Loyal Radicals
This is certainly a bit late – but we wanted to make some Presbymergent badges available to you so you could put them on your website. You can simply save the images and use them however you’d like on your website. We put together a variety of sizes, so hopefully one of them will work for your website. Enjoy.
The PC(USA) Office of Church Growth is sponsoring this New Church Development Discernment opportunity. If you are selected to attend, the Office of Church Growth covers all your meals and travel expenses (up to $250). Applications are due by September 1.
What: NCD Discernment
Where: Hot Metal Bridge Faith Community, Pittsburgh, PA
When: October 15-17, 2009
Why: If you are considering becoming an NCD pastor, or if you feel called to NCD ministry, then this event is a chance to pray, reflect, and spend time with other NCD pastors and coaches.
See the this NCD flier for more information. Feel free to email Meredith Kemp-Pappan or call if you have any questions. The number to call is 1-888-728-7228, ext. 5088.
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.
Evangelism is a hard topic for me. I’ll keep it short- since I know little about the subject. I hate to feel like someone is selling me salvation. I feel pressure when people think I don’t believe “correctly” and that if I don’t decide to believe a certain way I’m damned. The truth is, I don’t think it’s possible to force yourself to believe something right away.
On the other hand, I’m afraid that if I “sell it” incorrectly, that I really am leading someone astray. So I basically just avoid evangelism at all costs.
At this point the best thing I can do is to just live “out loud”, so to speak, so people will know that they can come to me if they have similar things going on in their lives, and I can tell them how God is working for me in my life. That’s about as far as I can go with my witness as of now.
Now for churches, I don’t know what the answer is except to be welcoming and encourage study, questions, and open discussion. And for members and clergy to practice what they preach, and do the best to live as an example of what God does in your life. In other words, represent well. That’s what people see I think more than power points or brochures.
I am working on a doctoral project that seeks lessons the emerging/missional church can teach the mainline about local mission; especially in answering the question “who is our neighbor?” I have a questionnaire that I would love for folks to fill out and e-mail back to me. If you are interested, let me know. Thanks.
For all of my twittering, facebooking, g-mailing, blogging and blackberrying, and so forth, the truth is that I most often find myself in sacred space, in the presence of God Himself, when I dare to put that all away, step away from my techno-centered routines, and simply be. At the risk of sounding like a Luddite, I most often see God when I stop texting and start looking around at the world God made with the eyes God blessed me with, tasting the air on my tongue and taking in the world around me rather than confining my experience of the world to that which appears on a small, digital screen.
* * * * *
Most recently, it has been the reality of the summer—a warm breeze picking through the branches and leaves of the live oaks, the whirring of bugs and beetles high above me, the taste of honeysuckle and thyme in the air—that has brought me back to myself. There isn’t much cell phone service worth using on the streets near my parent’s northern California home, so I have been forced to set down my phone and amuse myself with my surroundings instead, packing away the email, facebook, or catch-up calls that are so often a feature of my more urban hiking adventures in Philadelphia. As I walk down the dusty trail that lines highway 130, my ears prick to the gentle rustle of oleander and wild turkey, and I find myself reeling with the recognition that I am a part of something bigger than myself, that the signs of life around me are small reminders of something deeper and grander than anything I could imagine, something that could so easily go unnoticed and then suddenly bowl me over in a instant of blazing clarity.
When John Calvin wrote of the glory of and specialness of creation, I heard what he was saying. And I recognized myself in his remark that we too often fail to see the beauty that is before us. Every once in a while, however, a thin space, as the Celts called it, opens before our eyes, and the truth of the world and God’s presence in it is clear to us. As Calvin would put it, we find that in God we are given spectacles to see the sacred quality of all things, which hide in plain sight before me.
So what are the things that stun me back to the recognition of the Sacred? There is no pattern that I can discern, no perfect formula for figuring it out. While I am often bowled over by that which is natural, I also find that God can strip me of my ignorance of the sacred around me in the most mundane or even complicated of circumstances. I see it in the pattern of a quilt made by my own hands and a well-written poem, or even in the midst of the fray as much as the beauty of a mountain range. And I could argue that it takes practice to see the sacred with more clarity, and yet even that isn’t always the case. I have learned that the world will surprise my fuzzy eyes into focus as shockingly when I am looking for the sacred as it will when I am doing everything but.
Ultimately, these moments of recognition are both a mystery and a gift, for like God they are beyond my ability to grasp them, and filled with grace and wisdom. They surpass knowledge and understanding and are filled with Truth. They bring me closer to God, to myself, and to my fellow inhabitants on this great, sacred sphere that we call home. For that, I am thankful.
Surely it wasn’t Depeche Mode who awakened the church to this personal Jesus. But it might have started somewhere around the time the greater church started issuing a space in liturgy where one could ‘accept Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior.’ Okay, so it was probably before that, but it is a fair place to start. Sometimes I wonder if the traditions that issue this call find it awkward when followers do exactly that? The declaration of ‘my’ has been an overwhelming call to empowerment and liberation. My supposition is that as long as the ’my’ is synonymous with the familiarity of the tradition – empowerment is not such a threat. It is possible though, that the greater church is rethinking its offer to make it personal. Watching the theological evolution of a personal Jesus has somewhat dismantled the church. Because really, are we equipped for that? Shouldn’t we be equipped for that?
It is my experience that when we, as a collective, try to hammer down what or who ‘my Jesus’ really is, in a matter of minutes we subject ourselves ever so subtly to the sin of idolatry. For those who refuse to believe Jesus is no other than a white man from Dallas, Texas – and for those who are firmly convinced Jesus is a woman, or is Indonesian – this is personal. We want Jesus to identify with us. As we are. Why is it that we want Jesus to be exactly what we want? In a ’my’ kind of way? Is this really what we might call an emerging situation? Plurality in its most infant stage?
The most rational explanation is that the time has come to understand Jesus as more than the white guy from Dallas. Even though the female Jesus still scares the crap out of so many people – including women – we are even trying to understand the Black Jesus, the Queer Jesus, or the Chinese Jesus. Substitute ‘my’ for whatever you are – and there you have it. “_______ Jesus.”
I suppose it really is about knowing who we belong to from the standpoint of identity. We now know that the answer to the question “who is Jesus?” all depends on who you ask. We live in a time where what “I” believe is not critiqued as heavily as it once was – for good or for bad – you decide. We no longer fear excommunication as much because we can just start over in another place. Heresy is getting harder and harder to ’prove’. All the “I”s find each other through technology, blogs and twitter. They create space to dialogue. A lively, yet untouchable space. And most often, it is where the like minded “I”s can get together and cyber-duke it out against an opposing set of “I’s” for the entire world to read day after day because that is what we can do now. No more Aereopagus’s. Where you have to look your opponent in the eyes when you disagree.
Even more so, the ‘my Jesus’ critique of the traditional church has opened a lot of doors to those who have never had their kind of Jesus represented by the greater church. And most of those doors have been opened in new spaces. Store fronts. Houses. Back yards. Industrial garages. Away from the tradition that refuses to listen to the voice of ‘my‘. But in my own attempt to critique even the critiquers of the church I have to ask – can the evolutionary personal Jesus stay in the church? Monica’s Jesus wants that. Can the ‘my’ crowd maintain a healthy ground in the greater church in order to help reform it? Or is ‘my Jesus’ going to build a bridge and solidify plurality in a different space? So that there are lots of ’my’ us’s? Who knows. My Jesus probably does.
-Submitted by Monica Hall-
In his book, Generous Orthodoxy, Brian McLaren talks about the seven Jesuses he has known. It served as a kind of faith statement for him, as he shared his journey of faith by seeing how Jesus had touched and transformed the lives of people nearby and far away.
If I have a hang up about answering “Who is my Jesus?” it in the way the personal pronoun is the first person singular. If Jesus is “My Jesus” he quits being the Jesus of someone else. If Jesus is really going to be who we believe he is, than he is my Lord and Savior, but not just for me. Jesus does not exist just to back up my opinions, or to strike out against my enemies.
But the question has been asked – Who is my Jesus? I see Jesus as a human being growing up like I have, experiencing all of the stuff of life I have experienced, with a few things left out because of time and culture, of course. But Jesus is fully human; he fully experienced everything we experience – even the experience of death.
Jesus is a teacher. He went around teaching and healing, but his big thing, apparently ,was in teaching people. He taught them about the Kingdom of God and what it looked like to live in that Kingdom. I think Jesus is still teaching me and us today. We still need to put our stuff aside, slow our lives down, get a check on our preconceived positions and listen to what he has to say.
Jesus is a prophet. That’s church talk for a spokesperson of God. He had a word from God to give to the people. Sometimes he spoke it, sometimes he lived it. Either way, he confronted people with God’s presence in their lives – not just to tell them that they had sinned and they needed to change direction. But to remind them that God loves them – and us – passionately, so passionately that God will not let us go on doing things which are not good for us.
Jesus is the one who brings resurrection. Not just eternal life, not just getting your butt into heaven. But the one who gives us renewal of life every day, every moment. Resurrection is not just an experience after death. It is a ‘during life’ kind of thing. Jesus gives us new life in the midst of life; a renewal of life that invites us to share with others all of the joy, peace and justice that following Jesus is all about.
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.
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.
She’s worth reading/subscribing/following, so go over and browse around for a bit!
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