Today I had the opportunity to attend the Northeast chapter meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, since it was being held at my alma mater. The keynote speaker was Eddie Gibbs from Fuller Theological Seminary on the topic of the Emerging Church.

It was a $25 well spent. Dr. Gibbs is of course an older gentleman and rambled a little at times, but he has a great British accent (which alone was worth the money!) and more importantly, he had a lot of great thoughts about the emerging church “phenomenon” as he called it. He’s of course quite adamant that what we are doing now in typical churches isn’t working. To set up his presentations he gave a lengthy introduction to our culture in the past and now, and how the church had dealt with it in the past and now. And while I don’t know if much of what he spoke about was necessarily “new” to me, it was needed for his topic, and it gave food for thought for the discussion Calvin and I had with some friends and Dr. Snyder in the cafe while we skipped the second paper reading session.

The second presentation by Dr. Gibbs moved beyond the setup and to what the emerging church looks like, not meaning what a specific local church looks like but what the mindset of the emerging church in general is. How it functions broadly in relation to culture and people, touching on evangelism, discipleship, etc (having defined our culture and its radical shift in the previous presentation). Calvin, who beat me to blogging about this, already discussed an interesting point he brought up at the very end about the relation of the emerging church and traditional churches, which I wish Gibbs would have had more time to elaborate on, but unfortunately he was squeezed for time and had to wrap up quickly.

Gibbs is very passionate about being missional and I can get on board with that. I look forward to reading some of his stuff.

All in all, a good day!