A while ago I wrote about Doable Evangelism (DE), which is an outreach of the emerging church. In my article Doable Evangelism and the Emerging Church Are Off The Map I showed you it is a sister work with something called Off The Map. At the DE website is a piece called An Interview with Pastor Phil Wyman of the sort of church The Salem Gathering (TSG).

Ok, I’m almost done turning over the rocks that you will be up to speed here on what is going on near these shadows at the edge of the neo-liberal cult of the Emergent Church. Back in May TSG put on another little gathering:

May Conference – God for People Who Hate Church
Here’s a quick little note on a conference we are going to be doing here in Salem May 4-6.

You got it right the name of the conference is:

No joke! We are crazy enough to really do a conference with that title. Not only are we crazy enough to do that, but check out the line up!

Jay Bakker – Mr. One Punk Under God
Jim Henderson from Off-the-map.org
Listen to Jim
Tony Jones from Emergent Village

We will hold a few interesting sessions such as a dialogue with atheists, and another with some of our Pagan friends to learn what it is we do which offends the people we think we should be reaching.

We will hold an open dialogue about rethinking church, and hopefully find some unique ideas which excite our hearts.

There will be some late night movies on Friday and Saturday: Perhaps we’ll check out Jesus Camp, or Frisbee: Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher

Maybe this is too radical for you. Maybe this is just what you are looking for. (Online source)

The following Saturday May 5, 2007 edition of Podcast From The Gathering is where “Pastor Phil leads a Discussion Panel with Jim Henderson, Jay Bakker, Ken Nelson, Tony Jones, Beth Maynard, and Karen Ward.” If you’ve ever wanted to be a fly on the wall at a gathering of an emerging church, well your chance has just become *ahem* emergent.

The discussion begins with Ken Nelson of Streams Ministries International talking about the “Advanced Prophetic Ministry” of their “dream readers and seers” and how they will often go out and do free dream interpretations. Well that is, as you’ll hear, unless someone wants to hire psychics for $100 an hour, then they’ll make the sacrifice to take the cash instead.

Abbess Karen Ward, “pastor” of Church of the Apostles, informs us this Abbey is actually “a monastic church” in Seattle. The Abbess and enlightens us that “Jesus was a party crasher.” “Pastor” Beth Maynard speaks about the neo-monastic community she is a part of. It should be obvious right here that we’re witnessing a return right back into the religious bondage of apostate Roman Catholicism.

One Punk Under God Jay Bakker is on hand to talk about how his church once met in a bar called The Masquerade in Atlanta, “and it’s got three levels, heaven, hell and purgatory,” and Pastor Phil gets quite the laugh as Jay tells him they met “in hell.” And anti-theologian Tony Jones, the Emergent epitome of always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth (2 Timothy 3:7), steps in to further cloud any and every issue possible.

Although these people are currently spiritually clueless they do know the repainted social gospel and theology, such as it is, of the emerging church quite well. But the tragic truth is we are not dealing with the orthodox Christian faith here. No; rather this is a mish-mash of things roughly related to Christianity which they simply pick and choose by their own existential and highly subjective feelings about what they think God might be doing.

After listening to this the discerning Christian will hear the Voice of the Great Shepherd say – “Leave them; they are blind guides.”

You can download this sad, but highly illustrative program here.