Emergent Kiwi Engages Newbigin Thought

Steve Taylor has some very helpful thoughts over on his blog in lieu of his participation at a conference/think tank in Idaho. (That's right, Napolean Dynamite land.) It's when these kinds of ideas and questions come up in "emerging church" cirlces that I get most excited and challenged. Unfortunately, it's also these kinds of ideas surrounding mission and contextualization that critics of the "emerging church" seem to have little to say about.

Commenting on a quote from Leslie Newbigin's The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, Taylor says this:

This sentence foregrounds the church as the interpretive performer in the task of Western re-missionalisation. This opens a space for mission to be driven not by the essential pragmatism of declining numbers, nor the dehumanizing practices of church growth, but from a vision of the gospel as human, communal and Incarnational. It offers a hermeneutic in which the gospel can be embodied as the concrete hands and feet and ears of the Body of Christ.

(More on Newbign from Taylor here. Click here for some of my own thoughts on Newbigin's Foolishness to the Greeks.)

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