Pryomaniacs Frank and Dan are halfway towards a 1000 comment quest with a provocative blog post against emerging church and other movements that threaten the Fundamentalist claim to supreme power and a uniquely correct view of Scripture.
Its called . . Emerging Church: bad as Gutless Grace Girliemen? Worse than Wrongheaded Wrightophiles? Sillier than Leaky Canoneers? and it will probably break the record of 1000 posts, although the only people who will have the time to plummet its depths will be those without gainful employment.
[update: Mike Morrell has the skinny on the Pyro site and this current controversy]
As a blog post, I think it is enticing, artistic, bold, and I appreciate how it invites criticism from foe as well as friend. And although I appreciate the post, as I said on my comment which helped them progress toward their goal by one degree, I do beg to differ from Frank and Dan on a number of points . . .
as well as being lumped in with Benny Hinn who drives a much nicer car than I, who tends to his hair far more than I and whose stage-led ministry looks ENTIRELY different than mine and the non-celebrity type people i hang with in the emerging-misisonal church scene.
First off, I really think Frank and Dan's definition of "missional" does no justice to the word. None. Whatsoever. Rather than describing the grand initiative of the Triune God, our framework to understand the Scriptures and our example in Christ for being obediently sent into the world, Frank and Dan downgrade the word with relativism and syncretism.
". . . This is what the people want—verbal meat-chubbery—and frankly, from what we understand, giving people what they really want is called missional these days." Frank and Dan, Pyromaniacs.
Giving people what they want? OK - don't get me started. I have already posted about the importance of missio dei, where the word missional comes from, and why I prefer to talk about the "emerging-misisonal church".
Let me tackle the issue from another angle - something i think is more inherently problematic in this ongoing debate. It has to do with the way we approach, interpret and apply the Scriptures in our world. Let me quote from Frank and Dan in their provocation:
"And if the most central issue of the Bible—how can man be just before God?—has been misunderstood by basically every one of the holiest, godliest, most consecrated and devoted men of God for centuries; if, that is, our most elder brothers in the faith have, every one of them, answered that question wrongly, and only a specialist engaging in specialized sub-category studies can unearth the true answer to this basic question...
...it makes you wonder not only why God wrote the Book, but why He made such a poor job of it. Why couldn't He manage to get it Wright...er, right, the first time? Why didn't He make it plain enough for non-specialists to "get" what He was saying?"
(Frank and Dan, Pyromaniacs)
The first thing that grabs me here is what is presented as the "central issue" of the Bible - how man can be just before God? Now that may have been clearly adequate for Martin Luther and others but it seems suspiciously too small to me. Too small, too humanistic, too individualist, too man-centered.
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