Joey Yokeley

We Made The Paper ! ?

// May 28th, 2009 // Uncategorized

We made the front section of the journal today.  Click here to read.

Being in the media as a church is always a scary thing.  For the most part, the article was very good.  It represented our vision as a church and our desire to be active and love the community.  However, there are a couple key areas of concern I want to address now.

First, the article links us to something called “the emergent church.”  The paper got the dean of WF divinity school to comment on us and he links us to “the emergent church.”  Let’s be straight – We Are Not An Emergent Church!  As you can see, I am a little passionate about this.  The emergent church is a collection of churches trying to do a lot of the same new stuff we do with technology and being in the community.  That part of the article is true.  But that’s about as far down the road we go together.  The emergent church has continued down the road of change so far that they have also opened up the basic tenents of the Christian faith to debate.   Many emergent churches would no longer even be considered Christian by many evangelicals.

The River Church is an evangelical church that stands on the core doctrines of the Christian faith.  From those core doctrines we will not be moved.  If you spend some time at The River, that should be quite apparent.  We stand firm on the Bible as God’s Word and we believe that the only way to salvation is through Jesus death on the cross.  I just want to be clear on that!

Second, A caption above the article states that we are “Evangelism Free”  Now I know that they are refering to the coffee shop here, but let’s be clear that we are not evangelism free.  We are very much evangelism full, even at the coffee shop.  We just choose not to get in peoples faces and scream at them about Jesus.  We live out our faith and when the Spirit promtps us we use our words to share about Christ’s love for us.

Now, other than the above, I think the article is great!  Thanks to the WS Journal for coming out and writing about us.  If you have any questions about the article or The River Church please feel free to comment to this post or contact the church.  Our contact info is available at Riverchurchlive.com