Saturday, April 28, 2007

Sunday Devotional? What's wrong with Emergent?

John 10:30 “I and the Father are one." (NIV)


I having trouble with the Emergent Church. It’s not the new things that are emerging, nor the innovations emergent people are making. It’s the word – emergent.

I’ve been so conditioned by gender neutrality that I can’t accept the suffix ‘gent.’ That’s a masculine term and I’m really surprised that the enlightened emergents and emerlassies are sticking with it.

So, I started to change the word. I began with emerhuman and then realized that I had the same problem – human ends with man. Well duh! Back to the drawing board.

So I tried the neutral emerperson and then it hit me – person ends with son…another masculine term!

Then I tried to settle on emerbeing, which kind of has a ring to it, but then I thought about all those who are into good works, wouldn’t they want to be called emerdoings?

That didn’t help either….I started to pronounce it as emer doing …like Gerald McBoing Boing.

So I’m left wondering should it be emerist instead of emergent, or would that cause a new schism called emerism? And what about the ‘me’ in the middle of the word? Isn’t that being selfish? Surely it should be ‘we’…which would end up looking like ewerist, but that sounds like someone who is into Greek vases, or worse still, it’s a female sheep.

So, I’m having trouble with the Emergent church. Apart from laying off the Eucharistic Koolaid, does anyone have any suggestions?

Stushie writes the daily devotional Heaven's Highway, the Sunday worship prayer site Aaron's Beard , and the weekly international religous news blog Stushie's Stuff He's also started blogachuting on Fridays on the HH site - you should try it too.

4 comments:

Stushie said...

Pappy...it's satire. It's not about the Emergent church, it's about how we get so entrenched and divided over the exact use of church language.

Stushie said...

If you get two for the price of one, send one out to me too, Pappy.

Anonymous said...

Very Funny!

Sarah Louise said...

This was great!

signed,

an emerlassie.