Ben Witherington and the Emerging Church
Don’t know if you’ve read the piece below by Ben Witherington, but I found it an interesting piece of propaganda that paternalistically pats the Emerging Church, and by extension other similar movements in our time, on the head with an admonition to grow up and join the rest of the “church” (as we have known it) in the work of Christ. Furthermore, it assumes that “church” means what we have always known of church. And this is just what emerging, missional, and other such movements are calling in question! When Witherington writes at the end of this piece that is “unprofitable and unhelpful to sass your Mother, to repudiate the womb from which you emerged, by which I mean the ekklesia, the body of Christ, the people of God, which will always need structures and organization,” he seems not to realize or acknowledge that it is just this need for structures and organization that these newer groups are rethinking from the ground up. Structure and organization, yes, to be sure; what kin...