Last night i went to see the evangelist J.John at the Manchester Velodrome with my new church. Now, personally I react against anything like this, so i need to practice generosity when critiquing what happened... J. John spoke well was funny, engaging and used a good number of analogies to get his point across. At the end of the evening he did an altar call type thing and asked for people to turn to Christ and a number did, as well as a number of re-dedications...
Okay here are my issues...
1 - Doctrine of atonement based solely of Penal substitution, nothing was mentioned about incarnation and resurrection. This therefore presents a particular theology of atonement that preys on guilt...
2 - Have the evangelists bottled it? Why don't they just go for fresh conversions, rather than adding the rededication bit? One critique of the emerging church is that we're too focused on the de-churched...for me this was more about the de-churched than the non-churched. I think that the rededication bit is important, but noticed that most people who i knew who were standing at that part were good Christian people...
3 - Free Gift if you stand...is the gift of eternal life not enough?
4 - Christian subculture - don't you just hate it! A subculture that the majority of my non-Christian friend would be extremely suspicious of.
5 - Why does it always have to be slick and success based? We heard nothing of failure brokenness and the struggle of faith. I honestly think that to engage missionally with the emerging generation then it needs to be more about the honesty of our brokenness.
But it works for lots of people...and maybe this is about a diverse number of approaches to mission. This is one approach of many...
Technorati Tags: Ben Edson, Evangelism, mission, J.John
