Categories: uncategorized
Date: 23 August 2006 15:49:03
If you follow this link for Together for the Kingdom you will arrive at downloadable talks and powerpoint slides from Brian McLaren when he was in the UK a few months ago. I understand that they are quite interesting & useful (unfortunately I need to learn how to download them in order to comment further on the talks).
I think that it is interesting that Together for the Kingdom are the people who are seriously pursuing this evangelical / emergent agenda being as they are a combination of Detling, New Wine and Alpha in South East England. It highights the dualism and contradiction that appears to exist within the British evangelical establishment. From my experience of 2 out of 3 of these groups they are on one hand associated with clearly pushing a straight down the line charismatic evangelical agenda and message, but within a modern, more relational format. However on the other hand they are also clearly seeking to engage and adopt the progressive evangelical model and agenda that is currently coming out of the US which clearly embraces a social gospel and has more blurred boundaries.
I'm slowly coming round to the view that this is not linked to any great conspiracy theory, which is just seeking to use certain language and ideas to infact protect fairly hardcore evangelicalism, but rather that, atleast in the UK, this is just a historic and underlying aspect of the development of the evangelical movement, which goes back over a century. The fact that the British Labour movement has asmuch, if not more, to do with Methodism than Marxism is not incidental. The progressive US model appears to be just the current interpretation of that.