Words like “poor” and “vulnerable” might have a commonly understood meaning, but that doesn’t mean that they are not debated within academia, and I have personally been a part of conversations that have gone on for DAYS about whether we should be talking about “vulnerability” or “resilience”. The point I was trying to make was that yes, terminology matters, and it can have a profound impact on the way that we do our work, but at some point we also just have to acknowledge that we need to just pick things we can work with, and that some academic debates might never be resolved.

I understand you were drawing on an extreme example in order to make the point, I guess its just a difference in viewpoint.

What I was saying was that I am drawing a bit of a distinction between “academic”, or “bookish” exercises and “practical” “on the ground” exercises (and no I don’t think those approaches are mutually exclusive, in fact I think they need to inform each other…)

If I were carrying out a research project, then sure, it would be really important to define what I meant, for methodological reasons aside from anything else. However in practice, there’s also a point at which one has to give up on the methodological debate and just *DO* something.

To give you an example…one can spend ages discussing what it means to be “poor”, “vulnerable”, “resilient” or “have capacities”, and these debates are really important because they influence thinking, methodologies, practice etc. However at the end of the day you sometimes just have to pick a definition and DO something…do you think the people of Banda Aceh in the aftermath of the tsunami cared whether the Red Cross is talking about “vulnerability” or “resilience” more? I don’t think so! The debate is important because it affects how we do our work, but these debates can also turn into a nice academic exercise, leading to paralysis, or being used as an excuse for doing nothing, if we don’t also just draw some lines and admit that this debate is going to go on forever and sometimes we just have to pick something and run with it.

I don’t blindly trust anyone. I listen to/read what they have to say, and evaluate it for myself - this will often involve reading as widely as possible and educating myself.

I don’t believe in “converting” Christianity to anything. The Good News is for all times and all places. We do, however, need to use different vocabularies and methodologies in different contexts. The way I talk about God in Vanuatu is different to the way I talk about God when I’m hanging out with people who live on the streets of inner Melbourne, and it’s different again to the way I talk about God when I’m hanging out with my friends who’ve got PhDs in biochemistry and are into Wicca. I’m not compromising Christianity, or “converting” it - I’m just acknowledging that different people and cultures have different ways of communicating. I think that some parts of the Australian church have privileged consumerism over the Gospel, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t think that it’s possible to speak into a consumeris culture in ways that are culturally accessible and relevant.

There IS some “gneeral agreement” on what “postmodern” means…just because something can be debated, and there’s exceptions, doesn’t mean it’s beyond any kind of definition. Like I pointed out about, you’d be hard put to find a definition of “modernism” that captured everything that modernism and modernity means and can mean as well.

To me its not just for the academics. When I read in the Emergent manifesto that someone is a trusted interpreter of Post-modern culture, how do I take that. Do I just trust her, like some priest of an unknown god?

When someone else says they want to do a reverse-conversion, converting Christianity to post-modern culture, what is this likely to mean in practice?

All these things are meaningless unless one has some general agreement on the terms and ideas in use. And ideas are important - they should be out there in the open.

For instance it could be argued that some pentes have reverse-converted Christianity to consumerist culture, and this is debated and analysed in this forum. I’m not against adapting to the culture, but the devil as always is in the detail.

Postmodernism is a cultural shift, and “cultures” are notoriously difficult to define (heck, what we mean when we say “culture” is notoriously difficult to define!) I don’t think postmodernism has been defined with any more or less specificity than modernism has been, and that’s the very nature of trying to define “culture”.

In page 2:
“.. the movement is so diverse as to open anyone who speaks of it as a whole to the charge of misrepresentation.”

We have to get beyond this point. These people are leaders so the argument that “we dont even agree with each other so you cant argue with us” is a bit of a cop-out.

In page 3 he argues the bit about post-modernism being the common element.

It seems to me to be very pomo to endlessly dispute the premises of arguments so as not to engage in them.

So it’s more a response to a missional challenge than a simple response to “postmodernism”… although a missional response in the West will engage with groups whose mindset is more postmodern than modern.

That’s my criticism of the article really…. I feel like he’s critiquing the EC based on a smallish sample of authors and blogs… then deciding the EC IS a response to postmodernism… and critiquing that… in my opinion the whole picture of the EC broader than this.