The Center for Action and Contemplation (CAC), located in Albuquerque, New Mexico has announced the first emergent-Catholic conference to ever be held. The name of the conference is The Emerging Church: Conversations, Convergence and Action.
On the Emergent Village website, where the event is being advertised, it states: “[T]his will be the first gathering to be planned and hosted by a team of Catholic and Protestant leaders working together for the good of the church at large.” On the Action and Contemplation website (web home of Catholic priest Richard Rohr), it also identifies the non-Catholics as “Protestants” and “Evangelicals.” However, the non-Catholic speakers would be more accurately described as emerging church leaders. The reason for this distinction is vital: Many of the leaders in the emerging church movement do not resonate with some of the most foundational doctrines of historical Protestantism and Evangelicalism (e.g., substitutionary atonement of Jesus Christ and the authority of Scripture as being the inspired word of God), thus it is erroneous for them to be called Protestant or Evangelical.
Speakers for the 2009 event, on the “emerging” side include Brian McLaren, Shane Claiborne, and Phyllis Tickle. Richard Rohr (also the director for the Center for Action and Contemplation) represents the Catholic side. Rohr’s spirituality would be in the same camp as someone like Matthew Fox (author of The Coming of the Cosmic Christ) who believes in pantheism and panentheism. Rohr wrote the foreword to a 2007 book called How Big is Your God? by Jesuit priest (from India) Paul Coutinho. In Coutinho’s book, he describes an interspiritual community where people of all religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity) worship the same God.
To understand the significance and the ramifications of the ecumenical move toward Catholicism by key Christian figures, read Roger Oakland’s Faith Undone: the emerging church – a new reformation or an end-time deception, and for a more exhaustive study on the topic, read Another Jesus: the eucharistic christ and the new evangelization.
For information on the teachings and beliefs of the conference speakers, please refer to Lighthouse Trails Research Project.
