Back to Our Regular Programming

I'm sorry for the delay in responding. Much like your week last week, ours has been crazy here. But, alas, we are back at it again. Due to the hour and the need to treat this topic with care, my post may be incomplete but stay tuned for future episodes which may or may not explain more!

Anyway, on with the show. You asked about the "emerging church" and we will get to that but in somewhat of a roundabout way. Again, I ask you to consider the hour. We can only pray that lucid thoughts will come. Let us begin with your musings upon holistic living, integrating the practice of yoga in particular, and the antagonistic response you received by your Baptist neighbors.

Protestant Christianity has done much to run from it's roots in the ancient church and Catholicism in particular. Ever since the Reformation when Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door in Wittenburg, a great rift has separated the Catholic church from the Protestant. In recent years, particularly after the changes made at Vatican II, the Catholic Church has become far more accepting of their Protestant brothers and sisters, regarding them as true members of the Church and subsequently of the family of God. The Protestant side of the deal hasn't been as welcoming, however. Much superstition and lore surrounds the practices of the Catholic Church. Foreign terms, new imagery, and theoretically divergent theological leanings separate the two. The problem here is that these suppostions are based in ignorance.

This ignorance is not unlike what you're experiencing in good old Lake City. These people are afraid of what they don't know. A human's natural tendency is to be exclusionary. We like the idea that we're in, we know how to get it, and are therefore the gatekeepers. We don't like the idea that it's more complex than that. In all honesty, much of Protestant Christianity is built upon some ground that has become far removed from what it was intended to be.

Okay, I really want to keep going with this but, well, I'm falling asleep and have to be up early tomorrow morning. I'm honestly not sure if this even makes sense thus far but I wanted to keep the conversation going. Tomorrow I'll post some more and clue you in a bit more about the entity known as the "emerging church".

- andy