Emerge & Restore
Welcome to my blog, Emerge & Restore. This is an unapologetically Christian blog, admittedly geared to a relatively narrow audience. It is dedicated to pursuing a dialogue between the emerging postmodern Christian "movement" and the Churches of Christ. It is an amateur effort to help the church engage the culture and its recent postmodern shift and emerge as a community that is more faithful, more loving, more helpful, more culturally appropriate than what we've experienced in the recent past, without forsaking the beauty of and our heritage within the fellowship of the Churches of Christ. My dream is of an alliance with the Emerging church while still honoring our birthright as a group born of the Restoration movement(1800-1840).
I have no liberal or conservative agenda, no desire to do away with our distinctives, but I passionately want to ensure that Churches of Christ survive the next few decades in a manner that leaves us in a position to fulfill our mission as a church; to reach out the hands of Christ to a world that is crumbling - a world that desperately needs to know a carpenter from Galillee, who raised the dead and healed the sick, who calmed the wind and sea, and who confronted the evil and corrupt, the self-righteous and arrogant. He died for the sins of the world and rose from the dead - and he is the answer for us even in a postmodern, post-Christian world. He founded this community of the faithful that we call the church - and we must live up to our calling.
I'm concerned that the Churches of Christ are convinced that our allegiance to the over-rational, propositional mindset of modernism is equated with being faithful to the Word. I'm afraid we are approaching the world loudly proclaiming answers to questions that are no longer asked. We think our apologetic IS our faith and so we end up speaking a different language than the people we are trying to reach. If the culture around us is in transition, then as disciples, we must be too.
My name is Neal Whitlow and I am a 20-something minister with the Church of Christ in central Kansas. I have a wife, two daughters, and a passion for Jesus. If I have a contribution to make to the church, I think in will be in this arena. Thanks for reading. Soli Deo Gloria.
I have no liberal or conservative agenda, no desire to do away with our distinctives, but I passionately want to ensure that Churches of Christ survive the next few decades in a manner that leaves us in a position to fulfill our mission as a church; to reach out the hands of Christ to a world that is crumbling - a world that desperately needs to know a carpenter from Galillee, who raised the dead and healed the sick, who calmed the wind and sea, and who confronted the evil and corrupt, the self-righteous and arrogant. He died for the sins of the world and rose from the dead - and he is the answer for us even in a postmodern, post-Christian world. He founded this community of the faithful that we call the church - and we must live up to our calling.
I'm concerned that the Churches of Christ are convinced that our allegiance to the over-rational, propositional mindset of modernism is equated with being faithful to the Word. I'm afraid we are approaching the world loudly proclaiming answers to questions that are no longer asked. We think our apologetic IS our faith and so we end up speaking a different language than the people we are trying to reach. If the culture around us is in transition, then as disciples, we must be too.
My name is Neal Whitlow and I am a 20-something minister with the Church of Christ in central Kansas. I have a wife, two daughters, and a passion for Jesus. If I have a contribution to make to the church, I think in will be in this arena. Thanks for reading. Soli Deo Gloria.
posted by Neal | 3:24 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home