I have been too busy to keep up my normal blogging pace, but will get back to that soon. In the meantime, let me mention a couple of things coming up on Thursday.

Tomorrow, Eric Geiger will be by the blog to answer questions from his newest book, Identity: Who You Are in Christ I will post his interview early in the morning and he will be answering questions all day. Feel free to drop by.

Also, if you are around Chicago, be sure to come by Trinity Evangelical Divinity School for an afternoon conference (open to the community). I will be teaching on the missional church. Info is here.

Let me add that Trinity is a remarkable school and I am quite pleased with my time here. I will be talking more about the school and why you should come here!

Here are some of my notes from class today.

I would like to suggest that what evangelicals need is an adequate ecclesiology if they are to discover resources to deal with the longstanding problems that the critics have identified and quite ably analyzed... Now, many evangelicals are aware of their ecclesiological deficit. In fact, one of the recurring criticisms of evangelicalism is that it has no adequate ecclesiology (p.11 Liturgical Theology The Church Worshiping Community, Simon Chan, InterVarsity Press Downers Grove Ill, 2006)

Two quotes from Husbands and Treier

Both the best and worst of evangelical ecclesiology are rooted in the passionate evangelical commitment to mission. This engenders flexibility that contributes significantly to the accusation that evangelicals do not have an ecclesiology. We do - but our ecclesiology is so flexible that it is difficult at times to identify an effective one. (p.70, The community of the Word; toward an evangelical ecclesiology Mark Husbands and Daniel J. Treier, editor. InterVarsity Press, 2005).

The strength of evangelicalism is its willingness to adapt its practices to the demands of Christian mission. The weakness is its willingness to neglect our identity within the people of God. An improvisational ecclesiology recognizes the demands of adaptation and faithfulness, committing us to both. We must learn properly to confess in word and deed that the church is one, holy, catholic and apostolic. But what those marks mean in particular times and places requires discernment under the guidance of the Spirit. (The community of the Word, p. 71).

From my fellow Southeastern faculty member John Hammett:

A great number of churches in North America are undergoing radical changes as they take new forms and new approaches and move in new directions. But the new forms, approaches, and directions are anything but monolithic. Formerly, if a church identified itself as Baptist, or Presbyterian, or Methodist, one knew pretty much the stance of that church. Such labels are no longer sufficient, or even that helpful. Is the church traditional, contemporary, seeker driven, postmodern? Is it a megachurch, a house church, a cell church, a metachurch? (John S. Hammett, Biblical Foundations for Baptist Churches. Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, page 302-303.)

And, one from Shelley who cautioned two decades before the most recent explosion of evangelical innovation:

It should be a source of deep concern to evangelicals that while professing faith in an infallible Bible, they have produced so few worthy books on the Biblical doctrine of the church. (Bruce Shelley, Evangelicalism in America (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967), p. 124.)

And one more for good measure from Howard Snyder:

In Paul's thought the body is not a simile for the church. The church is not merely like a body. The church does not merely resemble a body in its diversity, unity, and interdependence. It is the body of Christ, who is its head. Every member of the body is, in a mystical sense, a part of Christ. (Christianity Today Magazine, online article: Editor's Bookshelf: Biology Class for the Church, Howard Snyder maps the genome of the body of Christ, David Neff, posted 11/01/2002).

Have a great Wednesday.