institutions have in today’s society also bedevil the church. The old issues-doctrinal purity, converting unbelievers, or beating back evil secular humanists-don’t have much traction today. Many dismiss the church as too authoritarian, inauthentic, irrelevant and scandal prone. Bob Sweetman suggests that a large part of the problem is that the church is organized to fight yesterday’s battles. He also suggests that the emergent church movement offers some valuable clues for what the church could look like beyond yesterday’s battles and today’s yawns.