Proclaimer Blog
EMA unity 2015
We’ve now finalised the EMA line up and seminar streams for 2015. We’re at the Barbican again from 22-24 June, back in our normal slot and hoping to see many of you there. As with other conferences, even if you don’t book now, it’s good to plan to be there. Try freeing up three days in May and it’s an impossible task. Do it now, and it’s manageable.
I love the EMA. You might expect I would say that, but even before I worked at PT Towers, I loved it. Not every session hits the mark every time for every pastor – and I certainly found that from time to time certain sessions resonated more than others. That’s the nature of conferences. But the setting of the EMA made that almost (not quite) an irrelevance.
For the EMA is one of the few gatherings in the UK where evangelicals from different backgrounds and ages and churches come together. It could be even more so – and we’re always thinking about that – but we’ve always said it’s a useful by-product that people from different churches meet in this way.
I’m increasingly convinced that it’s more than a useful by product but an essential element of what goes on. We need our distinctives. My own convictions are of Independency and I rejoice in those and want to find time to meet those who share them. But I contend that if that is our only interaction we will be poorer for it. So a gathering like the EMA serves the cause of Christ by seeking to see preachers built up: but it also serves the cause of Christ quietly, gently, promoting a gospel unity that cannot be manufactured, but is real and tangible.