In all the buzz and hubbub of the emerging church (a mostly Western/Northern world thing), the voices of the Church Emerging in the global South have not been heard. This is the focus of my school research, so I was delighted to read this:

The rumble of the drums and the joyful voices of our brothers and sisters from the Emerging World are getting louder and louder each minute. With all due respect, dear brothers and sisters from the west and north, you’ve been speaking for quite awhile. Now it is your time to show some humility and listen. [read more]

Good words. May they - and the ears to hear - increase.

Labels: culture, emerging church, Global South, Seattle

Those of you who know me, or have been tracking with this blog over the past couple of years know that much of my work has involved building a thing we're calling inter::mission. It's a dream that began before I was hired into my position, so I don't take credit for it, except that I've had the fun of giving vision and some structure to it. I won't go through everything that's involved (you can learn more about it on the inter::mission website if you want). Basically, it's a live-in experience for students (and a few non-students) which attempts to re-orient life around our identity in the Kingdom of God, and our joining with God in mission.

About two years ago I began work on this thing, and have been working to build it ever since. It's morphed a few times from its original form, but we officially kicked the thing off a little more than two weeks ago. One of the things it involves is a weekly "family meal" on Thursday nights. We eat together, hang out together, and talk about life together. On alternating weeks, following the family meal, we have teach-ins around Kingdom and mission. My goal is to primarily utilize guest speakers for these teach-ins. In Seattle, we have access to so many innovative, catalytic, super smart people who are actually practitioners, so we're able to make this happen.

Last night, we were honored with a visit from Karen Ward, Abbess of Church of the Apostles, as our first outside speaker/conversation leader. She talked a bit through the history and ethos of COTA, and about urban monasticism in their context. It was a really good time for the students. Definitely stimulating and challenging. She talked about the way they approach their neighborhood, Fremont, with the mentality that their whole zip code "belongs" to the church/parish, and how it's the role of the members of the church to serve and minister to the church, regardless of belief, lifestyle, affiliation, or status. Good stuff. Karen is such a humble, kind, and warm person, but with focus, creativity, and the best kind of leadership skill.

The past couple of years, and especially the past few months have been such a busy, maddening sprint to get this dream fleshed out and ready to go. And trust me, we're far from embodying a ton of what we have in mind. We're a small, quiet bunch right now, and continuing to add students to the mix little by little. But last night, as I sat and listened to Karen, and looked around the room, I got the sense that yes, this thing is really happening. It was one of those beautiful moments that wasn't self-satisfaction, but thankfulness for God's blessing and gifts. I'm really glad I got to be a part of this, and watch it develop. I'm even more glad that I get to continue helping nurture it and be a part of it.

Our vision for inter::mission is to help liberate young adults to experientially own their missional vocation. This is where we begin.

I've blogged recently about how easy it is to get caught up in the negative side of critique - especially those who are in any way affiliated with the emerging church vibe. There's a role for it, but talk is cheap if we're not actually paying attention to building a better way forward. For as long as God gives it to me, inter::mission is my humble contribution.

Labels: blogging, emerging church, friends, inter::mission, Seattle, the purple door

For the past several months, I've been supposedly preparing a revamping of my blog with different content, different layout, different blogging engine. As it turns out, I've been so cranking busy that that project has been placed on the perpetual back burner. Quite honestly, I'm beginning to wonder if the burner even works at this point . . .

HOWEVER, yesterday, whether intentionally or unintentionally, a good friend (you know who you are) pointed out something that I've been chewing on personally for a few months now. It goes something like this: those of us who run in emerging church circles can be a cranky, angry lot. Oh sure, we might have a better sense of humor and feel more relaxed than when we were in the mainstream of the evangelipseudofundmentlismo factory. But in the midst of all of our critiques of church culture, modernity, consumerism, etc., it's very often easier to know what we oppose, or what we're pissed off about, than what we're for. Sometimes it gets to the point that an outside observer would rightly wonder why we even bother with all this, anyway. As a note to said outside observer: most of us have asked that question more times than we can count.

But really, don't we want to be known for something other than our critiques? Don't we believe in a Story that is so good, so rich, so powerful that we decided to organize our whole lives around it? Isn't our faith in the God-man, Jesus, and his Kingdom vision something that stirs our hearts? Isn't our love for Christ's bride a calling to something good, rather than something we wish we could escape?

Let me be clear: I'm guilty of cranky critique and a bad attitude. I too often get lost in seeing a need for change, and lose my vision for a better way forward. I have a bad attitude.

So perhaps I'll try to launch that new version of my blog after all, except with a more positive mindset. Not some pep-talk, toothless, feel-good mantra fest or anything. And not necessarily a place free from critique. But a place where I can point to the good things that are going on, even in the middle of difficulty. A place I can freely display the hope that I have for the things to come.

That's all.

Labels: blogging, Christendom, emerging church, friends

Andrew Jones is at it again with another critic of the emerging church - this time it's John MacArthur. I haven't read his book, so I won't comment . . . but Andrew did read the book, and has a stellar review here. Quite funny, generous, and fair.

Labels: blogging, books, emerging church

For those of you who read this blog and don't know me, let me just state something that's fairly obvious to those of you who do - I'm a geek . . . but about obscure, mostly irrelevant things. The traditional image of Geek (notice the formal capitalization there) is someone who hovers over their computer keyboard, typing code, and taking occasional breaks to play World of Warcraft. I'm not that kind of geek. However, because I believe geeky technology - especially that of the computer variety - will continue to shape our culture, relationships, economy, justice, education, and religion, I have a few techy blogs in my feedreader.

This morning, one of them, Robert Scoble, posted a short ditty trying to define Web 2.0. In the tech world, lots and lots of people throw that term around, companies develop business strategies around it, investors throw down huge bucks for it . . . but not very many people can actually tell you what it means. A lot of people use the term in ways that make web developers want to pull their hair out, because they're so off base. Scoble gives the ol' college try this way:
Web 1.0 was about pages. URLs.
Web 2.0 was about users. Adding them onto corporate pages. Wikis. Blogs. Myspaces.
Web 3.0 is about getting rid of pages altogether. Being able to make the Web YOU want or need.

But, Scoble also links to another tech geek blogger who muses on the question. Different responses over there. Whatever the case, I've gotten the distinct impression that most web developers would say something like, "I can't define Web 2.0 for you, but I know it when I see it."

So now I come to the question: What is missional? Lots of people are using the term these days in the Church. Few could give you a concise definition if you asked them. A lot of people would give answers that seem well off the mark. A lot would say, "I can't define missional, but I know it when I see it." There are increasing attempts out there by some very smart people to define it in clear ways . . . but the ones who say, "I know it when I see it," may not even care - it's more about living into it than defining it. Ultimately, there will be people who don't "get" missional, but say the word all the time. Frustrating or not, it's still more about living into it than having some sort of linguistic power over definitions.

Labels: culture, emerging church, missiology

At the conference I attended at University of Aarhus last week, I very quickly noticed that I was the only person there that didn't have some sort of affiliation with some form of the Lutheran church. There were faculty members from a few "public" universities in Denmark and Sweden, but by virtue of these countries having state-endorsed churches, they're connected. Also, a couple of participants were there from the Lutheran World Federation mothership in Geneva.

I had one very interesting discussion over lunch with a couple of professors - one of whom has served at very high levels in the World Council of Churches. I was asked about the nature of the emerging church movement in North America, so we talked about that for a while. We also talked about the degree to which this kind of a renewal movement would be possible/likely within the Scandinavian context. They didn't give the emerging church much of a shot at bringing about renewal - at least not within the state church. In large part, they said, it's because if you start messing around with the ways they do church, you're literally messing around with the ways they do citizenship in the country. Wow - very different. Interestingly (frighteningly?), one comment was made to the effect of, "You can deny the resurrection of Jesus, deny the virgin birth, deny the Trinity, but don't you dare mess with baptism because that's how citizenship is sealed."

Is it any wonder that while everyone "belongs" to the church, virtually nobody shows up? Not to these professors. They're in an interesting position, though - they are not officially employed by the church, so they don't fear for the loss of their jobs, and yet they're able to make some critiques based on their observations.

I actually do have a bit more hope for the emerging church viability than my learned friends. Mainly because of the decidedly non-Christendom approach that the emerging church ethos involves. It won't require or significantly involve the state church to make it work. Tony Jones' recent trip to Scandinavia is a good example of some connections being made.

Within the context of a conference discussing the church in the global south and east, it's more than a little ironic to me that the theological conversation is still very Euro-American centric, despite the fact that the church is far more alive in the south and east than in the west. It's validated some of the directions of my doctoral work, but also potentially significantly shifted the practical focus of my work. I'm still chewing on some thoughts in that regard, but maybe I'll put some sentences together here in the days to come.

Labels: Christendom, conference, culture, emerging church, travel