Remember that bucolic vacation in the countryside when a rooster's crowing gently raising you from sleep to one more delicious day of sheer joy, away from city noise, surrounded by the reassuring sights and sounds of nature?

It was not like that at all. The third time the rooster crowed, it was like a time bomb exploding in your face. Peter, sheepishly warming himself over the garrison fire, having lied to save his skin, was shaken to the depth of his soul-by a rooster! (John 18:27). "How could Jesus have known with such accuracy? What have I done? My life is over." The eventual first apostle was brought very low before the pieces were put together again, and he became a worthy and courageous servant of his Lord.

Roosters crow throughout our lives, bringing good and bad news. In my teenage years, I lived with the constant fear of going bald. (My adolescent fears were justified!) The rooster that woke me every morning was a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that kept me awake, but unable to crawl out of bed, since it paralyzed me with fear of the future and of inevitable social failure.

At CWIPP we take seriously the notion of a pagan planet and of the need for Christian witness to it. Such witness becomes more difficult as Christians discover the all-encompassing planetary nature of our world.

As they say, a butterfly flaps its wings on one side of the globe and a violent storm arises on the other side. Acid rain observes no national borders. The "market" never closes, and red-eyed investors can follow global economic trends 24 hours a day, while Google Earth shows you the license plate numbers of the cars parked in any street you choose to observe. Big Brother is no longer fictional!

First, my disclaimers: I am not a New Perspective on Paul expert. A Seminary president sometimes has the role of getting up to speed on an issue that has suddenly become hot in the Church, and he should make not pretense about knowing as much as the real scholars. I have needed to ask our godly faculty to help me understand these issues so that I can advise friends of Covenant Theological Seminary as to what is going on as best as I can. I do not intend for this to be a definitive research paper where every statement is documented and qualified for scholarly dissection.

In this mp3 Pastor Scott Golike wants to answer the following questions: 'Have we been misreading Paul's problem with the Judaism of his day, and along with it what he meant by works of the law and justification by faith?' 'Have we been distorting Paul by reading him through the lens of Augustine's fight with Pelagius, and even more so, Luther's fight with Catholicism?' 'Have we, in fact, been misrepresenting the Gospel all this time?' Leading scholars say yes, including N. T. Wright, the most prominent evangelical who thinks so. Is Wright right? Listen to this audio as we look at Scripture together and see if we can get to a an understanding of what this debate is all about.

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The purpose of this paper is threefold: (1) introduce participants to the Contextualization Spectrum (C1—C6), a helpful missiological tool for describing Christ-centered communities in the Muslim world; (2) modify this tool so as to render it useful in assessing the emerging church phenomenon; and (3) apply this modified contextualization spectrum to assess some representative samples of actual emerging churches. At the heart of my proposal is the conviction that the emerging church phenomenon is, in part, a contemporary attempt at contextualizing the gospel and the church of Jesus Christ in a changing (postmodern) world.¹ If this is the case, then the emerging church phenomenon (1) bears some similarities with contextualization efforts carried out in the past, and (2) manifests a spectrum of embodiments that are contextualized from a lesser to a greater degree.

This paper has a very narrow purpose and so I offer the following limitations: (1) I will not make a distinction in nomenclature between "emergent" and "emerging" as applied to churches and proponents; for the purposes of this paper, I will lump these together under the rubric of "the emerging church phenomenon."² (2) Regarding this rubric, it is simply a placeholder for the ill-defined yet real phenomenon of which everyone listening to this presentation has (at least) an intuitive awareness. My purpose is not to write a definition but to do an assessment of a phenomenon. (3) One may agree or disagree with my placement of a specific church along the modified contextualization spectrum. Despite agreement or disagreement on the specifics, I will establish that the emerging church phenomenon manifests a spectrum of embodiments from a lesser to a greater degree of contextualization. (4) I will not consider the house church phenomenon per se. Though it is the case that some embodiments of the emerging church phenomenon are house churches, I will treat those as emerging church house churches and not as part of the house church phenomenon; such treatment would take me far a field from my purpose. (5) I also will not consider the phenomenon of individual Christians who purposely do not belong to any church, opting to pursue interaction with others through on-line venues or occasional gatherings of friends. A more fundamental question—"Do such connections constitute a 'church?'"—needs to be raised first, but this is not my purpose.

INTRODUCTION

Thesis
The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, I will raise three areas of concern Evangelicals should focus most of their attention as they assess both the Emerging Church movement (hereafter ECM) and Emergent Village (hereafter EV). Specifically, I will point to some examples of what three prominent EV leaders say regarding each. These concerns culminate with my most serious concern and secondly, I will argue there is a potential drift away from orthodox Christian views in the leadership of Emergent Village and thus, constitutes a serious concern for the larger ECM.

Two Preliminary Remarks
Let me begin with two preliminary questions. If you are privy to ECM conversations, you may see the value in starting with these questions upon hearing them. First, am I qualified to offer a critical assessment of the ECM? Second, do I reject all that comes out of the ECM?

Am I Qualified?
There is considerable concern amongst the ECM's ranks with criticism coming from outside the movement. Certainly D.A. Carson's book, Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church, has garnered much criticism from leaders in the ECM. Tony Jones has called it "breathtakingly bad."¹ Or listen to Brian McLaren's comments that are simultaneously an endorsement on the back cover of Bolger and Gibb's book, Emerging Churches, and a swipe at Carson's: "If you want to be truly conversant with emerging churches, this is the book to read."² Of course, the implication is Carson's book is not the one to read.

There is a widespread and growing interest in mysticism in our time. This is especially evident among younger Christians who hunger for something beyond rational categories of faith. But the word mysticism is notoriously difficult to explain since definitions vary from one writer to the next, both in the ancient world and the modern. The most fruitful line of approach is to examine mystical experiences for common patterns.

Imprecations, prayers calling down God's wrath upon the wicked, are found in the New Testament as well as the Old, on the lips of Christ and the apostles as well as the Psalmists. See Matt. 23:13ff, Gal. 1:8ff, Rev. 6:10, 18:20. On the other hand, the biblical ethic of love is also found in both Testaments. Scripture always proscribes personal vengeance and calls us to love our enemies: Ex. 23:4f, Lev. 19:17f, Psm. 7:4f, Prov. 20:22. So the problem we have in reconciling these two biblical themes cannot be met by some view of "dispensational change."

Quite a few people have suggested recently that "inerrant" is not a good word to use in describing Scripture. I shall seek to respond to them in this article. Before we take up the specific term "inerrant," however, it will be well for us to remind ourselves, in more general terms, of what the Reformed faith, and the Bible itself, teach us about Scripture.

A Book Review of: The Secret Message of Jesus: Uncovering the Truth that Could Change Everything by Brian McLaren

As some of you may know Resurgence has been in response to much of the emergent and/or emerging conversations taking place within evangelicalism. Personally I have taken interest in one of the many voices of the emergent, Brian McLaren. I must admit he truly is a joy to read, so very crafty and entertaining. After reading some of his books I was eagerly anticipating his newest book The Secret Message of Jesus and what he would have to say in a book devoted to Jesus.