Parchment & Pen Blog

Conversation involve questions. The asking of questions is either meant to illicit and answer or to provoke thought that provides an answer, even if the answer is a tentative “I don’t know.” I often tell my students that it is better to have an informed “I don’t know” than a forced make-ready answer. When it [...]

Conversation involve questions. The asking of questions is either meant to illicit and answer or to provoke thought that provides an answer, even if the answer is a tentative “I don’t know.” I often tell my students that it is better to have an informed “I don’t know” than a forced make-ready answer. When it [...]

It has been fun, interesting, discouraging,encouraging and enlightening to see the various reactions to the posts on the Emerging Church. As you would expect, there have been both positive and negative reactions. I thought that I would take the time to post links to some of these here so that you could get a balanced [...]

Download as PDF How does one define the emerging church? This is not an easy question to answer. Are you emerging? Maybe you are and you just don’t know it. It is very difficult to define exactly what it means to emerge. Sometimes its characteristics sound a lot like what Evangelical used to mean. Other times it [...]

I now turn to what is without a doubt the most popular interpretation of John 10:30 other than the traditional Trinitarian understanding, namely, the view that Jesus was asserting only that he and the Father were one in purpose. I should state at the outset that everyone agrees that from a New Testament perspective Jesus [...]

Having finished my series about the Emerging Church, I feel that it is important that I say a few things so that people have a better understanding about my thoughts in general concerning the “conversation” that is going on—the “emerging” conversation. I have a deep sympathy toward the confusion that postmodernism has brought about. The [...]

Are you an emerger? Is the emerging church heretical? What should my attitude be toward this “movement”? These are the questions that started this series of blog posts and I hope by the end of this post you will be better equipped to answer these questions in an informed and responsible way. I will now [...]

OK, I lied. Here is another parenthetical post in my emerging series. The five ways in which one can emerge will be coming soon. However, in my defense, I did not know I was lying at the time I made my original commitment—does that count? Take heart, this post has a LOT more charts and [...]

When Christian leaders talk about how to live a godly life, they eventually turn to the gray areas those things that are right for some but wrong for others. You know the list: drinking, smoking, watching R rated movies, playing cards, dancing, using colorful language, listening to Country-Western music (OK that last one is not [...]

Often when I begin a series on the emerging church people approach me with two questions: 1) “Am I emerging?” 2) “Are you emerging?” In both counts this is really a loaded question. I have a hard time answering it because I don’t know what they are really asking. It takes some further explaining before [...]

Before my next post on what it means to be emerging, I thought it necessary to reiterate some issues about orthodoxy. I mentioned some in the Emergent strand of emergers that many would place outside “orthodoxy” and this seems to have upset some people because I, in their opinion, too closely associated “orthodoxy” with “evangelical” [...]