Doug Pagitt has gone from an evangelical youth pastor at a megachurch, to a slightly left of center staff member at Leadership Network to the ultra liberal "pastor" of Solomon's Porch.
Pagitt does not "preach" during the services at the "church" but leads a"conversation" of young people seated on couches in a circle.
Tony Jones opines in his book "The New Christians" that today people are so-well educated that it is unnecessary for a community to be "preached at" and that it is arrogant, unhelpful, yada yada yada for some one to date to speak to a group for 30-40 minutes (this despite the fact that in any public gathering I've ever attended where Jones was near a mike, the Weezer wanna be wouldn't shut up!).
I tried such an approach while pastoring a church at the foot of Cornell University and filled with Ivy League students. It didn't work. Even though the participants were obviously very well educated, they were also bone ignorant when it came to matters of the faith. The more leftist stream of the emergent church who propose these kind of weird "innovations" are so trapped in their own sub-culture that they are often more blinded by it then the most conservative evangelical complete with the wife with a napkin on her head, home schooled kids who look like they walked off the set of "Children of the Damned" and a tribulation bomb shelter filled with Tim LaHaye books.
FYI, Tony & Doug, not everyone has the time or the ability to sit around all day reading Walter Brueggemann while their wives are at work to pay for an extensive theological library!
