This morning does not permit a lengthy post, but I will combine today’s idea with today’s particular vocation, of “performing the gospel” with the “Lord’s Day.”

I’m also struggling with my son’s Safari browser as it does not appear to enable me to edit much on this post.

The “post” in the “post”modern and the Emerging movement among Christians all over the world is a “post” that says they want to get beyond a kind of evangelicalism that is rooted and shaped by and characterized by “truth claims” to a kind of Christianity that moves beyond “truth claims” to “truth proclaims.” A kind of Christian faith that is centrally a kind of Christian life, a kind of Christian gospel that is proclaimed by performance. A kind of Christian faith that sees its focus in the mission to incarnate and embody and perform the gospel in the local community because the call of Jesus, found eloquently in the Sermon on the Mount, is to “be” a people.

While it would be foolhardy for me to think I am speaking for others, what I see in this new kind of Christian life is that its truth claims are truths proclaimed by the performance of the gospel by a local community. Its truths are what it proclaims.

The local church is always an embodiment of the gospel it claims to proclaim. Always. What you see is what you get, in spite of what is being said or announced or proclaimed from pulpit or Sunday School class or in doctrinal statements. What is seen is the performance and what people see is what they will get. Regardless of the doctrinal statement, the community will see how those Christians live and will equate what they see being lived with what they really believe.

Emerging Christians accept this “phenomenological approach to ecclesiology”: that is, it knows that a church’s truth claims are that church’s truth “proclaims” in its performance.

One of the reasons, so it seems to me, the younger generation of evangelicals wants to move beyond its past is because it does not think local churches had enough “truth proclaims by performance” in its “truth claims by articulation.” Here we find one of the real “posts” in this movement.