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New Church Development Discernment

August 5, 2009 By Presbymergent Admin 1 Comment

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.

Filed Under Events, Presbymergent Tagged With new church development

A Second Life for Presbyterians

June 19, 2009 By Neal Locke 26 Comments

**This is the first of a planned 4 part series I’ll be doing this summer on Presbyterians, Emergents, and Presbymergents in the popular virtual reality world, Second Life.***


If the birth of a real Presbyterian ministry in a virtual world isn’t evidence of the church emerging, I don’t know what is. And as strange, foreign, (or even silly) as the concept may sound to some, the more I explore the world of Second Life, the more convinced I become that this is a new context in which God is already at work, and God’s people across the world are already engaged in a diversity of ministry.  I think we should join God, and join them.

For those not already familiar with Second Life from various news reports, magazine articles, and other usual sources of hype, to explain would take up more space than would be wise in this blog post.  Instead, I recommend starting here. It’s eye opening reading, I promise.

When I first started exploring Second Life, I found plenty of evidence of minstry — from a United Methodist Chapel, to a Lutheran Pavillion, to a Taize Sanctuary 500 meters in the sky!  I found the Anglican Cathedral of Second Life, started two years ago by Rev. Mark Brown, which now has 800+ members and conducts five virtual services each week.   I also found a community — Koinonia Congregational Church – that can best be described as “emergent” and meets weekly in a beautiful sanctuary without walls or doors.

I searched for Presbyterians.  It was pretty bleak…but I did find one person — in real life she’s an elder at a Presbyterian Church in California — who has been keeping the proverbial light on, and started a group called (no surprise here) 1st Presbyterian Church of Second Life.  She reserved the name with the hope and a prayer that someday more Presbyterians would come along.  And now, that’s started to happen…

After several weeks of talking to people, dreaming and visioning, the number of Presbyterians in Second Life is growing — most of us are new, and probably feeling a culture shock not unlike what immigrants to the US feel (SL has a steeper learning curve than FB or twitter).  But we’re starting to connect, have conversations, explore opportunities for ministry that is uniquely Presbyterian, but also uniquely Second Life.  Just yesterday, our esteemed moderator, Bruce Reyes-Chow, jumped in (his SL name is Esteban Radikal), as did Philip Lotspeich (SL: Philip Lionheart) from the office of Evangelism and Growth.

So, in true Presbyterian fashion (maybe a bad thing, mabye not?) we’ve acquired some land, threw up a building (both were WAY easier and cheaper than in real life) and will be gathering on Saturday nights 9pm CST / 7pm SLT for fellowship, conversation, and perhaps eventually something like worship, too.  Tomorrow night will be our very first gathering of Presbyterians in Second Life, and anyone is welcome to drop in. May God’s Spirit breathe through the bits and the bytes into a new context (for us, at least)!

  • To find our meeting place in Second Life, click here. If you don’t have an account yet, you’ll have to create one.
  • If you’d like to get involved with what we’re doing in Second Life, contact Neal Locke via twitter, facebook, or email neal at mrlocke dot net.
  • If you created an account in Second Life but are utterly confused and lost, use the search engine to find me: I’m Neill Loxingly in Second Life. Add me as a friend, and I’ll come to your rescue, or send another SL Presbyterian to help :-)
Filed Under Culture, Emerging Worship, Events

Follow @presbymergent Next Week

February 14, 2009 By Adam Walker Cleaveland 6 Comments

As Jan Edmiston mentioned in her post, Connecting Face to Face, the Presbymergent Coordinating Group is meeting in Louisville this upcoming week, February 17-19. We have almost the entire Coordinating Group coming out for the gathering, and we’re all very excited. We’re going to be having some really important conversations and I’m sure you’ll be hearing a lot more from the Coordinating Group members after our gathering. Be sure and check the blog during the next week or two. If you haven’t already, you can subscribe to the site’s RSS feed by clicking here or choosing the RSS Tab on the right sidebar.

Twitter

If you would like more immediate feedback and updates, and if you Twitter, please be sure to follow @presbymergent, which is our Twitter account.

We are also going to be using the hashtag of #pmergent, so you can search Twitter for that to find out what’s going on. If you want to search on Twitter, click here.

Direct Updates from Presbymergent on Twitter

One thing you might not be aware of, but if you want updates from a specific Twitter user, you can just text “follow username” to 40404 (which is Twitter’s number). So if you want to get text messages whenever @presbymergent updates on Twitter, just text “follow presbymergent” to 40404. You can also find our most recent Tweets and most recent posts with #pmergent in the sidebar.

I’ll be getting out there Tuesday and if you want to follow my updates you can check my blog pomomusings.com but I’ll probably be Twittering more, and you can follow me at @adamwc. If you’re going to be at the Coordinating Group meeting, please leave your name and blog below, and if you Twitter, leave your Twitter username if you want, so people can track what’s going on.

We’re very excited about this gathering – more next week from Louisville!

Filed Under Events, Open Source, Presbymergent, Press Tagged With Facebook, faith, gatherings, Presbymergent Coordinating Group, twitter

Bass and Borg and McLaren, oh my!

December 16, 2008 By LeahBradley 3 Comments

Online registration is now open for the 2009 Festival of Theology & Reunion, March 15-18, at Louisville Seminary.  Lecturers include Diana Butler Bass, Marcus Borg, and Brian McClaren, speaking on the theme “New Ways of Being Church.”

To learn more and/or register, visit www.lpts.edu/reunion.

Filed Under Events, Presbymergent Tagged With Brian McLaren, Dian Butler Bass, Events, Marcus Borg

Twitter of Faith

November 22, 2008 By Neal Locke 6 Comments

Legend has it that one afternoon on November 22nd, Presbymergent founder and about-to-be-ordained-minister Adam Walker Cleaveland was trying to come up with a statement of faith for his Ordination service.  So he did the usual thing any 20-something uber geek would do…he asked his twitter friends how long a statement of faith should be?

After many responses of the usual sort (one page, two page, red page, blue page) fellow presby-geek (and World of Warcraft guru) Shawn Coons tweeted back : “instead of a statement of faith, how about a twitter of faith? Anyone else up to the challenge?”  And so it began…

Here’s the challenge:

  1. If you’re not on twitter yet, click here to see what it’s all about and why you should be.
  2. If you’re on twitter (or just joined), log in and tweet your personal statement of faith…in 140 characters or less.
  3. Add the hashtag #TOF somewhere in your tweet. That will actually make it 136 characters, but it also makes it easy for us to find and compile all of these statements.
  4. Encourage your friends to take the “Twitter of Faith” challenge, too – imagine how cool it would be if this meme spreads, proclaiming the gospel across the internets (well, at least across twitter).

UPDATE:  Adam, Mark, Chad, Wendy, Cobus, Matthew, Makeesha, Geoff, Adele, Drew, Cameron, Dan, Greg, John, Ryan, Angela, John, Greg, Molly, Matt,  Dave Zimmerman from InterVarsity Press, and our distinguished moderator, Bruce Reyes-Chow, have all posted this to their blogs.  If you blog it, let us know in the comments so we can link to it here, and feel free to use the above image (designed by Adam) for your post.

UPDATE: There’s now a facebook page and corresponding event, too.  Even if you’re not on Twitter, you can click here to scroll through the many TOFs that have been filling up the web in the past few hours.

Filed Under Churches, Events, Presbymergent, Resources, twitter Tagged With faith, twitter, Web Design

Philly Area Presbymergents: Shane Claiborne at Dilworthtown Community Church

October 30, 2008 By Tony Sundermeier Leave a Comment

Author and advocate Shane Claiborne will be preaching at the Dilworthtown Community Church on Sunday, November 2 at 9:00 AM.  Following worship, Shane will stick around for an hour long Q&A conversation concerning the content of his new book, “Jesus for President.” All are welcome!

Dilworthtown Community Church
1385 Birmingham Road
West Chester, PA 19382
www.dilworthtowncc.com/shane_claiborne

PS – Go Phillies!

Filed Under Events, Presbymergent Tagged With Events, Justice, Shane Claiborne, The Simple Way

The Offering: An Emergent Theology Tale

October 21, 2008 By Leon Bloder 4 Comments

I have had more than my fair share of days when I have questioned my call to be a pastor. I read somewhere how a young man, who was thinking about becoming a pastor, asked his mentor—a pastor of many years—”When did you feel the call to go into ministry?” The older man didn’t bat an eyelash and replied, “This morning.”

I completely get that. There are days when I feel like I need to hear the call every five minutes just to assure me that I am doing what I am supposed to do with my life. Even when people tell me things that should reassure me, I struggle to believe that God would actually want to use someone like me for such an important task. I once heard that the great reformer, Martin Luther, used to feel as though the earth was going to open up and swallow him whole each time he rose to say the Mass. That comforts me a bit, really. If Martin Luther felt himself to be unworthy of his call, then at least I am in good company. Martin Luther also swore like a sailor and loved beer, which is also pretty comforting.

For the past few years I have felt a longing in me that has been difficult to define and impossible to quench. You see, God, in God’s infinite wisdom and mercy, has seen fit for me to serve in the Presbyterian Church (USA)–a Christian denomination that has been (like most mainline Protestant denominations) in decline for decades. My more conservative colleagues from not-mainline denominations gleefully point this out at every available opportunity—God love ‘em. Once I had a fellow pastor from a conservative, evangelical church inform me over lunch that in his opinion the real moment when the PC(USA) fell into ruin was when it began ordaining women.

“That’s where it all started,” he told me in sage-like fashion. “And now look what’s happening… you’re ordaining them.” I asked what he meant by “them” and he replied, “You know…homosexuals.”
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Filed Under Churches, Culture, Emergent, Emerging Worship, Events, Leadership, PC(USA), Polity, Presbymergent, Resources, Theology Tagged With Emergent, emergent theology, pastoral ministry

Of Dying Breeds and Swelling Hopes: A Mainline Emergent in the Reformed Tradition

October 10, 2008 By Troy Bronsink 12 Comments

In the first part of this article (found in Fuller Seminary’s “Theology, News and Notes” Fall 2008 issue) I explore the similarities between the Emergent Presbyterians and the character Harold Crick, played by Will Farrell in the movie Stranger than Fiction. Crick overhears his narrator describing his “imminent death” and reacts with dismay screaming out loud, “What? What? Hey! HELLOOO! What? Why? Why MY death? HELLO? Excuse me? WHEN?”. In the PC(USA) Book of Order we are reminded that the church is itself “the provisional demonstration of… the new reality revealed in Jesus Christ [which] is the new humanity…” (G-3.0200 italics added). The church is “called to undertake this mission even at the risk of losing its life, trusting in God alone as the author and giver of life, sharing the gospel, and doing those deeds in the world that point beyond themselves to the new reality in Christ.” (G-3.0400). While I am a minister in the PC(USA) I have only come to Presbyterianism in the past 10 years. Newer to this whole thing, I tend to deal a little differently with the bad news of our imminent death. I get to be like the viewer in the film, and less like Harold Crick. I guess you could say I see it coming. But that doesn’t keep me from stretching into the life that is mine, and leaning into the script with all the more courage and passion. By the end of the film (SPOILER ALERT), Harold gets to read the script. He sees the poetry in his own ending and he is faced with the choice of leaning into that masterpiece with his very life. And this, I think, is what Mainline Emergents are doing everywhere.

I was asked by Ryan Bolger co-author of Emerging Churches: Creating Christian Community in Postmodern Cultures, to write a theological reflection on the Presbyterian perspective of the oxymoron of “mainline emergence” for Fuller Seminary’s “Theology News and Notes.” I have to begin by prefacing that a similar phenomena is happening in other religions including Judaism as well as many other denominations including our ecclesiastical siblings the Disciple, the PCA, and the EPC. Perhaps discovering others in this Emergence will be more an opportunity for reconciliation and integration and less an opportunity for division amidst an already small tribe. This, at least, has been the fruit of my friendship with Emergent Village, a generative friendship of Missional leaders of all stripes, ideologies, and denominations.

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Filed Under Events, PC(USA), Presbymergent Tagged With Agitators, Artisans, Critics, Designers, Emergent, Mainline, Presbymergent, Reformed

2008 Emergent Mid-Atlantic Conference

August 21, 2008 By Presbymergent Admin Leave a Comment

Please come join your fellow Emergent friends at the 2008 Emergent Mid-Atlantic Conference featuring Peter Rollins, on Nov. 8th, 2008 in Philadelphia. For more information please go to http://emergentmidatlantic.com

Grace and Peace,

Thomas, Lead Organizer, Emergent Mid-Atlantic Conference

Filed Under Events, Leadership Tagged With Atlantic, Emergent, New Jersey, Pete Rollins, Theology