Following on from last week’s stunning revelation that our senior pastor has read Generous Orthodoxy (and, it appears, enjoyed it and thinks it’s a very good book), this week, we had an actual, real-live Emergent preacher. He encouraged dialogue and interaction during his teaching, debated ideas with the congregation, encouraged individual thought and reasoning rather than just laying the smack down, as it were. We were covering Joshua 6-8, including the difficult topics of God’s destruction of Jericho, and Achan’s sin and punishment – and rather than jumping through tortured hermeneutics to try and explain away why God seems so much more violent and vengeful in the OT, he actually admitted that it was a difficult subject, that he didn’t have an answer, and that in fact a simple proof-text style response is probably not what is needed here anyway. What? A preacher not telling people what to believe and suggesting that they figure it out for themselves? Dangerous stuff, indeed.
