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.

UPDATE: Please vote using the voting/polling module on the right hand sidebar of this site. Do not leave your vote in the comments section, please.

We have received 15 entries into the Official presbymergent Logo Contest. Please vote for the logo submissions you think are best (you can vote again after 24 hrs). The voting will be open from today until Thursday night at midnight. On Friday, we’ll be awarding the prize packages to the top five submissions with the most votes. The panel of judges will be deliberating this week as well and you’ll hear from us shortly after the top five are chosen.

So, let the voting begin!

UPDATE: Please vote using the voting/polling module on the right hand sidebar of this site. Do not leave your vote in the comments section, please.

Several months ago, we tossed out a post asking our presbymergent community to come up with some questions for the candidates for Moderator of the General Assembly. Here are your questions, in poll-style — vote for your favorites, and we’ll present the top five to the candidates.

Hint: You can stuff the ballot box (vote often) if you wait 24 hours and then vote again.

With General Assembly approaching, and three candidates for Moderator already declared, a few of the presbymergent editors have been tossing around the idea of coming up with a list of questions we’d like to ask the candidates.  This seems to be a time-honored tradition among groups as diverse as the Presbyterian Outlook, the Layman, Witherspoon, Covenant Network, etc., so it might be an interesting way to see what issues are important to presbymergents, as well as a way to engage with the GA Moderator conversation.

Here are two questions (submitted by presbymergent editor Jim Bonewald) to get your creative juices flowing and serve as examples:

1. How can we (and you as moderator help us) re-frame the conversation in our denomination so that we can move away from the polarizations of the past and can move forward with the gospel in this new millennium?
2. Why aren’t we planting new churches in our denomination? Why have efforts at new church plants failed?  What new approaches do we need to take? What does a post-modern church plant look like? Why do we look for land before we build a community?!?!

Now it’s your turn:  leave a comment on this post to ask your own question (or questions).  Let’s not spend too much time discussing, debating, or answering our own questions just yet – we can discuss and narrow them down once we have a good number accumulated.  For now, dream big and ask the questions that you would ask a Moderator candidate if she or he came knocking on your church door looking for support – especially questions that have special significance among our growing community of “loyal radicals.”

So clearly this community of friends is starting to gather more inertia. One thing I’ve been wondering for some time is whether we needed to design a logo for presbymergent. Now that we’re planning on having a booth at General Assembly in June, and our name has started to show up on a few posters for events as a co-sponsoring group, I think it might be helpful for us to get a logo designed for presbymergent.

I made the graphic on the right one night just to have something. However, it’s not really a presbymergent logo – just a few little “badges” put together.

So I’d like to suggest we collaborate on getting a logo design put together. Obviously, we don’t have any funds, unless we wanted to raise some money to hire a professional to design the logo. Otherwise, we can seek out people who may be willing to donate their services, or there may be some of you out there who want to take a stab at designing a logo.

I’m also wondering how people would like to go about the process. Should we find one person to work on the logo? Should we have a variety of people design a logo and then we’ll all vote? I’m open to any ideas. I have a few ideas of people we can seek out, some of which may be willing to do it for free. And I am also willing to work on some ideas.

What does everyone think?

The events page on presbymergent.org has been updated with lots of information on where presbymergents are going throughout the coming winter and spring months. The biggest national gathering of presbymergents, however, will be taking place this summer at Montreat during the Church Unbound conference just after GA.

What is taking place in events, until this summer, are a number of region-specific gatherings. If you’re anywhere in the South, the combination of top quality speakers (Shane Claiborne, Tim Keel, Troy Bronsink) and low registration fee ($25 online), makes A Sustainable Faith in St. Petersburg, Florida, Feb 2-3, a must-attend event.

The main series of events is Brian McLaren’s The Everything Must Change Tour, taking place in eleven cities around the USA (Charlotte NC, Boise ID, Dallas TX, St. Petersburg FL, Washington DC, San Diego CA, Chicago IL, Seattle WA, Kansas City MO, New York City NY, Goshen IN). Currently two of the tour stops, Boise and Washington DC, have presbymergents who volunteered to connect Presbyterians going to these events. To learn more about how the First Presbyterian Church in Bend, OR, is getting ready for the tour, see this post, and email Nate Bettger for connecting with them in Boise. Brian Wallace is planning a gathering in Washington DC, email Brian for more information. If you are willing to volunteer for gathering presbymergents in any of the other tour cities, please email and/or write a post for this site by registering or logging in. I will also update the events page with your contact info and any other details you provide.

Finally, there will be a very special event this April 8-10, “Emerging Church for the Existing Church” designed to bridge gaps between Emergent explorations and established Mainline churches. All of the presentations at this conference will directly relate to what it means to be a presbymergent, a convergence of existing church and emerging church. This is an opportunity for both on-ramp questions of figuring out what Emergent is about and for higher-level practitioner questions of being Emergent in Mainline contexts.

If you’re planning a presbymergent-related event, or are even considering the possibility of an event, feel free to email about getting connected with other presbymergents.

One of presbymergent’s Editors, Jim Bonewald (of The Church Geek fame), has started a thread on our Facebook group page discussing presbymergent’s presence at this year’s General Assembly in San Jose. You can follow along here (it will ask you to login to Facebook, so if you haven’t had a chance to sign up for Facebook and join the presbymergent group, this would be a good opportunity to do so). There is some good discussion happening there about what a presbymergent event at GA could/should look like. It also looks like we’re on track for having a booth at GA.

We’ll definitely be looking for people willing to help out with this at GA, and the opportunities are pretty open. We’ll probably have some brochures or something to pass out, need some people to help with the booth and a variety of other things. And of course it always helps to tell people about presbymergent too!

At any rate, go head over to the Facebook discussion thread and let people know what you think we should do at GA in 2008.