Better late than…
Sorry to be so late. I hesitated leaning into this site for many reasons:
The main one being time sensitivity. While serving as a validated minister inthe PC(USA) for a couple years since seminary, I recently joined my practices with a historied community of Presbyterians 30 minutes north of my neighborhood as their solo-pastor (their’s got to be a better word to get this point across). How I ended up there/here is a conversation for another time. But the responsibilities of pastoring a redevelopement-transformation congregation on top of buying our first family home (in our old neighborhood), my wife starting a small buisness (scrap booking), and organizing the mainline emergent/s event at Columbia have been about all I’ve had time for.
The secondary, underlying, reason for my being a late bloomer for Presbymergence, is the suspicion I hold for denominationally centered renewal movements. I, like many of you, have connected to the PC(USA) late in life for reasons that I can understand and ones I don’t know (how/why God and God’s new creation have conspired to bring me here, is still being discovered). Here are a few I have begun to articulate
1. because of the utility of the reformed articulation of faith practices (tangling Word, Sacrament, & Shape)
2. the polyvalence of a book of confessions (tangling many people/contexts)
3. the dialectical tension between tradition’s handing over of belief and the openness of conscience (tangling past/future with the need to act generatively now)
But I must confess I’m brutally pragmatic about these things. I’m not so sure that being tangled to some “good thing” that does not accomplish its end, is actually that “good”. At the Mainline Emergent/s thing I learned a bit more about this. We Presbyterians PC(USA)ers share many of the same blind spots and benfitted from Cooperative Baptist Fellows and Episcopalians, etc sitting next to us. I also learned that all the fruit the Mainline Emergent/s event brought, was intended for then; for that day/week/season. The future of missional communities in the way of Jesus will continue to necessitate the cross-pollination of the institutionally encrusted and naive, but cannot center on the cross-breading of the two. Emergence implies a comming anticipated newness, not a calculated hybrid. And so to preserve the generative and timely ethos of the Mainline Emergent/s event risks forming yet one more special interest group within the denomination and risks totalizing the naive or encrusted. In short, our dreams and realtionships get tangled up in helping the church, instead of edifying the church in her task to join the transformation of God’s world.
In the seven months I’ve been at Church of St. Andrew I have begun to learn the need for my colleagues here to know what will happen to “their our thing”. The existence of an established entity creates an inertia toward seeking the future of its establishment. The church, PC(USA) included, must continually give itself away to God’s creation, as Christ has for us all. I have my vows and tangles within this congregation, and the Presbyterian church. To truely serve with energy, intelegence, imagination, and love, I (and you) need more than the PC(USA), we need all of the church, and even beyond the church where the Spirit is moving and regenerating…
BUT, I’ve been reading the site and enjoy what I see. I am usually the last kid to jump in the pool or the river, but eventually I get in all the way and laugh and play. So, all that being said, I’m in. I hope that we can together seek the future of Presbyterianism God’s creation, utilizing all of creation the Reformed tradition that might be of help- and not the other way around.
peace | courage | beauty
Comment by Karen Sloan on 19 March 2007:
Troy -
It’s great to know you’re jumping in this river! Thank you again for all you gave to the mainline emergent/s event, it was a key factor for getting presbymergent more organized.
God’s blessings!
Everyone else -
Troy’s wife, Kelly Bronsink, is a new co-owner of an amazing scrap book store. If you are in the Altanta area, make plans to stop by in person. Online, the store can be found here: http://www.scrapchicboutique.com.
Joy!
Comment by Andrew H on 19 March 2007:
As a newcomer to PC(USA), going on three weeks, and pursuing ministry (emerging in some way I am sure), I appreciate your thoughts on if Emerging, why reformed or Presbyterian?
We should regularly be asking the question — if intentional about ministry in a postmodern milieu, why claim any tradition, specifically the one we do? That’s a huge question for me, involved at a not yet emerging church in Berkeley, CA. Good ordering of thoughts on reformed tradition being a means to the end of God’s dream of new creation.
Comment by Troy Bronsink on 19 March 2007:
karen, thanks for the store plug:)
Andrew,
you wrote:
“if intentional about ministry in a postmodern milieu, why claim any tradition, specifically the one we do?”
I do not mean to suggest that traditions only serve as means to an end. Rather, tradition must be examined in terms of its end and is always being either shaped by its adherents or shaping its adherents (or both). What I am suggesting is that we are not being reformed unless we are continually re-shaping, reexmining, and reconfessing AND that such re-formation requires a deep ecclesiology cooperating with a wide variety of orthopraxies (certainly wider than just us PC(USA)ers).
Comment by drew ludwig on 19 March 2007:
This is good stuff. I, too, am suspicious of denominationally centered things, but I have also found great community within my demonination. I need the connections of my tradition, even as others with those same connections frustrate me.
Your last sentence is just right. I’m printing it out.
Trackback by The Web and Christ's Mission on 19 March 2007:
More Online Christian Resources (via Michael Ludwig)…
A while back I’d posted some comments about wanting to compile a list of online Christian resources ….
Comment by Tom Livengood on 20 March 2007:
Troy - it is truly wonderful to have you part of this discussion. We need such voices that mingle between being in the margins and within the “mainline”.
The struggle to be “presbymergent” needs to be more fully explored/debated. I look forward to your (Troy and others) contributions to this important conversation.
I’ll admit, I don’t know if “emergent” and “PCUSA” can co-exist. Let’s see what the Holy Spirit has in mind for this totally unpragmatic marriage…
Comment by George Love on 21 March 2007:
“I’ll admit, I don’t know if “emergent” and “PCUSA” can co-exist. Let’s see what the Holy Spirit has in mind for this totally unpragmatic marriage…”
I am rolling this around in mind trying to find a handle to get a grip on it. I suspect pretty much anything can co-exist with anything else (the Layman and the Witherspoon Society for example), but we’re talking here, I guess, about productively co-existing. It’s a bit like a dinosaur (sorry about the most tired and cliched symbol, but it just kept coming back) co-existing with a ferret. The dinosaur can go an eternity without knowing the ferret is there. The ferret moves so quickly that it’s here, there and everywhere. The ferret could decide (okay ferrets probably aren’t making a lot of thoughtful decisions, but play along) that the dinosaur is too big and just plain dangerous and move to a safe distance.
Anyway, I hope they can productively co-exist. I’m liking the term missional better than the term emergent these days, but whatever “it” is called I think there is a lot of hope for the church in conversing with the ideas of emergent.
Comment by Andrew Hoeksema on 24 March 2007:
Troy, (my last post was Andrew H, but I say everyone else uses full names, so…)
Thanks for the reply/refinement of my statement. To clarify, I was rhetorically presenting the need of the question of “why tradition in the emerging context?” and you gave a very provocative and meaningful answer. Interesting too to examine tradition vs. denomination, but I think we are on the same page.
I want to beat the ferret/dinosaur metaphor to death a little more: I have rich theological belief in the interdependence of all things in creation, so I would like to think that the dinosaur may be completely unaware, ignorant, and dangerous to the survival of the ferret, but still unconsciously depends on the ferret for its own survival because they are part of the same larger system (ecological or ecclesiastical if you will). This fits in with Troy’s answer to the question above. If we claim presbymergent, we must be intentional about the effect we have on the larger system of ecclesiology, but specifically the PCUSA. I am going to step out and say one of the many candles of hope that emerging congregations or belief systems can offer to the PC(USA) is that unity is possible in the midst of diversity of thought and practice and unity in fact depends on diversity. This is something people in Louisville are writing about, but emerging faith communities perhaps need to evangelize how we are (hopefully) attempting to live it out. This is actually something I have learned from and seen exhibited by Mission Bay Community Church in San Francisco (Pastor Bruce Reyes Chow) who is on this site.
How else do we need to witness to the larger PC(USA) through the nature of the communities that represent emerging.
Comment by Craig Clarkson on 26 March 2007:
Andrew wrote:
“[I]f intentional about ministry in a postmodern milieu, why claim any tradition, specifically the one we do?”
My $0.02:
Good question. I hope you’ll forgive me turning it around a bit… Can one not claim a tradition? I agree with what I think is a sense of reflection and intentionality about postmodern ministry within a tradition. But if one doesn’t claim a tradition what does that mean, that one is somehow unencumbered by a tradition? I don’t think that’s possible.
Likewise, I “chose” PC(USA) - and for none of the reasons that I currently find myself concerned with now - but I’m not sure what the implications are when I think about having chosen a tradition. Sometimes it seems more appropo to say that it chose me.
Comment by troy bronsink on 27 March 2007:
I think I understand the “it chose me” approach. And that everything has roots, traditions, and memory. However, I have not found it possible to either (a) do a tradition because I have chosen it or (b) avoid other traditions that I have not claimed.
Tradition is a powerful force when it gives us lenses for truth-telling and helps us discover deep memories in each other. It functions as a matrix of meaning. tradition allows us to move expeditiously through issues with short cut definitions and shared postures.
But there are many other ways that we opperate unenlightned about tradition. Un-named traditions also expidite processes and so the “naming of our tradition” cannot save us alone. Both named and unnamed traditions create “brackets” that can exclude and objectify the other.
I do not suggest that we quit exploring out “presbyterian-ness” but rather we avoid giving presbyterianism or a congregation or denomination that authority of “precedence.” The burning bush, Ezekiel’d dry bones, the works of Jesus Christ, the resurection, the coming strenght of the HOly SPirit… these are unprecedented things that define a new reality. Presbyterianism (tradition) cannot define the coming reality, the kindom of God. Presbyterian (and other traditions) can, however, create an environement for responding to that reality communally with the courage for such things as confession, reconciliation, and innovation.
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