Are Presbyterians Emerging?

yeah, um, the pcusa isn't REALLY presby. you should clarify that in your title. "are pcusa people emerging" would be better. you won't find any pca or opc presbys on your side. most of them are too busy standing firm in the faith and in their love for Christ, not for popularity.

I don't get the first comment. How is the pcusa not presbyterian?

Anyway, totally agree Tony. I'm really excited to see how Bruce can lead some positive change within a postmodern culture.

Eh, don't count out all the PCA guys too quickly. I can't speak for all of us, but I'm a happy member at a PCA church and am also extremely sympathetic to the ideas of Emergent Village. In fact, it was Brian McLaren's New Kind of Christian trilogy that restored my faith in Christianity a few years ago. I come from a fundamentalist background and had kinda given up on Christianity during my senior year of high-school. Reading McLaren's book made me realize one could be a Christian without sacrificing your mind and your conscience on an altar to the Fundamentals of the Faith.

Of course, being in the PCA, I have my share of theological quibbles, but overall I really appreciate what EV is trying to do. The thing with Reformed folks, be they Baptist, Presbyterian, or non-demoninational, you gotta ask what kind of reformed are we talking about? Like the part of the PCA I tend to swim with is very influenced by the Dutch Reformed tradition. We still hold to the doctrines of grace, male eldership, and other more conservative distinctives, but when it comes to relationships with the culture and other Christians we're missional in the same sense as most of the emergent Christians. The strands that tend to be more conservative generally come from more of a Puritan Reformed faith, which though strong in many areas, tends to be quite weak in terms of relating to the culture.

Basically, think Tim Keller and you have a good sense of where we're coming from. We appreciate our more conservative brothers, but we have significant disagreements with them on interactions between the church and culture. We also have concerns with where some of you guys are going theologically (just being honest here, hope that's alright :) ), but we're happy to call you brothers and pray that God would bless your ministry.

~Jake Meador
www.wordsfromtheway.com/between-the-trees
ps Listen to Steve Brown's interview with Tony Jones on Steve Brown Etc. That'll give you a great sense of where my friends and I in the PCA are coming from.

I'm in the love/hate camp with the pcusa as well. I'm a recalcitrant presbyter, unemployed pastor, and I'm not alone.

Tony you are right in saying: the PC(USA) is a huge, hegemonic, and possibly intractable bureaucracy. Bureaucracies are really excellent at only one thing: self-sustenance. They mitigate against significant change and they chew up and spit out entrepreneurs.

Unfortunately this happens at EVERY LEVEL from local church to national organization, usually with commitment to "good Reformed theology" but lets be honest "good Reformed theology" seems to change definition depending on to whom we are speaking and what their own commitments entail. I am cautiously optimistic about Bruce's election. I am also really uncomfortable with the knowledge that the pcusa tends to be warmly tolerant of certain kinds of ministries (read: entrepreneurial, ethnic, new development, redevelopment, mission outreach, etc.) but MANY folks within the structure think their early roguish ways will ultimately come under the umbrella of pcusa structure and process. That's not the way I understand emergent intiatives and so I tend to see doom and gloom ahead for these efforts.

I hope I'm wrong!

Re: my previous... Oh, I get it now... There's that lovely little button, "Show all comments." Guess more than just me missed it! (And we thought we had this blog-world all figure out! :))

I would like to correct a factual error in your "reporting" of our General Assembly. Bruce was not the only "Non white" person running for moderator. Bill Teng (of Chinese descent) ran from National Capital Presbytery. You may want to correct this. When someone with as much power and authority as you makes this type of error in reporting facts it can color your many readers perceptions. I know that it was an error of ignorance, but an error non-the-less. Thanks.

As moderator, Bruce will have visibility among congregations, and can provide an example and encouragement for alternate but faithful ways of "doing church" in this millenium. At the national level, there is an unwieldy but recently much shrunken bureaucracy, but we are not a top down denomination, so that bureaucracy only has real power in areas like pensions or mission abroad. At the Presbytery level, I suppose that could try to stop "emergent" changes in a congregation, but I cannot imagine it happening. In my Presbytery (Elizabeth, NJ) meetings often feature speakers with experience in new ways to be faithful or reach out. We know we have to change or die. Change in Presbyterian denominations come from links between congregations. When we see someone doing something effective, we copy it. That is how Workshop Rotation Sunday Schools spread throughout the country. Only later, the Sunday School publishers added curricula designed to be used with the Rotational model.