If you are like most people I talk to, you find the Emergent Church hard to get you mind around. Is it about style, is it about substance, are they relativists, does it matter?

The movement is marked by a disdain for labels, hostility toward doctrine and creeds, and deep skepticism of certainty about anything. So, it comes as no surprise that they are quite elusive when it comes to defining them by any objective terms.

When the details of a situation are hard to come by (or convoluted or contradictory) I often find it helpful to go back to the underlying ideas in play. This gives me a solid footing for analyzing the foggy facts that I do find.

In the April 23 STR broadcast, Greg spends an hour explaining the history of ideas from the classic period through the Enlightenment (Modern period) and into the Postmodern period, and how this shapes the Emergent Church thinking.

One of Greg’s primary gifts is the ability to bring concepts out of acedemia and make them accessible to us mere mortals. He does that masterfully in this talk.