How (Not) to Speak of God

"Church Times" article on Greenbelt 2005 described Peter Rollins as 'holding a seminar spellbound', and Ikon's 'gentle, symbolic, and creative multimedia act of worship' as 'weird but wondrous'. The emerging church is still an embryonic movement, yet it currently faces a serious challenge. How it responds will reveal whether it is little more than the latest re-imagining of the evangelical tradition, designed to address the decline in church attendance, or a radical re-envisaging of faith. Having been born out of a post-modern sensitivity, Peter Rollins believes the emerging church is in a unique place to acknowledge the long forgotten insight that revelation embraces concealment; that our various interpretations of revelation will always be provisional, fragile and fragmentary; that we speak always with wounded words about a wounded Christ. The emerging church thus has the potential to leave aside the security blanket of certainty and recognize that what is important is that we embrace the beloved rather than somehow agree about how we understand this beloved, acknowledging that the God we follow touches us in deeply personal ways that are singular and which cannot be dissected via some universal understanding. "How (not) to Speak of God's" sustained exploration of the theory and praxis of emerging church is firmly anchored in an analysis of twelve Ikon services, on topics such as: 'The Prodigal Father', 'Risk' and 'Advent'.