Category: Emerging Church

Emergent Gathering

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So what to say about the Emergent Gathering…


For starters – the Glorieta Conference Center is a fantastic place. It’s nestled in the mountains outside of Santa Fe – so one is surrounded by spectacular views, dense forests, and (this year at least) beautiful wildflowers. A beautiful place to be part of a conversation.

The campus is huge with massive meeting halls, hotels, apartments, and cabins, gardens, game areas, a lake, and at the center of everything a giant Bible (the Bible thing was really weird, to get anywhere on the campus you had to drive past the Bible – all roads led to the Bible… it was strange). At night you could see tons of stars which is something I rarely get to see here in the Chicago suburbs. The setting did serve to show me how out of shape I am given that at 7500 feet elevation I got out of breath just trying to walk from building to building.

As for the Gathering itself – it is a very organic and somewhat chaotic event. They call it a do-it-yourself kind of retreat/conference. We cooked our own meals which had been planned by other attendees. Whoever wanted to could lead a session. I led sessions on Re-imagining Feminine Imagery for God and on Emerging Women. Other offerings included open forums on theology, a photography walk, a visit to Santa Fe art galleries, discussions about salvation, a contemplative hike, forums on worship, Biblical literacy, and community involvement, and a local brewery tour and tasting. At first, I didn’t know what to make of the seeming chaos and disorganization. Nothing was really planned or discussed until it was about to happen. My “J” tendencies were beginning to stress out until I realized that in true DIY fashion, I could make the week whatever I wanted to make it. The community was coming together for an experience and what that experience became depended on how much each of us were willing to offer to the community. So I did my best to jump in.

During my time there, I got to participate in some fun discussions and meet some wonderful people. There were people there at various stages of encountering the emerging church conversation. Some people had just begun to hear about it and had come to the Gathering to find out more. Others who are in unsafe places at churches where they could loose their jobs if the wrong people discovered what books they had been reading came because they were desperate for like-minded people to talk to.

Other of us who have fully engaged in the conversation came looking for conversations that went deeper than the typical “intro to emergent” ones we often have. And all sorts of denominations were represented. There were those who had left the institutional church, evangelicals, post-evangelicals, mainliners (although they made up a smaller percentage of the whole than they did at the Emerging Women Gathering), and even an atheist interested in the emerging/postmodern approach to Christianity. I had fun making new friends and putting faces on internet friends from the Ooze and elsewhere. There were of course some of the Emergent “big names” there and it was refreshing to just hang out with them as opposed to hearing them speak from on high at a typical conference. Just hanging out with people was a huge part of the blessing of the Gathering. Be it over meals in local restaurants (yummy New Mexican food!) or over beer and wine late nights in the communal cabins – conversation was the core of this gathering.

A few “snapshots” of my favorite Gathering experiences –

– Sitting on the dock for Doug Pagitt’s discussion about getting beyond Augustinian Christianity. It was so freeing to admit that there are historical lenses that shape our perception of faith and then actually talk about what our faith might look like it we removed those cultural assumptions.
– Silly (yet somewhat serious) discussions with other Emerging Women about upcoming EW gatherings. Something about discovering the sacred feminine by dancing nude under a full moon and about theology that happens in Vegas staying in Vegas… um, yeah..
– The Wednesday night sharing session that turned into a place for people to share their poetry.
– The African drum song that we sang together after serving each other communion outside under the changing trees.

I am glad I got to experience this Gathering. I did find it to be a safe place to share ones ideas without being attacked or automatically called a heretic. It was a welcoming group and a place of hope for those of us who believe that the emerging conversation is a valid and necessary expression of the Christian faith. I will try to reflect more on specific conversations I was involved with there as well as the “emerging women” side of it over the next few days.

For those of you who attended and help make this even happen – thank you for all you had to offer and the experience you helped make it be.

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Safe Places

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So I was talking with Mike the other night about if there exist any safe places for “emerging” conversation. We have been interested in the ideas wrapped up in the emerging church for the last 6 years or so. Its not so much that we were convinced to join a movement, but that in the emerging church conversation we found others who were asking similar questions and approaching scripture in a deeper more wholistic way. We went through (and are still on)a long journey of examining the assumptions of faith and interpretations of scripture we had been exposed to. The process caused us to change our opinions on certain issues, become undecided on others, and as a whole deepened our faith. We identify with the emerging church and Emergent not because they are “it” or have got it right as organizations, but because they represent people who are on the same page as us.

But as the emerging church conversation has grown, it has made its fair share of enemies. It became the easy whipping boy for many evangelicals. Many who refused to read anything by emerging authors would read a critique in some magazine and assume they had it all figured out. Most weren’t even interested in discovering what “postmoderns” or “emergents” really believed – they just made assumptions about stuff they didn’t like and projected it onto us. So in our churches and ministry groups real conversation was impossible and you had to be careful about who you would offend if you thought too differently than they.

For awhile it seemed like online places like blogs, The Ooze, or emergent village were safe places for conversation. But then they were overrun by critics who came to show us why we are all wrong. On one side you had the atheists who were there to tell us we were all stupid and wrong. On the other you have the fundamentalists/evangelicals who were there to tell us we are all stupid, wrong, and going to hell because of it. None of them really want conversation, just to tell us we’re wrong.

Even the gatherings and conventions weren’t safe. I remember at the emergent convention in Nashville in 2005 how hard it was to hear a deeper talk. The convention was concurrent with the National Pastors Convention. So at it there were sessions for Pastors, them Emergent on-ramp (for beginners) and fast-track (for those already involved in the conversation). I attended mostly fast-track sessions hoping to hear deeper theological/philosophical/cultural discussions that went beyond the questions I was asking 6 years ago. But instead there always showed up the critics who came to throw questions as accusations and traps (or perhaps they thought by just asking the questions they would enlighten us to or stupidity and wrongness). Every time one of them would ask why postmoderns don’t believe in “absolute truth” or something else that completely missed the point, the room would groan and mourn the fleeting chance for intelligent conversation.

Its not that I think debate and conversation are bad. There are people asking questions and at all points of discovering their faith. There need to be places to engage ideas and debate. But there also needs to be places where people who have been on the journey and part of the conversation for awhile can safely converse. Where ideas can be brought up and not automatically condemned. Where issues can be pursued and practical expressions of faith explored without one being told they are going to hell. Where the same 3-4 questions are not the ONLY ones brought up. Where being “different” or “outside the box” isn’t an issue or are even categories.

Anyway… just wondering and dreaming…

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Cleaning Out the Idols

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So I was reading in 2 Kings the other night and read the part about Josiah discovering the book of the law. Here was a culture that claimed to follow God, but they had essentially lost the scriptures as they collected dust in the temple. So of course they had let in all kinds of strange ideas and interpretations of following God. One thing that I found interesting about this passage is who they had to go to to explain what it was they had found. The priests no longer knew what the law was about, so the King found a prophetess named Huldah the wife of the grandson of the keeper of the wardrobe. So in all of Jerusalem only a young woman knew enough about the supposed faith of the people to explain it to the King and was the prophet appointed by God to deliver the message about what he was to do now. Interesting.
So Huldah basically tells the King that God will bring disaster on his people and stuff. Then Josiah read the book of the covenant aloud to all the people and renewed the covenant. Then he went about clearing out the idols from the land and from in the temple. He removed the idols to Baal, Asherah, and the starry hosts from the temple and tore down the quarters of the male prostitutes that were in the temple.
Jerusalem still got their butts kicked by God, but this event should have some implications for today. Many in the emerging church are attempting to read the scriptures anew and to see the idols we have let creep into our faith. The call is to do what we can to remove those idols (while humbly acknowledging that there will always be lenses of our culture through which we view the faith and therefore give us a proclivity towards idols).
So what idols do we worship in the church? Besides the ubiquitous greed/consumerism/capitalism that is the bane of the American church – I see dangers in upholding reason above God and faith, in pledging worship to a flag of a political entity in our church (or schools for that matter), and in pursuing power and not caring for justice, mercy, and humility. Just a few thoughts here… anyone else care to comment or add to the list?

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