The Christian Humanist Podcast Episode 5: Emergent vs. the New Calvinists
The Christian Humanist Podcast’s fifth episode is now live on FeedBurner, and we tackled a controversial question today, namely the place of (what magazines call) the New Calvinists and the Emergent Church in 21st-century Christian life. ?I’m sure that my friends in both camps will agree that I got many things wrong and didn’t rein in some misinformed statements in my role as moderator, but such are the limits of a one-hour conversation. ?On second thought, I’ll let my readers and listeners judge. ?Chime in, eh?
Tune in next week to hear CHP’s conversation about science fiction, fantasy, and the place of speculative fiction in the Christian intellectual life.
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When we hosted the heads of all the big mainline denominations at Claremont they thought one of the biggest problems they faced was how ‘ageist’ their congregations are. Not sure what emergent churches yall have been to but the three I have spoken at or visited are much closer demographically to the US population than the three mainline churches I have worked at. Having been on staff at two churches with over 500 members and only a hand full of people between 18-30 at them on sunday it seems the whole emergent movement isn’t uniquely subject to that kind of criticism. The same thing seems to be the case with mega churches that have a huge baby boomer population and marginal selections of other age groups.
Any way, enjoy the podcast.
Thanks for listening, Tripp, and especially for plugging the show on HBC.
You’re right about the widespread character of age-segregation; even at megachurches, which boast most of the 18-30-year-olds still actually assembling at all on Sunday mornings, they often have age-segregated (de facto, of course, rather than de jure; people could go to the old folks’ service if they wanted) separate services, and most of the “target demographic” churches with which I’m familiar are evangelical (broadly speaking) rather than post-evangelical/Emergent in character.
I actually just posted a longer version of this discussion on the main blog, if that interests you at all. If you like, you could even claim that you were using the force through this comment to influence that one.
[...] by Tripp Fuller from Homebrewed Christianity, who suggested I give a listen to an episode of The Christian Humanist Podcast about the Emergent Church and the Neo-Calvinists. ?Well, I gave it a listen, and it was [...]
This was very thought provoking for me, so thanks for that CH guys! So much so that I whipped together some of the thoughts you inspired and put them in a post over at my corner of web here: http://ow.ly/FkZq
Thanks for your work!
-Callid