State of the Church RE: Emergent

I realize that I have spent a great amount of time on the emergent movement. This is because it's literally flooding into our Christian colleges, seminaries and into church youth groups. And, the amazing thing is, almost none of church members over 40 know what is going on. Even many, if not most, pastors don't.

So, with that in mind, I will now pronounce that I firmly believe that the emergents have turned a corner. At first they were willing to "converse" with evangelicals (who they often call fundamentalists). When their doctrine was rebuffed, they tried to ignore us. When that didn't work many of them (but not all) got irritated and began to call us fundamentalists and say other not very nice things about us.

But now I believe they've turned a corner. They were mainly out to change evangelicalism into their postmodern vision and they have done amazingly well. Since they have cornered many major Christian colleges and seminaries and youth groups, they have achieved their goal. So, they are once again ignoring us because they can. And they can because they have the Christian youth in their camp and that is what their goal and agenda was.

We've lost the first round. Now, many churches are waking up to this fact, but most slumber on, or even think emergent is a fad, or a good thing, or something not to be contended with. Let's hope that pastors and denominational leaders wake up from their slumber before it's too late.

One tragic outcome of this is the number of Christian leaders either compromising with the emergent doctrine, or pretending they don't know what emergent pastors in their midst believe as they invite them to speak to their youth conferences and even their area pastors' conferences (are you listening Foursquare and So. Baptist Convention people among others?).