Category: Emerging Church

Closer to Fine – Wild Goose 2013

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“I’m trying to tell you something about my life
Maybe give me insight between black and white
The best thing you’ve ever done for me
Is to help me take my life less seriously, it’s only life after all”
– Closer to Fine, Indigo Girls

I didn’t know if I could do Wild Goose this year. After Mike informed me at the beginning of the summer that our marriage of 13+ years was over, life was turned upside down. I was in shock. I went into survival mode. I haven’t been able to write and I barely knew how to put into words the turmoil I was going through. The idea of going to the Wild Goose, intended to be our family vacation this year, was overwhelming. I’ve always been a private, reserved person emotionally – which has usually simply been code for not being real. But somehow I knew that I couldn’t go to the Wild Goose this year and not be real. For once, to not refrain from being open and honest and fully myself. It’s just that sort of gathering – raw and dismantling.

Wild Goose has been a place where for the last couple of years I have found hope. Hope for the community that despite not knowing if or what it believes still calls itself the body of Christ, but more importantly hope that a better world is indeed possible. The nature of a festival moves one beyond pretense and comfort, where it is easier to see that there is good at work in the world despite the apathy and ignorance that usually cloud our vision. I caught glimpses of that hope this year, but in all honesty I didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to grasp hold of those glimpses as they flickered by. Everything was simply too close to allow hope and revolution to capture my imagination this year.

I needed something far more basic. I needed the fantastic community of friends I have developed over the past decade, but whom I only get to see maybe once or twice a year at these events. I needed long conversations over beer, late-night dance parties in the mud, and hot-tubbing until the wee small hours of the morning. I needed to laugh and let go enough to be able to see how deeply real and deeply absurd it was to be up on a stage caked in mud fielding questions about how to talk to teens about masturbation and how BDSM challenges the dangers of patriarchy.

And I needed to stand in a field Saturday evening singing along with the Indigo Girls, as loudly as I could, the lyrics to Closer to Fine and discover that I actually meant them.

148On Friday I had gathered at the beer tent for one of my favorite Wild Goose traditions – Beer & Hymns. Believers and skeptics join together over beer to sing with that wonderful mix of awe, irony, nostalgia, and anger the classic robust hymns of the Christian tradition. Yet not even with a wistful nostalgia could I join in on singing It is Well with My Soul. Of course it is not well with my soul. And the very lines that “thou hast taught me to say it is well with my soul” represent the very aspects of the faith world that I fear the most these days. I’m done being told what to believe, what to feel, how to act, how to process, how to package things up in meaningless but convenient packages. I’m done parroting the faith equivalent of “I’m fine” just because it is expected of me. That pull to appear to accept that all is well kept me from treating my depression for years. I don’t play that game anymore.

But amidst the community at Wild Goose, I found that while I could not sing It is Well with My Soul, I could sing Closer to Fine.

That despite my tendencies to overthink, overanalyze, internalize, and take everything far too seriously I am able to let go enough to just be. Some days that means be okay, other days, be a complete mess. And that’s okay.

So thank you Wild Goose for letting me dance in a field and realize – “There’s more than one answer to these questions pointing me in crooked line. The less I seek my source for some definitive, the closer I am to fine.”

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Emerging in Hope

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Following the Emergence Christianity gathering a few weeks ago, there have been numerous conversations on blogs, podcasts, and Facebook around the nature of the conversation and who exactly gets to define it. I don’t want to rehash the arguments here nor do I have time for the ill-informed “the emerging church is dead” comments. The world has changed and the church (whether it likes it or not) is changing with it as it has always done. Yes, there were those who claimed the label “emerging” because it was the latest fad and there are those still trying to apply it like a veneer to a dying institution, but what is happening around the world is far larger than any one manifestation of the phenomenon.

But responding to change is never easy. When it is obvious that the way things have been done are no longer working one has the option of simply staking one’s claim in the past or adapting to the new situation. Yet to adapt implies the uncertainty of change and that can lead to fear. Fear of the unknown, yes, but also fear that in making changes we will just be repeating the same mistakes that have come before.

In the midst of all these discussions on emergence, I came across this passage in Anselm Min’s The Solidarity of Others in a Divided World that helped clarify the situation for me –

William James once spoke of two attitudes toward truth and error. One attitude is that of the sceptic, who is driven by an obsessive fear of falling into error and does not want to believe in anything except of sufficient evidence. The other is the attitude of the pragmatist, who is more driven by the hope of finding truth than by the fear of falling into error and is therefore willing to risk even believing in error in order to find truth. Deconstruction is more like the sceptic than the pragmatist. It is fundamentally fearful of all determinate embodiments of human sociality in history because of the terror of the same. It may offer prayers and tears for the coming of the wholly other and its messianic justice, but it does not want to dirty its hands by working at establishing determinate institutions of religion and politics. In the name of differance it flees, in neognostic fashion, from the historical determinacy of matter, body, senses, objectivity, and sociality; from the world of presence, identity, and totality; and takes refuge in the dream of the impossible. (44)

While I would not be so quick to dismiss the need for deconstruction, I see the danger of getting caught up in its cycle of fear. It is one thing to diagnose the problems in the church and its disconnect from the realities of the world, but while voicing such might be a necessary part of a healing process or the claiming of permission to seek freedom, it can be easy to let fear confine us to the refuge of this dream of the impossible.

We have seen the pain and the problems in the church and we want something better. Yet the idea of imperfect people imperfectly trying to put flesh to the idea of moving forward in hope is scary. They will mess things up, they will create broken systems, and they will fail in their attempts to embody the dreams and ideals of the emerging ethos. Inevitably, structures and institutions will develop as the pragmatists seek to build rather than just dream. And because such things have terrorized in the past they in and of themselves are feared. It then becomes easier to attack those who try to actually do something than it is to take that step into the unknown.

I like to dream and to deconstruct, but I need to have hope. I need to have some solid ground upon which to place my feet as I journey towards that hope. I need to see ideas assume flesh and exist in social actualities. I’m not all that good at making it happen, but at heart I am a pragmatist. I cannot just say that a better world is possible, I need to live it. Even if that means I might fail or (what’s even scarier) never stop journeying towards hope always in the process of deconstructing and building.

I am emerging not just out of something but into something. I am done with talk for the sake of talk (or even for the sake of hearing if my voice resonates with others); I need to do something that affirms hope. That is how I am moving forward these days.

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On Disability and Sola Scriptura

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And now for the disability post.

During the Q&A time with Phyllis Tickle at the Emergence Christianity gathering a woman who uses a wheelchair asked what I thought was one of the most important and telling questions of the event. She commented that even though emergence Christians talk about LGBT folks being the last great “Other” that the church needs to accept, in reality it is people with disabilities who are still otherized the most by the church and asked Phyllis what can be done about that.

I applauded her question.

That’s the thing to do in these sorts of gatherings. When someone dares to bring up the elephants in the room or be a voice for unrepresented voices one applauds if one cares.

I was the only one in a cathedral full of people who applauded her question. It was literally just the sound of one hand clapping.

Phyllis responded that disability is not a truly otherizing or controversial concern for the church because it doesn’t challenge the conception of sola scriptura, next question. I think Phyllis is spot on with her theory that the issues that challenge the church the most are those that shake up our perceived understanding of scripture. If we cling to sola scriptura and our interpretation of that scripture is that slavery is okay, women cannot teach in church, or that same-sex relationships are a sin then to accept those things is to disrupt our entire conception of the scripture. Given the philosophical framework of most Protestants and the lingering predominance of sola scriptura, I fully agree with her description of why such issues caused such turmoil for the church.

What I don’t agree with is that disability is not a challenge to sola scriptura.

I would argue that people with disabilities are in fact the most otherized group of people in the church. Whether it is dealt with well or not, most Christians would agree that racism is wrong and that we should love people of all colors of skin. Many churches would also say that sexism is evil and quite a few even allow women to serve as pastors. It’s trendy to engage in interreligious dialogue and LGBT advocacy is the undisputed cause of the moment. Not so much when it comes to welcoming and showing support for the differently abled.

Basically, we are not and never will be cool. While I fully acknowledge the damaging effect positive stereotypes can have – there is something to be said for the hip factor of Queer folk in advancing their cause. But no one brags about their cool disabled friend they go shopping with. We don’t have Pride parades that end up being the most fun event of the season. There are no sitcoms about witty and fabulous disabled people. Not that this is a competition, just the facts that we are hard to like. We are the awkward ones. We are the ones who are so used to the stares and the pointing fingers and the laughter that we’ve learned to brace ourselves as we enter most social situations knowing that we make other people uncomfortable. For better or worse we have never had the option of a closet to hide in to escape the taunts of the world. We are the freaks and it will never, ever, be trendy to advocate for us much less see us as something other than Other.

Secondly, standing in solidarity with us is costly, literally. If a church starts talking about offering programs for the disabled or even putting in an access ramp they quickly encounter the hard data of the cash it will cost them. Most decide that it is more fiscally responsible to just ignore us. Yes, I get that churches that chose to be welcoming and inclusive of the LGBT community know that there might possibly be a financial cost to that decision. But as members leave and take their tithes with them, the blow is softened by knowing that the loss of income came because the church chose the moral high ground over bigotry. It is easier to accept potential cost than swallow the price tag up front.

But beyond those factors, what I have discovered regarding why disability advocacy is not a cause emergence Christianity (or any form of Christianity really) cares about is that the traditional biblical notions about disability have not yet been challenged the way ideas about slavery, women, and Queers have. Instead of seeing people with disabilities as whole people to be equally welcomed in the body of Christ, there is still a ruling belief in the church that we are broken people in need of healing. We are people to be served and changed, not people to be included and fought for.

Think about the songs we sing (even last week at the Emergence Christianity gathering). The lyrics are all about the poor and the blind being made whole or about rejoicing that “I once was blind but now I see.” If we were singing “I once was gay but now I’m straight” or “I once was Native but now I’m civilized” there would be an uproar, but no one sees any issue in singing such about the differently abled. It is still permissible to assume an absolute normative and cast anyone who appears different as the incomplete other that must be healed and made whole before they can be accepted like everyone else.

church disabledThe church still repeats the cultural mores of the biblical worlds. Those with imperfections of the body were barred from serving in the Tabernacle and the Temple. Even animals with defects could not be offered up to God in sacrifice. Only those who appeared normative, unblemished, could be accepted as pure and holy sacrifices to God. People with disabilities could not even enter the Temple to worship, but had to remain in the courtyard of the women and the Gentiles. The imperfection of our body made us unacceptable to God. Over time Gentiles, women, and slaves came to be seen as whole persons made in the image of God and therefore worthy of service, but the stigma of incompleteness remains on those with disability.

Phyllis was partially right in her response. Disability isn’t an issue challenging sola scriptura. But that’s because there has yet to be a vocal and vibrant call within the church to challenge ancient cultural assumptions that continue to cast us as Other. And honestly, I don’t know if there ever will be given how “uncool” we are and how costly it is to welcome us fully. That one could even state that how the church conceives of disability isn’t an issue is quite telling of how little attention is given to us at all.

It’s uncomfortable to be the sole person clapping for this cause in a room full of people who generally seem committed to being as welcoming and inclusive as possible. And it’s indicative of how far we still have to go.

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See also J.C. Mitchell’s response.

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Emergence Christianity, Women, and the Fall of Christendom

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Last week I was able to attend the Emergence Christianity Gathering in Memphis, TN. In truth, I went mostly to see old friends and to get the fix that comes from surrounding myself (for a few days at least) with people who ask the same sorts of questions I ask. Not that we all think the same, but sometimes I just need that freedom to be myself for a few days. So on that level, the Gathering was amazing. I had some great conversations, heard some good Blues bands, and ate enough barbeque to last a lifetime.

And for the most part, I enjoyed the content of the conference. Yes, there was a serious lack of diversity on stage and amidst attendees. Yes, meeting in a cathedral makes for a very uncomfortable venue. But for what this event was (a celebration of Phyllis Tickle’s life and work), I was prepared to deal with those.

And then came the final session.

There’s no denying that the final session was just weird. Even those who weren’t offended by what was said there thought it was a very odd way to end a conference. I’ve had both people who were there and who were following along on Twitter asking me what the hell happened. I can’t really explain why it happened, but I want to spend some time responding.

A big part of the problem was that people coming to an emergence Christianity event, especially to hear such an intelligent woman as Phyllis, were not expecting to disagree with her much less hear her say such confusing and hurful things about women, people with disabilities (more on this one another day), and African-Americans. From what I gathered, people came there hopeful for what is emerging in the church and left feeing bewildered. They expected to perhaps disagree with some speakers, but Phyllis is beloved and so the disconnect was far more jarring. I’ve heard Phyllis give versions of these lectures before, but never draw the conclusions she did at this event, so even to me, it was unsettling.

The main content of the gathering was Phyllis doing her whole overview of church history to explain where the church is today and how we got here. It’s a fantastic, albeit cursory, survey of church history which far too few Christians have any knowledge whatsoever about. In her talks, she is always one to make snarky comments or sex jokes that no one but a woman pushing 80 can get away with, but the unsettling pattern in her storytelling this time was to blame women for the demise of Christendom. In the final session Phyllis described the rise and fall of Constantinian Christianity and pointed to the emancipation of women in the 20th century as a catalyst for that decline. While most of us there would agree that the fall of Christendom is a very good thing and that women’s liberation significantly changed our culture, it was where Phyllis went with from there that caused the discomfort.

Phyllis described the freedoms working outside the home in WW2 and the ability to control our cycles the Pill brought women and argued that such things led to the destruction of the nuclear family and therefore the foundation of the civil religion of Christendom. While it is a narrow assessment of causality, I can agree with the descriptive observation that such things changed our culture. But then she jumped from these changes as that which brought an end to Christendom to describing how such changes led to the destruction of the ways the faith is passed on to new generations which thereby resulted in a biblically illiterate society. As she described it, when mom is not at home weaving the stories of scripture and the church calendar into her day to day activities in front of her children, they do not receive the basics of the faith. One cannot apparently have a sacred family meal over Papa John’s pizza picked up on the way home from work the same way that one can if one is baking bread, doing family crafts, and eating pancakes on Shrove Tuesday. Phyllis ended the session by encouraging us to discover ways to be back in the kitchen with our children and finding crafty ways to import the rhythms of the church year to them. Essentially to focus on the family and all that. That is the great emergence. The end.

You can see why people left bewildered.

The story as she told it made sense – constructed narratives work that way – women are to blame for the post-Christian era and if we just got back in the home the faith could thrive again. But it is important to note that in her narrative instead of focusing on what has emerged that brings hope in this world, she was telling the story of why things have changed – which are two vastly different perspectives. At some point in telling the story of change it is hard not to get nostalgic about one point or another and hold a sugar-coated vision of that time up as the period we must all try to harken back towards. The problem with such an approach is that it ignores the underside of said period and it imposes guilt upon those who find hope outside that period’s restrictions.

In making the argument that religion was far stronger when the nuclear family (as defined by a working father and stay at home mother) reigned one not only limits the definition of who gets to represent proper religion but also romanticizes a system that was far more broken than is often realized. The truth is, not all Christian families had the luxury of living such a white middle-class, middle-America lifestyle. Even ignoring the patterns of faith outside the Western world, it is only a small demographic of people who ever had a mother at home teaching the children the church year as she cooked their supper. To hold such up as a goal for contemporary Christians to return to privileges white, middle-class, liturgical faith as the only true or acceptable way to be a faithful Christian. While there is nothing wrong with living in such ways, it is not nor never has been the only way to live one’s faith or impart it to one’s children.

To lament that our culture ever changed from such a family structure (even though only a few ever lived it to begin with) also ignores the ills of that very structure. The shift in the Reformation period that empowered women by making them the spiritual leader in the home has over time not only ostracized men from spiritual practices (because such things are “just” for women) but also restricted women’s service to God to just within the household. This way of thinking does a disservice to men, women, and the Kingdom of God. Perpetuating the notion that it is the role of women to care for the spiritual development of their family in their home ignores the fact that it was causing problems for the faith long before the practice began to decline.

missed memoSimilarly, upholding this family structure ignores that the development of the modern nuclear family wasn’t exactly a healthy historical development. Prior to the Victorian era’s turn to individualized nuclear family dwellings, people lived far more communally. Multiple generations lived together and villages functioned as extended family. There was no such thing as a woman keeping house herself. No one ever had to cook, clean, manage the house, watch the kids, and educate the kids on her own. Younger teens helped around the house. Kids could wander the village knowing that most people there would take care of them and that they too were expected to help others as needed. Crying babies were watched by the tween girls or elderly women while the women devoted themselves to other tasks. The development of the nuclear family took all of those support structures away from women. Those who were not rich enough to afford servants to help them were expected for the first time in history to bear the burden of all the household tasks alone. A few enlightened men in recent decades have begun to lend a hand, but it is rare that extended families much less the community (including the church) feel any need to help women with these tasks – expecting her instead to be some sort of supermom who can do it all. At the same time the turn toward isolated nuclear families took away the safety that being in community provides. When generations live together and everyone in the village knows each other’s business it is a lot harder for abuse of women and children to be hidden. Not that it didn’t happen or that women weren’t treated as property during those periods, but the façade of the nuclear family hid many ills that a nostalgic romanticized view ignores. It was not a sustainable system, and it is no surprise that by the mid-twentieth century women were both “running for the shelter of mother’s little helper” and seeking freedom from such unrealistic expectations.

But just because the story can be told in such a way that explains why things have changed in a regretful fashion doesn’t mean that is the only way the story must be told. Allowing women to lead family devotions was a huge hopeful step forward in empowering women once upon a time. The freedom that working outside the home and the Pill brought women gave them hope of being fully themselves and the ability to stand on their own two feet apart from abusive and controlling husbands and fathers. I think many of us at the Emergence Christianity Gathering were shocked that such stories of hope were ignored in favor of one that piled on the same stale guilt that we have come to expect from traditional religion. I’m not saying that Phyllis Tickle can’t believe whatever she wants about the role and place of women or tell the story of history through her own particular biases, but what dawned on many of us during this final session was that she was no longer telling a story of emergence. The end of the story as she told it was not one of hope and promise, but one of restrictions and guilt that we are already well acquainted with. It hurt to hear that from her, and many couldn’t bring themselves to admit that they had problems with how she told the story – just that it felt like a really weird ending to the conference. It is like we were waiting for permission to disagree, to state that was not the only way to tell the story.

So here I go – as much as I am grateful for Phyllis and admire much of her work, she does not possess the only truth regarding what is emerging. It is okay to tell the story of where we have been as a story of hope and liberation instead of merely one of regrettable change. We are still figuring out how to live within this emerging world and what were once whispered ideas and conversations are now unquestioned facts about the evolution of our culture. Not knowing where we came from is dangerous, but so is staking our claim in a misunderstood past. We are constantly negotiating what it means to witness with hope within this present moment without simply re-iterating the past. How we tell our story determines the shape of that witness.

So my question for Emergence Christians is – how can we use this awkward moment to push us to start telling this story of hope?

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Letters to a Future Church

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I had been anticipating the release of the book Letters to a Future Church: Words of Encouragement and Prophetic Appeals (IVP), so I eagerly said that I would participate in a blog tour related to the book. As a collection of letters to the church from both leaders and laity alike, the book lives up to its subtitle as it offers both encouragement and prophetic calls to embrace various ways of being a Christian in the 21st century. What I found most intriguing was that in its intent to address the future church, what this collection provides is a helpful snapshot of the diversity of voices in the North American Evangelical church today. So, for instance, some of the letters uphold right doctrine and culture wars as the path forward for the church and others the embracing of social justice. Some voices both question and mock the perceived problems of the church today while others rejoice in the blessings the body of Christ is offering the world. With authors as diverse as Rachel Held Evans, Tim Challies, Shane Claiborne, and David Fitch these differences are not surprising. At the same time it is immensely encouraging to read these diverse voices coming together under the common vision of imagining what it means to be the church in the years ahead.

While I found a number of the letters personally challenging, the most poignant word for the church (for me at least) was in Peter Rollins’ letter. He writes –

It is not enough for you [the church] to say that you are falling short of your beliefs, for this very confession plays into the idea that there is a difference between your various beliefs and your actions. Rather, if you will permit, I ask you to remember the radical Christian insight that one’s actions reflect one’s beliefs. That you cannot say that you believe in God if you do not commit yourself to what Kierkegaard referred to as the work love.

As part of this blog tour, I was asked to write my own letter to the church which I have found to be more difficult than I thought it would be. There are a million things that I could say to the church, most of which are simply evidence of my own failings and hypocrisy. But as I thought about it over the past few weeks, one theme in particular kept coming to mind which echoed Rollins’ letter in many ways. Hence my letter –

Dear Church,

I’m tired. I just don’t have the ability to keep up with the façade of “church” anymore. Oh, I love Jesus, I am crazy about living into the Kingdom of God, and I desperately want to be with the body of Christ, but I just can no longer keep up with the systems and structures that go along with all of that. I know it’s cliché to talk about wanting to be the church as opposed to merely doing church, but right now all I see are the structural façades and they are overwhelming.

It’s not that any one branch of the church is to blame – megachurch, mainline, or housechurch – all seem bogged down with the idea that the church exists for its own sake. The point seems to be to perfect the performance, hone the ritual, grow the structure so that the church can survive and thrive. It’s all (in theory) so that the church can bless its members and be able to serve the world, but all too often it seems like the forms of church become the purpose of church consuming all of our vision and energy. The actions of church don’t reflect the things I claim to believe and yet they demand all our attention. And I just have to confess that right now I am worn out.

I’m not interested in building structures right now. Or defining boundaries or expressing unwavering loyalty to a tribe. Or even in the survival of any group or gathering (even as I respect and cherish the need for such). Instead of constantly shoring up structures, I feel like I need the space to mourn. Not just for my own personal stuff as it seems every structure in the world exists to help me deal with me, but instead to be able to focus less on strengthening particular forms and more on taking the time to lament the fracturing amidst the forms. To listen to the stories of the body that have been kept silent, to hear the groanings of the body that our choruses and chants drown out, to strip away our beautiful facades in favor of sackcloth and ashes. I need the space to hear of the struggles of the body of Christ and the trials of inhabiting God’s Kingdom without the distractions of having to protect a structure.

Jesus said those who mourn will be comforted and that the weary will be given rest, but dear Church, how can we ever find the comfort that comes from mourning or the rest from burdens when we must constantly be working to hold up your façade? So what I simply ask is this – provide space for us, as the church, to mourn; let us please rest.

Your Sister,
Julie

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If you could write a letter to the church what would you say? InterVarsity Press and Patheos would love to hear your thoughts. Now through May the 4th anyone who is interested is invited to submit a letter to the IVP Letters to the Future Church Campaign for a chance to have your letter posted at Patheos and get some of the latest IVP books. So what is the message that you think the church needs to hear?

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Emerging Christianity, Soularize, and the Future

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I spent this past week hanging out with the awesome folk at Soularize 2011 – a three-day learning party in (not so) sunny San Diego. This year’s Soularize marked both its tenth anniversary as well as its final chapter. Ten years ago the first Soularize (put on by Spencer Burke of TheOoze.com) was hosted by none other than Mark Driscoll at his Mars Hill church in Seattle. That fact right there is evidence that a lot has changed in this past decade. But a lot more has changed since then, the world has shifted and along with it this emerging conversation.

Ten years ago I had never heard of the emerging church. Oh, I was reading postmodern philosophy and asking all sorts of questions that were getting me in trouble, but I had no idea that there were other Christians discussing these sorts of ideas. I had just finished my first round of grad-school having studied Intercultural Studies and Missions at Wheaton College. I often had made my classmates (and a few of my professors) uncomfortable by asking why missions concepts like contextualization of the Gospel, socio-linguistic relativity, and intercultural difference could not also be applied to our own American culture. If it was okay to have the Gospel make sense culturally in some third world country, why couldn’t it make sense to all people in the United States?

But this was the era when “purpose driven” churches were cutting edge and where in a post-9/11 flag-draped America, homogeneity trumped authenticity. Facebook and Twitter were still years away, so it was a lot harder to discover that you weren’t the only one asking the crazy questions. Even so, it was early in 2002 when someone recommended to my husband and me that we might enjoy reading a book by this guy Brian McLaren. As others have often mentioned, what I discovered in A New Kind of Christian wasn’t completely new, but more of an affirmation that there were others exploring the same sorts of questions about faith as I was. And knowing that one is not alone holds a special power. Knowing that I didn’t have to ignore those nagging questions or divorce my intellect from my faith saved my faith. Instead of a hollow and confining static system, it had been transformed into a living reality.

Knowing that there were others out there meant I had to find them – which is where The Ooze enters in. I found that community online, and more specifically its message boards. I created a profile with a fake name (MaraJade) and a false avatar and jumped in with both feet. Over the next few years the evolution of my faith played out on those boards. I eventually added my real name as virtual friendships morphed into physical ones, but it was there that I began to re-imagine theology, and church, and what it even meant to be a Christian. While it was not always the safest place to explore such questions in a public forum, it was the only place where such dialogue could even occur. It is amusing now to think as The Ooze shuts down that all these old conversations, these snapshots of a faith in transition, will now be archived at Fuller Seminary. I pity the sociologist of religion who will sift through them someday for her dissertation.

But as the conversation grew, territories were claimed and lines began to be drawn. Certain groups declared that there was a range of acceptable questions (generally permitting the re-imagining of worship practices but not theological stances) and they (loudly) denounced the rest of us. Others set up camp as either for the Ooze or for Emergent Village – competing for publishing contracts, conference speaking spots, and (of course) advertising dollars. Those of us involved in both observed that tension and felt like we were being made to choose sides. Looking back, it seems so silly that in a conversation about deconstructing the systems of modernism in favor of re-imaging a wholistic and healthy way to be the church such petty fights would ever be waged, but I guess that is the way of man (and I intentionally used the masculine there). For me the conversation was holy in whatever guise it took.

I never made it to a Soularize until this year and I regret that. But there was still something intriguing to enter into that space ten years on and discover where the past decade has taken the conversation. In a struggling economy the trappings of financial success have long since lost the power to sway the conversation. Petty differences have given way to collaboration as those who believe that re-imagining church for a postmodern world is more than just the latest trend to follow. The angst of needing to constantly deconstruct where we all have been has mellowed into a loosely held space where dreams and critique coexist. The urgency to fix the world has passed while the passion to hope for a better world remains.

In short, the emerging conversation I encountered at Soularize this year was one of hope. While it might not burn as brightly as it once did, a bonfire requires too much empty energy to sustain itself. What we have left is a smoldering movement – not in the negative sense of having been reduced to ashes, but of the sort of long-burning coals that warm homes and bake bread. And there are still new people joining the conversation – asking their own questions and desperately attempting to cling to their faith in meaningful ways. But how they enter in looks different now that there are those of us who have matured in this conversation for the past ten years or more there to welcome them in.

Groups like Soularize and The Ooze may be winding down, but that is because the conversation has shifted. We no longer just need space for questions; we need space to build as well. Learning parties are no longer just about questions, they are also about formulating responses with our lives. I am grateful for this last Soularize for serving as a transition in that shift. And I am looking forward to what lies ahead.

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Crazy, Holy, Hungry Ones – My Wild Goose Reflection

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I went to the Wild Goose Festival for the community. Meeting for the first time this year in the hills of beautiful North Carolina, Wild Goose was a gathering focused on arts, justice, and faith. I went eager to reunite with old friends and to finally translate a few virtual relationships into reality. Oh, I was excited to hear David Wilcox and Jennifer Knapp and learn from respected Christian leaders, but it was the gathering of friends that drew me and my family to the fest. And while it was the community that brought me there, it was the communal experience of commitment that defined my time there. Those lines posted above from Carrie Newcomer’s song “Where You Been,” sum up perfectly the experience that was the Wild Goose Festival.

If anything, Wild Goose was a gathering of those who dream of a better way. A better way to be human, a better way to be the church. Not in a “we want to be better than you” sort of way, but more of a deep felt recognition that the world is not as it should be. It was that wrestling with trying to live into the lives God created us to live that became the conversation at Wild Goose. As part of that, one theme that kept resurfacing in the talks I heard was that of learning to be open to the full range of human emotions and experiences in the world. The typical Christian impulse in our country is to dwell upon the joyful aspects of life and faith. We put on the mask of pretending all is fine to the world. We hold church services oriented around worship, praise, and the uplifting parts of scripture. While there is nothing wrong with doing those things, they don’t allow the faithful to reflect the fullness of reality. As the great civil rights activist Vincent Harding pointed out in his talk, there is pain and suffering in the church. Institutional and social evils such as racism and the inequalities it produces affect the body of Christ – harming both those who commit and who suffer those sins. To pretend that all is well when all is obviously not well is to pretend at joy – not to experience it in reality. As Harding commented, to ever be able to truly laugh, one must also be allowed to honestly weep for all the pain and suffering. Pretending that all is well or to deny that the suffering exists harms our souls, preventing us from being whole healthy people. In his talk Soong-Chan Rah also called for the need to remember the words of lamentations in our churches. The Western church has exorcised such biblical passages of lament from our services, lectionaries, and prayer books, and we would do well to be reminded from the global church (that knows far more about experiencing suffering) that recognizing and lamenting our sins and pain is part of what it means to follow God.

While the church of course has a long way to go in regards to becoming balanced and healthy in such ways, it was encouraging to get a small taste of what that might look like at the Wild Goose Festival. I can’t speak for everyone there, but from the conversations I was a part of it truly did seem to be a gathering of folks who deeply dreamed of a better way. People who desired for our faith to mean something tangible. People, who, as Richard Rohr said there, don’t want to settle for the easy shallow faith of merely worshiping God – putting God on an idealized but distant pedestal to be admired but not known. They want to follow God in ways that transform their lives and therefore the lives of others as well. People who desire to follow God in ways that bring about justice, that seek to restore broken relationships, that always orient around caring about the needs of others. But also people who don’t trust in their own strength to do such things, who know the world and the church are messy, and that we need time for lament and repentance as part of our experience of following Jesus.

It can be easy to talk about such things, and I know I’ve done my fair share of talking before. But what I appreciated about the Wild Goose festival was that it forced us past the point of posturing to a place of transparent honesty. At most of our church gatherings, conferences, or cohorts we can easily erect a façade of self and allow others to see only what we desire them to see of who we are. We can talk grand ideas, look as pious/hip/committed as we desire, and then escape back into our solitary lives without anyone glimpsing our rough edges. But there is something about camping in close proximity in sweltering weather in fields crawling with ants and ticks, where the nearest water is a spigot several fields away, with your communal shit stinking up the port-a-potties and your children sleep-deprived from the excitement of camping and the loud bands that play into the wee small hours of the night that violently rips away any façade one might have attempted to hide behind. Everyone sees you crawling disheveled out of your tent in the morning desperate to concoct a coffee-like-substance over your tiny camp stove. Everyone hears you yelling at your kids to stop (literally) bouncing off the tent walls and go to sleep. And I’m pretty sure half the people there witnessed my tired, hot, and hungry children having a grand royal meltdown in the food area one day at lunch. It was just a few days, but it was real.

So when we came to worship together and share our passion for following God in transforming ways in this raw state of discomfort and exhaustion, it was more than just talk. We were those crazy, holy, hungry ones who believe in something better. It was a glimpse of the Kingdom of God that went far beyond just friends gathering to have fun together at a festival or to posture at caring for others. It was a gathering of the most committed Christians I know – those who long to follow God wholly. And that gave me great hope for the church. I had to laugh when I read after the festival that some opponents were deriding the festival, questioning our faith and referring to the event as Apostate-palooza (because *obviously* anything to do with art, camping, and justice can’t possibly be Christian). Yet I realized that they were right in a way. This was a gathering of apostates of the church as it has become – a often meaningless and impotent entity beholden to civil structures of culture and politics that cares more about power and privilege and shoring up hollow rituals and traditions than it does about loving others and believing in God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. Wild Goose was a gathering of those crazy folks who are committed to a better way. We are apostates of meaningless religion, ready to strip away the facades and get at the real work of following God.

That was my Wild Goose experience – leaving me raw and tired and strangely full of hope.

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Accessible Church

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Posted at Envision Access –

Hi, I’m Julie Clawson.  I’m a writer and a mom.  I’ve served as a pastor and currently help coordinate Adult and Children’s Education at my church in Austin Texas.  I was also born missing my left arm below the elbow.

I’m very involved in the emerging Church movement, and many of us in this movement like to do church a little differently.  That means our worship services are very experimental and artistic – making use of various sorts of media and hands on experiences.  As much as I appreciate these diverse ways to connect with God, I’ve seen the awkwardness they can create for people with disabilities.  Prayer stations with art or video’s with words shut of the blind in the congregation.  Body prayer exercises and juggling prayer books is difficult for me as a person with just one arm.  And the command to stand up for prayers or songs always makes my friends in wheelchairs flinch.

I recall one Good Friday service when part of the worship experience involved nailing a prayer to a wooden cross.  It was a moving activity for many, but I had to sit it out because I am unable to use a hammer.  In no way did I think the activity should not have been done simply because I could not participate, I just wished someone had been aware of my difficulty and offered to help me out.

Often what many of us with disabilities desire from the church is just an awareness of who we are.  Making worship activities inclusive of our needs would be affirming while not condescending.  Something as simple as instead of telling everyone to stand up to invite those who desire to stand up.  Or encouraging people as they start a hand-on worship experience to be there for each other and lend a hand where it is needed.  Reminders like that acknowledge that there are diverse needs in the congregation, but don’t single any one out as being too different.

Sometimes it is hard to feel like we are part of the body of Christ when those of us with disabilities are either always treated with condescending pity or alternatively have our needs ignored.  Churches are striving these days to people with different learning styles and spiritual languages.  I applaud those efforts, but also want to send a gentle reminder for churches to be aware of and include the people with disabilities in their congregation at the same time.  We want to connect with God in diverse and hands-on ways as well, we just sometimes need to church to be proactive and creative in inviting us into that space.

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Singing the Songs of Babylon

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I arrived home at midnight last night after three exhausting days at the Emergent Village Theological Conversation. I’ve been to Emergent events in the past and have returned home inspired, ignited, and hopeful, but this event was different. As friends mentioned after the event, in the past we have gone home ready to change the world and pumped up with the joy of friendships and yes, even the navel-gazing affirmation of our own spiritual intelligence. Those events shaped the conversation and inspired us to build something new. This wasn’t that sort of event.

Since leaving yesterday, I’ve been walking around with an ache in my heart. I feel wounded and broken – my soul has been permanently changed and now feels alien in its own skin. What we heard these last few days changed us. And I am beginning to realize that we can’t unlearn what we heard this week, the stories we heard have altered our very being. We can choose to deny what we heard or refuse to let what we heard move us to action, but there is no going back to the people we were before this conversation – for us as individuals or for the organization Emergent Village.

Strange thing is, I wasn’t expecting this conference to affect me so strongly. I knew about the horrors of colonialism. I’ve read books on liberation and postcolonial theology. I speak up for justice and believe the call for Christians is to end oppression. I admit my complicity in ongoing oppression and colonialism and strive to repent of such sins. All those things I knew in my head. But sitting down and listening to the stories and the prophetic words of people who speak the truth about their own experiences with such things is something entirely different. I hope over the next few weeks to write about some of what I heard there, but for right now all I can do is attempt to process the space I am in at the moment.

This ache in my heart, this realization that opening myself up to hearing these words means that I can never return to who I was before is difficult. It is an uncomfortable liminal space to inhabit. And it is in that uncertain space of discomfort that we ended the conference. No moments of feeling theologically astute for chatting with some famous theologian, no triumphal feeling of understanding the emergence of the church in postmodern times – simply people stripped raw, uncertain how to move forward. For me, the uncomfortable strangeness of that discomfort was manifest in how the event wrapped-up.

Here we had spent three days discussing the effects of the colonial project. The speakers had led us to see how the Bible is used as a colonizing text and how the rituals and trapping of the Western church have colonized the minds of indigenous peoples. Their dream is to find ways to do distinctly indigenous theology and develop spiritual practices that are native to who they are. They pleaded with us to stop seeing Western theology, philosophy, academia, and liturgy as the norm that all others must aspire to or at least subjugate their spiritual language to. And above all to not just allow native peoples space to pursue those paths, but to join in with them valuing their voices just as much as we value Western voices.

So after all that we closed with a time of communion where we stood serving the broken body of Christ to one another. And as we served someone started singing hymns. Old hymns. Traditional hymns. The hymns of the great Western churches. As others shakily joined in, I sat in my chair stunned and silent feeling that something was deeply wrong. And then Musa Dube, the Botswanan biblical scholar who had been sharing and challenging us about the need to re-imagine our theology and rituals started singing “How Great Thou Art.” She later shared how singing is how she has always been able to connect with God. And it was in that moment that the tears started to fall. I couldn’t help but weep that when confronted with our own complicity in the sins of empire the only way we knew how to respond was by singing the songs of Babylon. That in even this moment of worship all we knew to do was speak the language of empire. Part of me wanted to believe that in that moment it was enough to be who we were, but part of me also wanted to stop the whole thing and beg Richard Twiss or Musa Dube to give us the language to move beyond ourselves. Yet all I could do was weep at my inability to do anything but sing the songs of Babylon as an offering of reconciliation to the God who brings freedom to the oppressed. And that has left the ache in my heart that has stripped me raw.

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Privilege, Race, and Excuses

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Since entering into discussions about the upcoming Emergent Theological Conversation on “Creating Liberated Spaces in a Postcolonial World,” I’ve been intrigued by some of the responses I’ve encountered. There were the expected ones accusing the entire conversation of being socialist or Marxist or whatever, but then there were the more nuanced ones which in truth were even sadder. I am sure there must be people out there who have decent, well reasoned arguments for why Christians shouldn’t give a rip about postcolonialism, but so far I have yet to encounter them.

What I find more of are the (white) people who automatically get defensive when it is suggested that perhaps there might be something wrong with the colonial past and that it might be beneficial for Christians to listen to the voices of all the members of the body of Christ. Apparently by suggesting that there may have been ills in colonialism we are demonstrating that we are deluded by “white guilt” which invalidates everything we have to say. What a convenient excuse – for avoiding whatever this “white guilt” is has become a valid reason to avoid responsibility. The defensiveness then proceeds in one of two directions.

The first is for the objector to claim that they are color blind – they don’t see race, so how dare I be racist by saying that people of other races or ethnic groups should be listened to. The underlying argument is that if we are all one in Christ, then all voices should matter. So to them to have to stop listening to (all) white voices in favor of hearing the perspective of an African or an Asian (or a woman for that matter) is a promotion of racism against whites. They convince themselves that race shouldn’t matter, so that they can feel comfortable never interacting or learning from anyone who isn’t white. (please see Bruce Reyes-Chow’s recent piece on this whole issue)

The second common defensive response is for someone to give the, “how dare you imply that Christianity needs changing, it is heresy to abandon the established truths of the past!” While there may be a decent argument somewhere in there, what it generally implies is that the person thinks that the church has existed in stasis since the day Jesus floated up into the clouds. Any perspective that is other (different to what they know) must obviously be pagan or an attempt to corrupt timeless truth. Once again a very convenient way to avoid the truth of history or actually assuming responsibility for one’s theology.

But by far the most disturbing response I have encountered so far is the “why bother?” response. It will come as no surprise that registration for this year’s conference – where instead of hearing from some rock star white male theologian we are hearing from an African woman and a First Nations man – is significantly less than usual. Granted, some of this is to blame on the economy, people just don’t have the funds to travel to multiple conferences anymore. But I’ve heard over and over again that this conversation just isn’t important enough to “waste” limited conference funds on (I heard the same thing leading up to Christianity 21 last year with its all-female line-up). Sadly, listening to the voices of those questioning the theology our ancestors thrust on them to manipulate them with and who engage in dialogue regarding how the faith of those who claim that we are blessed to be a blessing can truly bless all the nations of the world just isn’t relevant enough to the American church.

Hearing those responses helped me see the narrow boundaries the American church permits for the conversation of race and reconciliation. It is fine to throw the emerging church under the bus for being for whites only, but when conservations start to occur where the goal is to simply listen to supposedly neglected voices – the passion around that issue disappears. It is fine to say we want diversity, but not to actually work for it. It made me wonder if much of that conversation stemmed from people who want to claim the token minority in their church as “diversity” but who aren’t willing to give up enough privilege to actually listen and learn from people with differing experiences. And I fully admit – I cling to my privilege in a million ways and have been guilty of tokenism more than I would care to admit. But, I have to wonder why people are so afraid to care and make changes where it would really matter.

It reminds me of a Delta Airlines ad I saw recently. It had a picture of a woman sleeping on an airplane with the caption “Sleep Shouldn’t Be a Perk.” The copy went on to explain that since sleep is a basic necessity that on a (very) select number of International flights (to places like Dubai or Sydney) Delta now provides fully horizontal beds – in their Business Elite cabin. So apparently if it is in First Class it is a perk, but if it is in Business class then it is a necessity. Those of us who can barely afford economy class will continue to be treated like crap and packed in like cattle. Privilege can be admitted and the playing field equalized, but only within certain very narrow boundaries.

I wonder if the same is ultimately true of the (white) church. We like to talk about overcoming racism and how much we love Martin Luther King Jr., but it seems like we are willing to accept others only if they are already almost exactly like us. We don’t want to do the dirty work of admitting privilege and how our theology has been used to oppress others. We will make a million excuses why we dislike the very conversation, but in the end I thing we are just afraid. Afraid of what is other, afraid of change, and afraid of having to give up some of the perks we hold so dear.

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