Relevancy22: Contemporary Process Christianity: Post-Evangelic Topics and Theology: Index

Quotes & Sayings

We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write off the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Showing posts with label Index - Emergent Church Era I. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 6, 2024

Index - Emergent Church Era I

INDEX - EMERGENT CHURCH ERA

OF THE 1990s to 2010s,

Part I

"...In hindsight, my faith didn't require abandonment. No.

Simply a better resonance with what it wasn't hearing
in today's current generations of God's faithful." - re slater

Contrary to how conservative evangelical churches have spoken of the emergent church, I have participated in each church forum as an active minister and member. And from what I have read of the many evangelical articles on its more progressive twin, they all seem to be unfair, if not errant, evaluations of the emergent movement.

Moreover, these same statements and evaluations have told me exactly who evangelicals think they are in difference to the work of the Spirit of God pouring the Lord's gospel out through their kindred emergent fellowships.

It is why I left evangelicalism for process Christianity. For better or worse, the conservative evangelical church over the past forty years (since the 1980s) has closed its ears and hearts to the gospel of Christ not unlike how the pharisees did towards Jesus in their era. A lot of it came from how they read their Bible which I have spoken to in hundreds of articles here on this site.

More simply, Jesus preached a loving God and a loving gospel against the evangelical's God of wrath and judgment and the sundry legalisms which came along with this kind of evangelical God. And as I look about the conservative enangelical landscape in 2024 they have fundamentally embraced an anti-christ-like figure within their political midst over that of Jesus and the kindness, if not thoughtfulness of Jesus' gospel.

Hence, I would state that everything from conservative evangelic apologetics to their eschatology has been turned inside-out and backwards as hallmarks to evangelicalism's fallenness, pride, unteachability, and unrepentant hearts. James says to watch the works of one's faith. However perfectly dogmatic and holy evangelical doctrine is, the very acts of it's dogmas have betrayed the kind of God they are worshipping. It's confusing and caused a significant quantity of their fellowship to leave evangelicalism to rethink what they believe and hold dear about Christ and Christianity.

And though I continue to attend both conservative and progressive evangelical churches and fellowships as I was taught as a child from my youth, I find the Spirit-life my once former fellowship had in the 60s and 70s has altogether changed for the worse and not for the better.

Thus the reason so many evangelicals have left for a better expression of the gospel found in the emergent church movement. Whereas, the churches they had left have continued to hunker down into less vibrant, more angry, and condemnatory protestations - if not impreccations - placed upon the heads of former friends and disciplers. It is the poorest of Christian responses. To disagree is one thing... but to condemn and damn is simply another. It sears the heart when pronouncing "Raca" upon the soul of another thus making any form of fellowship virtually non-existent.

Jesus once observed that new wine will burst old wine sacks. So too today, the new wine of the gospel has burst the confines of the traditional church forcing it to examine itself, and in the examination move either forwards, towards Jesus, when drinking of the new wine he is offering or... to continue in their older forms of stubborn, idealised, traditionalism. From what I can see this latter has greatly harmed evangelical fellowships across America.

Below is a collection of articles I have written over the years discussing this very personal faith-dilemma. You may disagree or agree... none of which I care about. What I do care about is that Jesus be preached in a loving gospel of embrace, welcome and spirited fellowship that sees the person and not the argument. I would like to see a return to how the church use to evangelize as versus how it evangelizes today.

My vision of the present and future is profoundly different from what it once was. And though the emergent church has since come-and-gone it's legacy is still present with us. I would urge those who can, to join those like myself, along with the mass of recovering "nones and dones." My gifts are several, but here, I will teach God's love to the lost generations of the church and local communities.

Join us then. Find your spot and settle in for awhile. There is no movement, no organizations, no faith committees. But there is a profound Spirit-resurgence criss-crossing the globe across all faiths and beliefs.

Peace and blessings,

R.E. Slater

February 6, 2024