emergent self-portrayal

Hello all,
My name is Stephen Miracle and this is my first post to the blog. I was invited into the mix out of Ginkworld's forum. It is in sincere hope, that I might be able to contribute as I at the same time absorb the conversation brewing in here...
For my first entry I want to rant about my personal entrance into emergent and a view about it now. About a year ago, I had read a ChristianityToday article about the Emergent Church with Brian McLaren. I did not know anything about him, so I began to read attentively. In the few pages that were given whole concepts were given that rang true from my own experiences. The day after reading the article I bought "The Story we Find ourselves in", and "A New Kind of Christian". They were honest with good questions dealing with the modern church.
Maybe it is just me, but when I came into emerging life it wasn't because it is Postmodern. It was because the views being portrayed seemed real, biblical, and true. One of these affirming views was a redirection of the outlook of our faith. Our faith is not something that can be laid out in objective belief's. Instead, it is something living and breathing. We hope that we believe the right way, but it is the relationship and the journey which is important.
This idea of living in faith and emphasis not on beliefs but relationships was not something extremely held deep in the modern church. The emergent views is something that I believe is biblical and real. Since my first initial readings, I have become quite involved in emerging thought. But there has been something that has been bugging me lately... The way we portray ourselves to the modern church and to the world.
First, we say to the modern church that we do not believe that they are wrong. Instead we just are recontextualizing some theology and methodologies to better fit our own perspective. I do not agree with phrasing ourselves as this., because I do believe the modern church has gotten it wrong. Their overrationalizations, proof-texts, and systematic theologies just make me want to shoot them. I have to pray for forgiveness every time I speak to one :). Whether one is a conservative or liberal modern Christian, they believe that God can be made into a logical sequence.
Next, we say that our focus is to be a church with a postmodern philosophy for the postmodern generation. This is the one that really gets me going. While it might be true, that we do have postmodern philosophies, and we probably do speak to the larger outside of the faith postmoderns better than the modern churches, our focus was not on creating a new strategy to reach a particular audience. At least for me, coming to emergent it wasnt. I think in deconstructing our modern faiths we have managed to start a faith that naturally flows towards those who are of postmodern minds...