Terry Pruitt's Blog

There seems to be a repentance from ever saying anything positive about Francis Schaeffer in the Article, Not Your Father's L'Abri . The article covers the changes in thinking at the L'Abri ministry and the drift of questions from those original visitors asked. Interesting, but why must American's view historical figures, recent or distant past, from the point of view that debunking them is the best way to understand them. We can debunk all history makers by talking about lack of depth in thinking in some area, leadership style, lack of vision, and legacy problems. These criticisms are true of all leaders except the Divine One. Schaeffer planted, someone else water, but God is giving the increase. Why not see Schaeffer's legacy as being a part of a tapestry, complex and beautiful, that God is building in his kingdom? Interpreting Schaeffer's legacy is of course something that is very difficult to do. He had good and bad, strengths and weaknesses. Did Go...

I would like to direct your attention to an article by Reclaiming the Mind Ministries. Basically the post is about the differences between fundamentalists, evangelicals, emerging, and emergent. The charts are instructive but I will let you go to the posting Comparing Fundamentalist, Evangelicals and Emergers to see the charts. The basic idea is two fold, what can you know and what is essential. As a side note, I'm with Patton that I'm not ready to disassociate myself with the term evangelical. For that matter, I'm not ready to disassociate myself from the term fundamentalist. Even though evangelical or emerging would better describe my position.

I wrote a paper about the Emerging Church for seminary several years ago. At the time, Emergent and Emerging were not used in the same distinction as they are now. I see them as different forms of the same root, but usage dictates meaning, not history or assignment of meaning. There is an excellent article about the Emergent and Emerging church at the blog Reclaiming the Mind Ministries called Would The Real Emerger Please Stand Up . It is not clear to me where the chart came from but I find it helpful. I'm including these charts from the post here. This first chart shows the range of beliefs in Christianity. I would guess that the author would not be attempting to show that each grouping is as large or historically important as the next one, just the spectrum of belief conveniently boiled down to nice categories. Then he zooms into a section to further discuss the messiness of it all. I'm not quite sure everyone would like their assigned categories, but of course that i...