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A Tickle In Our Ears

August 29, 2009 By David Williams 11 Comments

The General Governing Council here at presbymergent is deeply troubled by a recent interview with the otherwise estimable Phyllis Tickle. In that interview, which was conducted over at the Ooze, she lays out her informal thoughts about the role that we as “hyphen-mergents” might play in the revitalization and renewal of denominational Christianity. We have heard much of the chatter in the emergent world around her assertion that the timeline for denominational acceptance of the emergent ethos is short. In response to this conversation, we feel we must raise a cautionary voice. There is, in her description of presbymergent, a deep and critical conceptual flaw that we on the GGC feel must be addressed.

We do not use a hyphen.

Other than that, she’s got some pretty cool things to say. If you haven’t yet seen the interview, give it a watch:

Filed Under: Presbymergent

Faith and Social Media

July 26, 2009 By David Williams Leave a Comment

So what do we think about social media and its role in the life of faith? As the church begins to come to terms with Blogging and Vlogging and FaceBook and Twitter, there’s very little doubt that this new form of communication will have a substantial impact on the way we share both the Good News and our lives together. It’s easy for us here in the blogosphere to lose track of just how revolutionary this form of communication is, and it’s helpful to keep sight of where this might be leading us.

There’s a solid article on the contemporary relationship between faith and technology over at CNET today, one that’s worth reading and/or showing to your technology-averse sessions. Got leadership that’s reluctant to take full advantage of this revolution? Print out a copy.

Conversations about what impact this will have are ongoing, and there were some interesting takes recently on the subject from a few folks in the emergent and Presby world. Carol over at Tribal Church was musing about Twittering during church events:

I like it when people twitter during conferences, and even worship. This is why…

There’s some good blog-conversation over that-a-way, so feel free to join in!

At the same time, Bishop N.T. Wright has been featured mulling over the risks of web-based media in a great little Vimeo clip. Yeah, there’s irony there. Go give it a watch over at Blog RPS.

Filed Under: Presbymergent

Race and Emergence

July 14, 2009 By David Williams Leave a Comment

Anyone who attended the first gathering/convening/clumping together of Presbymergent earlier this year in Louisville would have noticed something striking. It wasn’t just that an almost cultish number of the circle of laptops had little glowing apples on the back. It was that the group, for a significant portion of the gathering, was pretty much a monoculture. It was mostly men, and almost entirely Caucasian or Anglo or Honky-American or whatever it is we’re calling whitish-pinkish people these days.

This is, unfortunately, fairly reflective of our denomination as a whole.

It is also reflective of the emergent movement, which for all of our talk of relational faith and embracing the other, tends to be whiter than a polar bear drinking milk in a blizzard.

There’s an interesting pair of blog posts exploring the relationship between the emergent movement and the African American religious tradition put up by Rev. Byron Wade, the current vice moderator of the PC(USA) General Assembly.

He writes:

What would be the attraction/pull for African-Americans to worship in these places [emergent communities] knowing that most of us have grown up in a culture and heritage of strong black churches? Even those who are youth/young adults tend to gravitate towards congregations that are similar to what they are used to.

It’s a good question, and one he endeavors to answer in part one and part two of his post.

Filed Under: Culture, Emergent, General Assembly, Presbymergent

Meeting in the Middle

July 13, 2009 By David Williams Leave a Comment

We emergent-types are pretty convinced (as much as we can be) that the journey of Christian faith is an extended conversation, full of growth and change and life. Faith is not, for all of our shouting an’ hootin’ and carryin’ on at each other, a binary thing. Sure, we want to separate ourselves into the faithful and the failures, the progressives and the conservatives, the sheep and the goats. Ultimately, though, a faith founded on love isn’t that sort of thing.

There are some great musings on this subject at Halfway to Normal, a delightful blog written by Kristen Tennant. Last week, she explored her struggles with a binary approach to faith. She writes:

too many churches and religious groups deliberately focus on an all-or-nothing approach to evangelism and outreach. They present this enormous pill and ask others to swallow it whole; if they don’t, those Christians often assume the worst of you and move on.

The full post is here.

She’s worth reading/subscribing/following, so go over and browse around for a bit!

Filed Under: Blogroll

Good Shabbas

July 10, 2009 By David Williams 1 Comment

Figuring out a way to cobble out a day of rest in our 365/24/7 hurly burly culture is sometimes more than we can manage.

That’s as true for Christians as it is for the rest of our society, and it may be doubly true for pastors. There are some interesting reflections on this subject over at Journeyman Preacher this week, where we can hear Doug say things like:

Keeping-Sabbath–as I understand it–is not a legalistic requirement as much as it is finding our strength and purpose in God. It is also simply enjoying God’s presence in our lives.

Go give it a read!

After that, there’s more Sabbath thinking out there for those of us Jesus people who can’t seem to stay away from Twitter and Facebook. Rhett Smith asks:

So why don’t we have sabbath patterns built into our routines? What is it about being engaged in social media and technology that keeps us from setting the proper boundaries?

Got an answer for that one?

Filed Under: Presbymergent

Who is My Jesus?

July 3, 2009 By David Williams 7 Comments

Who is Jesus?

I believe that Jesus is the One who saves. But…aaah…what is salvation? Salvation comes when we stand in right relationship with God. It’s a healing of the rift that exists between we selfish, solipcistic creatures and our Creator.

All of the terms and images that are used throughout the Gospels and Epistles point to Jesus of Nazareth as the One who fully manifested the self-emptying servanthood that is required if we are to conform our wills to God. He’s the physical reality of the logos that underlies the universe, so woven up into who God is that parsing out where the man ends and God begins is a fools errand.

Or the errand of theologians. Six of one, half dozen of the other.

More importantly, through him we come to see that this logos isn’t just the disengaged Enlightenment clockmaker or the abstraction of an Aristotelian unmoved mover. Instead, Jesus expresses the logos to us as love. He has soteriological power..that means savin’ power, kids…because he is God’s own self-expression. He’s not the Ba’al of a neo-Canaanite Trinity, sacrificed and raised by El like a subordinate mediator god in a tripartite pantheon. At his most essential, substantial level, Jesus is God.

Being Christian..and being saved…is less about obeying or emulating Christ and more about participating in Christ. It’s not about our own heartfelt emo conviction that we’ve been adequately spattered with His plasma and corpuscles. It’s not measured by our ability to memorize and recite scripture or the doctrinal assertions of our particular tradition.

It’s measured by our participation in that love that is God the Father, which Christ expressed through his life, and which the Spirit struggles every day to manifest in us.

reposted with minor tweaks from Beloved Spear

Filed Under: Emergent, Theology

Emergence, Postmodernity, and the Love Ethic

January 10, 2009 By David Williams 2 Comments

In order for the emergent movement to be both progressive and faithful, it’s going to have to show how it transcends the deconstructionism and emphasis on radical particularity that has defined much of postmodern discourse. What does that mean?

Deconstructionism can be defined in an almost infinite number of ways, primarily because the postmodern movement tends to view any effort at definition to be somehow oppressive. I tend to view it as epistemological defenestration. ” Epi-whazza defene-huh?” you might say.

Epistemology is a fancy pantsy way of saying: “the study of how you know what you know.” It’s useful in moderation, but in excess it is also why philosophy has gone from being something that everyday human beings discussed and debated on the street corners to this self-referential something that functionally nobody gives a good God damn about.

Defenestration is an old term from the early days of the anarchist movement, and it basically just means “smashing the windows.” If the old system is to be destroyed, you find the places it can be shattered, and then you shatter them. Preferably by using a senior Vice President of Lehman Brothers as a projectile. This is pretty much the entire life of postmodern academics, although it happens through incomprehensible journal articles read by twelve other people rather than huge rioting mobs.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Presbymergent Tagged With: Emergence, Love Ethic, Postmodernity

Next Steps

July 1, 2008 By David Williams 36 Comments

So now an emergent Presbyterian is the moderator of the General Assembly. We can say, yay Bruce, and marvel that he now has his very own page on Wikipedia.

After we get done celebrating, though, we have to ask ourselves: what does this mean for Presbymergent? In what ways will this impact the conversations we’ve been having here and will be having here?

What do you think?

Filed Under: Presbymergent Tagged With: Bruce Reyes-Chow, GA, moderator

Is There Such a Thing as An Emergent Clerk of Session?

January 17, 2008 By David Williams 6 Comments

Once again, I’ll dip into the presbymergent brain trust with a question about the changing dynamics within my own congregation.

I love my “wee kirk,” which when I arrived back in 2003 was a group of about 17 stalwarts, the last folks standing in a suburban congregation that began it’s archetypal mainline deathspiral back in the 1970s. We’re now at about 45 attendees, a mix of Anglos, second generation Korean-Americans, Vietnamese, Taiwanese, and African-Americans. The majority of my membership is now under the age of 30.

This year, my session composition is finally changing to more fully reflect the makeup of my church, with half of my leadership now comprised of young professionals…again, under the age of 30. My dear stalwarts are pleased with this, and are eager to hand over the reins. I am both pleased and a little concerned, because while I have total confidence in the thoughtfulness and gifts of my new church leadership, I’m not quite so sure about how well we’re going to mesh with the demands of church record keeping and bureaucracy.

In the near term future, I’m going to need a new clerk of session, and to be quite blunt, I don’t want to inflict the expectations of that hallowed office on any of my new members. My current clerk is worried about it, because she recognizes that it’s going to be nearly impossible for any of my new leadership to do all the things that she currently is required to do without quitting their jobs.

I’m going to be unable to honestly persuade anyone to take on that mantle because I don’t think it’s one that ultimately *needs* to be taken up. Yes, we need to keep good records for our own planning. Yes, we need to maintain standards of accounting transparency. But I need my folks working towards our vision for revitalization and in-the-trenches evangelism, not pouring their energies into paperwork. We don’t have that luxury.

So my question is: have any of y’all managed this kind of transition? Any tips? Any pointers? Any sympathetic ears in Presbytery?

Or should I just resign myself to telling my folks that all those exceptions on our Session records are just a way of telling us how exceptional we are…

Filed Under: Leadership, PC(USA), Polity Tagged With: Clerk of Session, Leadership, Session

New Media and Outreach

December 3, 2007 By David Williams 4 Comments

A question for the Presbymergent cognoscienti:

How and to what extent does your congregation utilize new media as an implement for evangelism?

I know that we blog, and that we’re open to integrating media into new forms of worship. This is good. But that we have connectivity within our respective fellowships doesn’t speak to how deeply we utilize internet media as a tool for bringing those outside our churches/faith communities into relationship with us.

I’ve been encouraging my little church to view our suite of web-based materials as a support for relational and affinity-based outreach. Between our website, a Google groups, a YouTube channel, and my own compulsive text and video bloggery, there’s a tremendous level of congregational and pastoral transparency.

The issue, as I see it, is moving those essentially passive media into a more engaged and active mode. The potential seems great, but I’m not sure what to do other than working to teach and empower my flesh-and-blood congregation to view our blogging and vlogging as a vital resource for our outreach efforts.

For those of you who’ve been actively using new media as part of your congregational life…how have you seen this played out? Are there any good best-practices resources in this area?
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As a side note, as I reviewed the Categories to tag this post, I noticed that neither “Evangelism” nor “Outreach”…nor any other variant of those concepts…seems to be present. Hmmm.

Filed Under: Blogging, Culture, Emergent, Networking, Resources, Website Tagged With: Blog, Media