Dan Kimball: A Revolution in Church and Teaching (EC BIOLA #1)

May 14, 2005 Posted by Roger OvertoncloseAuthor: Roger Overton Name: Roger Overton
Email: rogeroverton@hotmail.com
Site: http://ateamblog.com
About: Roger Overton is currently pursuing a Masters degree at Talbot School of Theology. He has addressed various churches, schools and youth camps throughout the United States. Roger was co-editor of The New Media Frontier (Crossway, 2008) and God and Governing (Wipf & Stock, 2009). Roger can be emailed at rogeroverton@hotmail.com.See Authors Posts (559)

This is the first in a series of blogs the A-Team will be posting from the Emerging Church conference at Biola on Friday May 13, 2005. Our goal is to capture, as accurately as possible, what was said on a topic and offer some of our own reflections. See also Melinda Penner's comments from the early morning session, Timbo's overview, and a discussion at Tall Skinny Kiwi.

My topics were Church & Homiletics/Teaching, both of which were presented on by Dan Kimball, with an address on preaching by Kent Edwards. The first presentation began with a video about communion in an emerging church. In all honesty, I didn’t get the point of the video. We were all expecting some more explanation as to what took place in the video; what it meant.

After the video Dan Kimball got up and presented on what’s going on in some emerging church services. He talked about the cross being at the center of the stage, with the preacher below it so that the focus is always on the risen Jesus. He talked about the worship band being moved from front and center to off to the side. He also went into the ancient worship being utilized through liturgy and deep theology. The gist of the talk was about the stylistic changes being made. For the most part, I think he’s right on.

Kent Edwards, a professor at Talbot, addressed the issue of some emerging leaders advocating a removal of preaching from church assembly (though he didn’t tell us who was advocating this). From Luke 4 he argued that Jesus came as a preacher. Preaching is a form of communication, which according to Edwards is more than words; it’s also genres. He said that God inspired genres as well as words. The responsibility of pastors is to make the communication of God attractive to the congregation. If the sermon is boring, then the pastor has sinned. Forms of preaching should include narratives.

Dan Kimball then commented on how he is now preaching more than ever before. He’s using more scripture more aggressively. 2 Timothy 4:2 tells us that this is essential. It is part of Kimball’s four elements of church: worship, community, missional, theology. Our primary desire, says Kimball, should be to see the Holy Spirit transform lives through the

power of God’s Word. Our preaching should be theocentric instead of anthropocentric.

The main goal of the conference, as I understand it, was to have a conversation between those within and without the emerging church movement. I didn’t think Kent Edwards, as much as I agreed with him, really represented someone critical of emerging churches. I always enjoy hearing Dan Kimball speak. Though he’s not fancy- not academically verbose like most lecturers I listen to. Perhaps what I like is simply that I agree with 99% of what he says, and I think what he says needs to be taken seriously by non-emergent leaders. Anyone who’s read my posts before knows I’m not really a fan of the emerging church movement, but if it were even generally more like Dan Kimball, I would be.

Related posts:

1. Book Review: The Emerging Church by Dan Kimball
2. Book Review: They Like Jesus but Not the Church by Dan Kimball
3. The Worship Palette (EC BIOLA #5)
4. The End of the Emerging Church
5. Epistemology and the Emerging Church (EC BIOLA #6)
6. The Need For the Body (EC BIOLA #4)

Posted in Emerging / Emergent Church, Main Page, Roger's Posts, Theology