The Emergent Movement; we are so in with the times we are Protestant, post-Protestant, evangelical, post-evangelical, liberal, post-liberal, conservative, post-conservative, anabaptist, adventist, reformed, charismatic, neocharismatic, and post-charismatic.

The Emergence Movement is a recent (post 1970's) movement lead by America's young libertarian Christians. (and yes the title of this post is what they title themselves as) The Emergence Movement is in multiple countries and even continents today; North America, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Africa. Using a postmodern viewpoint the emphasis is driven away from the Bible and more toward the fellowship and the society around the "church" (I put quotation marks because it's mostly a house meeting or a gathering) I am not going to describe a typical Emergent Church, because they don't have an exact definition, the society around them or the group's own traditions is what defines their own church.
The Emergence Movement beliefs range from a Trinitarian based values; imitating the life of Jesus, transforming society, emphasizing communal living, and to lead without control to Post-Christendom, where the focus is on good works and social activism. In theory this idea is more of a Christian Communism (the good kind, not the red commies or anything) but is misleading with their teachings. So in closing, interesting concept, wrong values.

TBN, Televangelists, and Purple Hair

For an assignment to one of my classes I had to watch an hour of the TBN, (Trinity Broadcast Network) one of the world's largest Televangelist outreach. WARNING: The following contains boring accounts of the TBN history, if you're interested read on, if not, skip to next paragraph. The TBN was founded by Paul and Jan Crouch, and Jim and Tammy Bakker in 1973 from Ontario, California. The network didn't take off until the 1990's, having almost filed for bankruptcy on multiple occasions. Now they are stretched across the USA, and even reaching across the world.

Now, for the actual blog part, I will attempt to review the TBN from the hour I stumbled through it. One reason I say stumbled, the ads. As soon as I started watching I was assaulted with many different ads and donate buttons everywhere. I could smell the prosperity gospel from a mile away, (it was probably the Psalms perfumes they were selling) however due to problems with the website I wasn't able to watch the entire thing, and what I did get from it wasn't anything extraordinary. It was teachings from the Christian Bible (as much as I knew) and worship had "God-centered" songs, but I was left more with a lukewarm feeling than anything, a bad sermon leaves a bad taste, a good sermon gets one excited, but a lukewarm sermon just feels like "ehh" more like a classroom with a teacher drilling mindless facts into your head. Now, they did have professional preachers and the whole shebang, but it just felt like another televangelist, and nothing more. I'm not pointing the finger at those who run the TBN, nor those who watch it, but I am saying is I felt like it was just another marketer in the whole televangelist scheme.

Now, I know y'all were interested in the purple hair comment I made in the title, and that's because of this. Jan Crouch, the woman who co-founded it had a magnificent head of comically purple hair (which is quite scary if eyes are exposed to it for a long period of time) :P