And emerging church hypocrites continue their whimsical whining e.g. over at the Emergent blog One Hand Clapping in this polite hit piece Motivation or Ridicule?:

So the blog buzz over the weekend were the anti-emergent motivational posters and then Emerging Grace’s beautiful response. She took what was an attempt to tear down others, and focused on the true message of the gospel. I found the anti-emergent set to be disturbing and cruel and not just because I disagree with the sentiments they express.

Some of them just completely miss the point of the emerging conversation which I hope is the result of ignorance and not malicious misrepresentation (one can always hope right?), but others demonstrate seriously harmful attitudes of prejudice and intolerance. While of course many who like these posters are the types that uphold intolerance as a Christian virtue (its all about the hate man), they so miss the point of the Christian message it’s not even funny.

These words were written by Julie Clawson whose husband Mike was one of the planners of the Mideast Emergent “Gathering”, which by the way also happens to be a term Wiccans use as well to describe their own meetings. I had brought up MEG in the post Pyromaniacs “Postmodern” Posters over at my Christian Research Net website. Mike Clawson took exception to that piece on his Emerging Pensees:

Update: Oh, and you know you’ve “arrived” in the emerging church world when you’re trashed by Ken Silva. I’m glad to see our event made it onto his EC-bashing radar.

More than pleased to help shine the light on this darkness Mike. Now a while back I wrote The Emergent Road to Universalism and Emergent Church: Emerging Panentheism which concern Spencer Burke, a well known voice in the Emergent Church, and exposes his universalism and his panentheism only to be told that he doesn’t speak for Emergent. Uh-huh, right.

Well then, let our friend Mike Clawson set the record straight:

We wrapped up the conference with a fiery and prophetic set of exhortations from Spencer Burke, who encouraged us not to get bogged down with creating ecclesial empires or big structures, but to begin reimagining a whole new way of being the light of the world in our postmodern cultural context.

I was especially touched by his closing comments about coming back to the heart of God and just remembering the love that our Father has for all of us as he holds us close to his breast (like a parent holds a newborn infant). It was the perfect note to end the conference on.

I close this with a bit of alternative advice for leaders within the neo-liberal cult of the Emergent Church–e.g. Tony Jones and his pastor Doug Pagitt–who were part of this MEG conference, as well as for other emerging church semi-pelagian people-pleasers like Erwin McManus and Rob Bell: If you can’t take the heat then you’d best get out of the kitchen of the actual Church of Jesus Christ. You see, “soon” it’s going to get mighty hot up in here…

O yes Lord, send us Thy fire…