I fond this little article very intriguing, and part of me laughs very loudly!  If you’re a techy like me, you’ll understand–but then, you’ll also have to be pretty grounded into the current happenings in the church, globally…mainly, you have to understand what i mean by the “emergent/emerging church/movement“, that has flooded so called post-modern Christianity.  there’s been quite a divide in the church, basically creating these 2 opposing sides of conservative vs emergent, you MUST be aware of this–you can’t just be stuck in your little bubble of your own church/fellowship and not realize what kind of worship you are expressing by how you live out your faith.

(For more on the “Emerging Church” click the links above, or check out this good article by D. A. Carson.  And please excuse their stupid name, it doesn’t mean that church is almost about to happen or up and coming LOL…it’s just “concerned with the deconstruction and reconstruction of Protestant Christianity in a postmodern cultural context“.)

This is my first real Conserv vs Pomo/Emergent post, so you have to know me–I am NOT an emergent.  I am a reformer, a conservative (evangelical), a Calvinist (at least 5point).  And as such, I am a bit biased towards the reformed theology.. unlike our good friend Ling-Ling, who has much pomo/emergent tendencies and thinkings.  me, i just simply admire and cherish God’s sovereign grace in all things and want to share that with everybody around me.  So anywayz, here we go. 

The Emergent Church & the iPod

BY SHANE ROSENTHAL [POSTED ONLINE:  JULY 18, 2005]

I’m very fond of my iPod. I pretty much have my entire music collection stored on my little 40gig device, and it can mix all my tunes up randomly, so that it basically becomes my own little radio station. But I have to be the first to admit that there is a downside to this new emerging technology. And that is this: because all my music is available, I have become somewhat less patient with individual songs and I often find myself reaching for the “skip to the next song” button. Why? Because listening to a song all the way through sometimes gets boring.  Skipping to the next “randomly picked track” is always exciting.

I think the Emergent church movement is sort of like my iPod. Think of it this way: the various traditions of Christendom are the music genres, and the various features of those traditions are song tracks. Now, most Christians have music libraries predominantly from one particular genre (such as Lutheran, Methodist, or Pentecostal), but emergent folks have very ecclectic collections spanning numerous genres, and all this is stored on an iPod set to “random play.” This is why one Emergent church will look and smell completely different from a sister congregation. With random play, you’ll never get the same playlist twice.

I get the sense that Emergent folks are dealing with the same issue that I am having with my iPod. Because they have the entire church tradition at their fingertips set to random play, the thing that has been exalted more than anything is the human will. What will be allowed in today’s playlist? Why are we skipping past this track in favor of the next?  Perhaps it’s not the really the “music” itself, but “change” that we’re ultimately after. Or maybe we simply love being the authors of our own playlists.

One final observation. The Emergent church iPod does appear to come pre-loaded with various music genres (Anglican, Evangelical, Medieval Catholic, Anabaptist, Reformation, Eastern Orthodox, etc), but for some reason, who ever owns the device appears to have a propensity for playing Anabaptist and Medieval tracks all the way through, while often skipping straight past Reformation tunes. Go figure.

Source: http://www.modernreformation.org/btt.htm#btt071805