On Tuesday, April 21 from 7 to 9 pm several members of Boston's Emergent Cohort will be attending a debate at Gordon College (255 Grapevine Road, Wenham, MA; the debate is taking place in the Ken Olsen Science Center which is pictured on the left and located, um, somewhere on campus; if you're taking the rail you'll need to stop on the Beverly Depot, North Beverly or Montserrat station on the Newburyport/Rockport line and get a ride from someone like me). Sounds exiting, I know...but wait, there's more!
The question being considered at the debate is "whether the movement commonly designated 'emergent' church or 'emerging' church bears witness to the positive flourishing of Christianity in our time." This is a huge conversation taking place within evangelicalism (we always like to foster an internecine feud or two to keep us from the real work of mission:), so I'm excited to hear what the students say.
Since Emergent is more of a conversation than a proposition or ecclesial practice, after the debate a number of us are heading over to the Salem Beer Works (
I hope that a number of you are able to join us for the debate and/or the beers and pseudo cohort gathering after. If you're going to attend, please RSVP so that I can keep an eye out for you. If you have questions about this event, please shoot me an email at gentry13ATgmailDOTcom. If you are looking for a couple of home remedies for prostatitis, I can share a few of those as well.
Be Well,
Gentry
* Single seminarians, don't get the wrong idea.
5 comments:
i know that building!
to be clear, Gordon College is not, strictly speaking, an evangelical institution. at least, they certainly didn't used to be. and they still officially position themselves as non-denominational (they seem to have dropped "protestant" from that description sometime in the past 10 years). when i was a student there in the early 90's the faculty were very much of the liberal, mainline protestant persuasion.
thanks for the input jhimm.
i can see what you're saying to some degree. according to the college's website gordon carefully eschews the evangelical and protestant branding. however, their continuing participation in the council for christian colleges and universities as well as their friendship and affiliation with wheaton and westmont suggests that their roots are still pretty evangelical.
i don't say this out of opposition to some of the faculties more mainline tendencies. i'm a fan of profs like professor borgmann and consider it a shame that they lost thomas howard after his acceptance into the RCC. i just think that, all things considered, gordon is more evangelical than not.
thanks for stopping by. be well.
how was it?
it was a great night. the debate went well - though i was a little confounded when the had the audience vote on the winner of the debate and i was pissed when the moderator asked the cohort members not to vote so that we didn't swing the outcome (though we may question the limits of objectivity we do not eschew objectivity altogether) - and we had about 20 gordon students join 11 or 12 cohort members for drinks and discussion after.
kudos to Gordon for framing the debate and the students for inviting us to the event. let the conversation continue.
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