Finding Out Your an Emerging Church Person

I gave up reading evangelical books in the 80s, too much self help, too much ahistoricity, too much appropriated corporate and freudian thinking, and too much trust in logic. So i stayed with the Bible, and the old stuff, and read history, economics, and philosophy instead. About five years ago I went to a wedding of my best friend, and had dinner with, two Jews, two Hindus, a converted Jewish Christian and a quitesential evangelical who was the head of world wide missions for the Free Churches of America (my favorite denomination to use as a punching bag).

After 90 minutes of discussion of Hillel, the talmud, the Rigveda, and confucian thought (Mr evangelical said nothing during this entire dinner conversation), I turned the discussion to
Christ and his assertions. At that moment MrE turned to me and said "what are you?", I asked him "what do you mean?" He said he thought I was "into Eastern Philosophy", and I told him that I was (i'm also into Lattes btw). His confusion continued, because I was representing Christ's message, so I told him I was a Christian, this confused him even more, how do you know that other stuff, why do you talk about it - he asked. I told him because I am interested in people and what they think and believe. He then asked me what kind of Christian I was, and I hesitated, other than "heretical", I never really had a label on where I had arrived at philosophically/spirtually. So I said "post-evangelical". He asked me what that was, and I said "picking up the pieces of the last 50 nightmare years is what that is".

When the Hindus told him that they supported "Focus On the Family", he nearly he had a coronary. I told him that marriage and family were universals, lots of people were "into families". Two years later somebody talked to me about the emerging church. Thankfully I never saw him again.

What I like about the really good emerging people (Fitch & Franke come to mind) is that they are trying to understand where the people/culture are and speak to it. In my past experiences of evangelicalism I felt there was a HUGE effort to define what they should become inside some fantastical institutional/cultural mileau centered around 1950 Levitown or something, and to get them there I had some kind of MentalLogic/Incantation to do with them. How does one have a conversation and relationship in this I wondered.

When I talk about the Maronite Catholic Church, worshiping in Arabic, and using Allah
as the name for God, things can get ugly in evangelical america, but tell me this isn't worship of the Triune God at least personally for the singer

http://tr.youtube.com/watch?v=LEtboCk_9BE

There is a little more out there then what is in the Evangelical books, I suspect that simply don't have a big enough imagination and don't want to leave their carefully controlled arenas of experience. This is probably akin to the white western missionary showing up in your favorite missionary country where the "natives" need to be taught the proper sexual postion - man on top aka "the missionary position".