Podcasting the church

Go ahead an grab podcast #9 at Outchurched with Ryan King’s interview with Greg Horton, who writes at The Parish.

Note: the blog and podcast starts from an (former, I suppose) Evangelical — Nazarene and Southern Baptist — non-churchgoing leadership perspective. An odd concept the first time but stay with me.

It starts off with the rhubarb that has been troubling many a Unitarian Universalist: how to keep the kids once they go off to college. Interested?

Well, it is worth listening for this reason alone but Ryan and Greg wander off to matters of general disfunction in the church. Some are matters shared with Unitarian Universalists, others aren’t, and still others we suffer the opposite effect. One matter of note is how consumer-oriented and self-actualizing (rather than missional or service-oriented) most Evangelicals really are. And so are we. The alternative is to gather with those who share a basic meta-narrative; here the Christian meta-narrative stands above all others, where we war between the culture of the self and pluralism for the hell of it. But if I said they stood against dogmatism, what would you think?

The podcast is about thirty-five minutes long and a substantial download if you don’t have broadband but well worth it. For the non-seminary-educated (or long-ago graduates) keep a pen and paper handy: they offer up a litany of valuable writers in the field.