Because I am not a pro at this blogging thing, I am basically a week or so behind this story. I do want to give a quick rundown though, with some links, because I think it’s important for us to know the kinds of issues that face believers who are attempting to be culturally relevant yet faithful to the gospel of Christ. I’m not going to throw out a lot of easy answers here, just give an overview to help jumpstart your own research. It seems, though, that we may have arrived at the fork in the road where a choice must be made regarding this thing called Emergent.

Essentially, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary held their Convergent Conference on the 21st and 22nd of September. The topic was (of course) something related to missiology and featured (of course) Ed Stetzer and Mark Driscoll as speakers. You can grab the talks here. Let me first say that it is nice to see this missional focus making inroads into the SBC, as I think the virtual drunkenness with loud-mouthed Reformed theology that has characterized the “cutting edge” of the convention these past few years has become a bit tiresome, especially with the more annoying Baptist bloggers (like the Pyro guys – check their annoyingly stiff review of the Convergent controversy here).

At any rate, Driscoll gave the wham-bang talk of the conference that has everybody else talking, too. Although his tone was humble and almost somber, it seemed that he was in some sense on a mission to “lay down the law” about the heterodoxy of the movement that has come to be known as Emergent. As Mark explains, the “emerging church” was a missionally-minded, culturally-relevant, young leaders’ movement that originated in the early-mid 90’s but has progressively flowed into a few separate streams: the relevant stream, the relevant-reformed stream, and the revisionist stream. Driscoll, once standing beside such men as Doug Pagitt and Brian McLaren, has now distanced himself from the entire revisionist stream (mainly, Emergent) in no uncertain terms.

The Emergent Village blog response did not go super deep in answering Driscoll’s challenges but did provide quoted responses from several sources, such as Pagitt’s blog. The Pagitt quote mainly just made Driscoll sound mean and made Doug sound like all he wants to do is have a nice conversation while washing Mark’s Jeep. For the record, I doubt Doug is really that nice and would guess that he has opinions about Mark which resemble his opinions of John MacArthur. Not that it’s bad to have opinions, but it’s hard to have them and be emergent all at the same time.

And speaking of MacArthur, he recently “debated” Pagitt on CNN regarding that all-important theological issue threatening the church, yoga. Goodness. He also wrote a new book called The Truth War where he kind of throws out the good “emergings” (like Driscoll) with the bad “emergents” (like Brian McLaren). Check out the Internet Monk’s review of the book here. Also under the fundamentalist bus these days is Rob Bell, who, in both Driscoll’s recent talk and MacArthur’s recent book has been accused of false doctrine and another gospel, in short, heresy. I want to know more about Bell. I want to like him. I do like his sermons and his NOOMAs (at least what I’ve heard). I, like Moulder, want to believe.

And for a good criticism of the guy I just can’t NOT like (Driscoll), look to another Emergent dude by the name of Tony Jones. On his Theoblogy he accurately sums up the main weakness of Driscoll’s argument at Convergent.

Listen to Driscoll’s talk. Learn about the main players in the emerging/emergent church. See if you agree that there are decisions to be made.

(Note: I have read McLaren pretty closely, and there are big problems, IMHO.)