Recently I have had some interesting conversations with people (my dad) on this new idea of the emerging church. I have come to closely associate myself with this movement and have been fervently reading every book I can get my hands on having anything to do with this. I have also had a lot of conversations with quite a few people who think similarly and explained some of my theological perspective to different people. I always have a lot of trouble articulating my thoughts and feelings into coherent dialogs even though I have deep convictions in areas for reason besides feeling it still ends up being thoughts that cannot be made into words for me. It makes things very hard for me when trying to explain myself to people who have different or especially opposing viewpoints. This has become especially prevalent with my father. As I picked my dad up at the airport yesterday we again got onto the conversation of the emergent church. Mainly because I had a copy of Tony Jones The New Christians with me that he was looking at. It started with his statement of, "I think that this 'Emergent Church' is just another demonination." (I spelled that wrong but I thought the wrong spelling was funny so I left it) The problem with talking to people such as my dad is that they are looking at the emerging church from their framework without the willingness, or probably without the understanding, that this "conversation" is taking a completely different framework. Therefor he puts this movement back into his framework and once again packages it up nicely into his framework and sets it aside. I try to explain this to him. I start at the beginning by saying, "Dad the conversation is about more than just a few theological differences it is a completely new framework, a new world view." To which I, of course, get the response, "ok, whats the framework" I begin to explain postmodernism as apposed to modernism and medieval frameworks. And I get almost nowhere. He can not pull himself away from his mindset and look at the ideas from another point of view. This to me is one of my biggest struggles with my new way of living out my faith. I am fine conversing with like minded (as in open minded postmodern) Christians and non-christians but when it comes to traditional modern minded Christians I am uncomfortable and don't feel able to converse freely. This is a problem because the whole framework is about being open to all ways of looking at it and accepting differences. I suppose I just need to work on seeing their way of doing things as beautiful as well even though sometimes I don't agree. This means accepting the fact that I will sometimes be not accepted or even shunned due to certain belief systems.
I guess thats life.
breNt