Emerging Africa

Is the Emergent Church a religious version of the Tea Party? Part I | Civil Religion:What I do find intriguing are some striking similarities in structure and style between these movements, as opposed to deeper any issues of substance that might hold them together. “Tea Party” is a label given to an amorphous, fast-growing populist movement that resists being affiliated with a particular political party and denies being led by any one of a number of well-known spokespeople who have been affiliated with it (Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck being obvious examples).

Missional Conversation Disappearing? | The Blind Beggar: "There has been a noticeable downward trend in the number of posts in the blogosphere related to the missional paradigm. Used to be that I’d have a dozen posts daily in my RSS feeds, but for the last few months it’s been just a couple a day."

The same thing seems to be happening here. It used to be quite active, now nothing for weeks on end. Where's everyone gone?

Are you bored that there seems to be so little new content here?

Emerging Africa is now running off a new server. If you've visited the site in the last few days, you may have noticed it wasn't working optimally. My host had accidentally upgraded php to 5.3, and broke some sites in doing so (this site too, alas). There wasn't any way to roll that upgrade back, so I decided to do something I've wanted to do for ages anyway - migrate it to a server which I have more control on.

My apologies if you visited here in the last few days and couldn't read/post anything. We're back up and running now - if you notice anything weird, please let me know.

I just received the most extraordinary e-main from one James Sundquist:

=== begin quote ===
I give you my highest commendation to Deborah of Discerning the World and
Steven Hayes for exposing Peter Veysie, Senior Pastor of Ridgeway
Ministries. I am grateful that you were able to warn as many saints as
possible on your Discerning the World site. I will try to help expand
your warning about Mr. Veysie and other Emergent Church plague pied pipers
in our own media database and various radio ministries we frequent. We
will sound the alarm on His Holy Hill reflecting the following letter to
Peter Veysie.
=== end quote ===

I see from my diary that Scot McKnight, an Emerging Church fundi from overseas, is due to be speaking at Tukkies on Wednesday 12 May at 10:30 am, the topic being "Conversion and why folks walk away from the faith". It is in the Information Technology Building (where's that), Room 2-27.

Is anyone else planning to go to it?

Where's the best place to park, and find the IT building?

In his book A new kind of Christianity Brian McLaren poses 10 questions that he thinks Christians should be asking.

1. What is the overarching story line of the Bible?

2. How should the Bible be understood?

3. Is God violent?

4. Who is Jesus and why is he important?

5. What is the Gospel?

6. What do we do about the Church?

7. Can we find a way to address human sexuality without fighting about it?

8. Can we find a better way of viewing the future?

9. How should followers of Jesus relate to people of other religions?

10. How can we translate our quest into action?

Some time ago some people said they would like to know more of the history of the apartheid period and Christian responses to it. So I've been writing a series of "Tales from Dystopia" for anyone whose interested in that sort of thing, and the latest in the series is Tales from Dystopia V: Sophiatown and ethnic cleansing on my Khanya blog.

This post is very much like the original purpose of a blog -- an annotated log of web sites visited. This one is copied from my Khanya blog

When I first encountered the Emerging Church movement about four years ago I was puzzled about what it was. Today I encountered one of the best descriptions I've seen: Some thoughts on the definition of 'emerging church':

Reclaiming the Mission: Why is the Emergent/Missional Church So White?:The lack of diversity in the Missional Church (and for that matter the Emerging Church) is a main topic at this year’s Missional Learning Commons coming up here the first week of January in Ft. Wayne.

That blog post is well worth reading, and I think it could lead to some discussion here, if we ask how true it is of Southern Africa, and what it means in this part of the world.

So here's my comment on that post - what do others think?