Posted by
Mark McConnell on Monday, October 16, 2006 8:39:49 PM
Portland "Emerging church", Imago Dei, got spotlight attention from The Oregonian, this weekend. Missing from the online version are the pictures, which really formed the centerpiece of the article; but that's okay, because whatever the emerging church is, it cannot be photographed.
Can it be an
accidental joke that this movement which is so noisy about rejecting the market-driven megachurch is portrayed by the article as being so carefully
packaged for consumption by its target populations?
It must surely be for our amusement that this movement is called "emerging", when the
most consistent characteristic, according to the article, is that these churches are indistinguishable from their landscape.
The irony can't be lost on them, when they read about themselves, that what at least this one outsider described when looking at their experiment (whether she saw it this way or not, I don't know) is that they are missing what they claim is most important to them: community.