“RE: Emergent Church Spreading Cancer” or “Marsha, Marsha, Marsha!!!”

This morning I pulled up Google news and discovered an editorial titled Emergent Church Spreading Cancer by Marsha West. In this article West takes everything from Oprah to Desmond Tutu; from New Age to the Emergent church and summarizes it as, "a cancer to the church. Her writing bares little or no distinction between any of these individuals and instead links them all together and places them in a box. Once she has done this, she removes the emergent leaders from the box (After labeling them wrong and liberal of course) and accuses them of not following after Biblical principles (i.e. her opinion of what Biblical principles consist.) It is amazing how ignorant this article and the writer are of the subject matter and truly by her own admission:

According to Emergent leader, Tony Jones, "At a basic level, Emergent's mission is no different from any other group of Christ-followers: we want to follow Christ and we want to help others follow Christ. Of course, where it gets tricky is when we start talking about what it looks like to follow Christ. All along, Emergent has been about the melding of theory/theology and praxis, and we want to promote fresh, creative, and imaginative thinking about each. It seems that many organizations get to emphasize one side over the other in the theory-praxis equation, but we really are going to struggle to keep both of those in an equal, reflective symbiosis. What does it mean to be the church? What does it mean to follow Christ? We want to serve as a catalyst for conversations that attempt to answer those two questions, and to bring together the most creative people we can find for those conversations. But, conversation alone leads to paralysis by analysis, which is why we have always made sure that conversations are led primarily by practitioners rather than theoreticians and consultants." Huh?

It is actually quite simple Marsha. Orthopraxy is just as vital as orthodoxy…still too hard? Ok, practice what you believe. West continues to fail on her own understanding:

"Emerging church practitioners are happy to take elements of worship from a wide variety of historic traditions, including Anglicanism, Roman Catholicism, the Orthodox church, and Celtic Christianity. From these and other religious traditions emerging church groups take, adapt and blend various historic church practices including liturgy, prayer beads, icons, spiritual direction, and lectio divina." [10] In other words, whatever unbiblical practice floats your boat.

Lectio divina is unbiblical? I wonder if she know what this means? She assumes, I am guessing, anything that is not in Scripture is unbiblical. I guess it must really be hard for her to vote since that specific practice is not in Scripture. I could continue writing but to be really honest, I would be wasting my time. Besides, I have to go do something unbiblical like…go to a meeting?

To read her article go to: http://www.opinioneditorials.com/freedomwriters/mwest_20080418.html