Great time at the conference. Hard core thinking and then some good relaxing times around the pool table. Good to meet many friends there.
Tom Wright was great - bringing a balanced eschatology into a whole cosmology to inform his historic ecclesiology. What?????? He talked a lot about bringing the future of God into the present. Good stuff!!!!. His comprehension of the emerging church was a little short and narrow, but then he is a busy man and he lives in a castle on a little island so that was OK. We all liked him and he was very approachable and friendly. Si, Tim Keel, Jim Thwaites, Shannon Hopkins were there. Richard Sudworth, Jason Clark, Gareth Powell and Jonny Baker wrote reports and summed it up better than i feel like doing right now.
UPDATE: ok - two questions in my mind. Maybe those of you smarter than me can answer them.
1. Is the emerging church solely a reflection-of / reaction-to the past, or is it in fact partly prophetic? ie, are these new forms of church we are seeing a sign of God's future breaking in to the present? Tom Wright's teaching suggests the inbreaking of God's future into our present should be a reality. If this is true, then not everything we are doing can be explained easily by what we have come out of. I know much of what we are doing has been done before, and that is a good thing. But, are we, in some circumstances, displaying signs of the future kingdom without reference to the past ecclesial history?
2. Is there a word for this inbreaking of the future into our time?
If 'diachronic' means understanding our present through time (historically past time) and 'synchronic' means understanding our moment with other moments (a multilayered present) then what word would describe the phenomenon expressed in question one?
