Grace and Peace to You All,

Election 2008 has finally come to an end. For those of us who have been suffering from election fatigue these past few weeks, it’s a welcome relief, to tell you the truth.

But now, after months and months of being made aware of all the ways Americans seem to be divided, we will begin to hear (and quite rightly) that we must come together. In president-elect Obama’s victory speech last night he spoke directly to this when he quoted Abraham Lincoln, who also presided over a divided nation. “We are not enemies but friends,” Lincoln said after the Civil War, “though passion may have strained…it must not break our bonds of affection.” These are fine words. We can’t escape the sense of history in that they were spoken by an African-American who has been elected President of the United States in Lincoln’s home state, and in Chicago, the very city where Lincoln won the nomination for President. They are fine words, and historic. But the road to unity is going to be difficult, and there are many among us who are anxious and fearful of what lies ahead.

As the Church, the Body of Christ, we need to lead the way in the healing that must begin after such a long and contentious political season. How can we do this? We can first recognize that as the Church we are called to “unity in diversity,” through the power of the Spirit of Christ in us and all around us. The Body of Christ is diverse. There are people in our own church—the First Presbyterian Church of Eustis—who probably voted for different candidates. There are members and friends of our congregation who gather together each Sunday for worship, sing together in the choir and serve side by side in mission and ministry, who may not agree at all when it comes to politics. I know that today I am the pastor of a church where some of my flock are rejoicing over the victory of president-elect Barack Obama, and some are not.

But the Body of Christ is also unified. Paul referred to this in Galatians when he wrote, “There is no longer any Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free, for all are made one in Christ.” In Philippians Paul exhorted the early church to be “One in spirit and in purpose.” The culture that Paul was speaking into was no different from our own in that it sought to divide people by race, background, political leanings, faith, gender, and so much more. But though the world will try to divide us, and cause us to strive against one another on the world’s terms, as Christians we are called to One-ness. I use the word “One-ness” because we are drawn together by the One who gave everything so that we might have life, and “life more abundantly.”

I have many Christian friends all over the country who are despondent today. Many of them have expressed their anxiety over an Obama presidency in fairly apocalyptic terms—end of the world kind of language. I have other Christian friends who are unbelievably excited and hopeful—triumphant, if you will—that a new day has dawned. I am quick to remind them all that four years ago, the tables were turned. Those who are rejoicing today were predicting the end of civilization then, and those who are despondent today were on top of the world. As Christians we need to understand that if our outlook of the future is determined by the outcome of an election, and not by the hope we say we have in Jesus Christ—-then our priorities need adjusting.

To that end—and this is the second way the Church can lead in healing division—we need to look to what unifies us as brothers and sisters in Christ, and live into that hope on a daily basis. What the world needs to see from the Church is not angry rhetoric or bitterness and fear. The world does not need to see a Church divided by politics, but united in the love of Christ and for the purpose of being salt and light. Jesus prayed that his disciples would live out this hope and that they would be a witness,
“My prayer is not for [my disciples] alone,” Jesus prayed in John 17. “I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one. Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one. In them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unit to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.”

And so, my beloved congregation…
If you are filled with joy at the outcome of the election, remember the very words that president-elect Obama used last night to frame his victory. He said that he saw the victory as a challenge to show the kind of “humility and determination to heal the divides that have held back our progress.” Your joy today should bring with it a measure of humility and grace, and a sense of duty to heal wounds, find common ground and point to Christ in all that you do.

If you are filled with anxiety and dread on this day, be at peace. We serve a risen Savior, who is at work in and among us in the world. We believe in a Sovereign God, who sets up kings and kingdoms and takes them down. We are heirs of a hope that is not found in politicians nor the outcome of elections. Live into that hope in a spirit of unity with your brothers and sisters in Christ who perhaps voted differently than you did yesterday, and above all show love and demonstrate the kind of grace that you yourselves have been given.

You are loved and prayed for daily.

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.”

He hissed the word “homosexuals” like a snake, like it hurt him to say it. I started to explain the intricacies of Presbyterian polity, and that we didn’t in fact ordain lots of different people for lots of different reasons, but that didn’t mean that they were evil, bad, horrible, hellbound sorts. The thought of explaining all of this, however, made me tired. Instead I decided to take the high road and asked him if he had any pictures of himself in his Klan robes and hood, and how many people came to his last cross burning. Lunch sort of went downhill after that.

I shouldn’t let things like that bother me, but I realize that the reason it does is pretty simple: I worry that the critics of my [supposedly] dying, mainline denomination might be right. What if they were? Would it really change the way I feel about things? I have looked into the eyes of Legalism and Fundamentalism within the Christian community and know it to be something altogether apart from God. But here I am–a self-described emergent church leader—bursting with ideas and dreams of reforming and transforming the small corner of the Body of Christ to which I have been assigned to shepherd. Here I am in a mainline denomination, serving an historic, traditional church. It feels like I am the smallest, puniest most insignificant tugboat in the fleet trying to push the grandest and most gargantuan ocean liner away from the rocks.

I spent most of my day today in meetings talking about budgets, and extremely important things like who really should have a key to the closet in the church kitchen where the good silver is kept, and why it’s important to have a church sign that matches the outside decor of the church building. Today I felt about as emergent, innovative and transformative as an old shoe. It’s days like this that try my soul, and make me wonder if I am somehow being punished for all of the misdeeds of my youth…and there were many.

The thing is, I have had these other moments when I feel so called to be a pastor that it literally makes me ache. And even further, that God—for some reason unknown to me—seems to want me to take my place in the ocean among so many others who are paddling like mad, and trying desperately to turn this big ship we call the Church around.

George Herbert is this seventeenth-century poet that I admire a great deal. I have his picture on the wall of my office. It’s more of an engraving, really—or rather, a picture of an engraving that I printed off of the Internet and then put in a gilded frame to make it look respectable. At any rate, a rendering of George Herbert sits on my wall. Once I attended a talk by Eugene Peterson, the man who created The Message–a translation of the Bible into everyday language–and about a million other books about faith and life. He said that one day he just starting replacing all of his diplomas, accolades and awards that were hanging on his office wall with pictures of people he admired and who had influenced him. He cited George Herbert as one of his heroes, along with a bunch of dead, German theologians that I was ashamed to say I had never heard of before. I went home and did the same thing. My wall contains C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, George Herbert, J.R.R. Tolkien, Eugene Peterson and Bono. The picture of Bono is a good one. He’s got on shades and a cowboy hat. I got if off the Internet, too.

I’m sorry…this story really should have begun on the streets of San Diego, which is a pretty darn nice place for any story to begin considering the weather and all. Anyway, I found myself walking in downtown San Diego on a bright February afternoon in search of a bookstore. My mission was to buy a book of George Herbert’s poems. You see, it was in San Diego that I heard Eugene Peterson’s talk–the one where he mentioned his office and the picture of George Herbert that hung there. It had been the second time in a month that I had heard the name of George Herbert, and I decided that it was the type of sign that at the very least necessitated the purchase of a book of his poetry.

A few weeks earlier, I happened to be sitting at a worship service in St. Paul’s Cathedral in London England. Yes, I realize that I just wrote that I “happened” to be in England. Well, I was. I was on “holiday,” to coin an English colloquialism, with my wife. We were celebrating our 15th wedding anniversary. We were attending a Sunday night worship service on the Third Sunday of Epiphany at one of the most famous cathedrals in the world. I’m not bragging or trying to sound pretentious (well, maybe a little), but you have to admit that’s pretty cool. But this is even better… We were there five years almost to the day when we first attended a worship service in that grand cathedral. And on that day, five years before, God had spoken to me in an audible voice and told me that I needed to become a pastor. I’d been fighting the the call, you see, and I guess that God decided enough was enough. The voice that God used that day was the voice of the Reverend Canon Patience Purchas, Associate Director of Ordinands, Diocese of St. Albans. I didn’t know what it meant either. I found out her job title in plain English was more like, “The Pastor in Charge of Everyone in Southern England Who is Trying to Become a Pastor.” Her sermon that evening was essentially about how to recognize God’s will for you life. I don’t remember much of it all, but I do remember that at one point she said something like, “I feel as though there is someone here, who is struggling with God’s call to pursue a life in ministry.”

Now, I’ve seen enough charlatan preachers in my church-going career to know that old trick. I’ve witnessed a number of these performers, who, at the critical moment in the sermon—usually around the time of the altar call—will stretch out their hand in dramatic fashion and say, “I sense that there’s someone out there…someone out there who is far from God…” or something to that effect. There’s nothing particularly spiritual about this 9 times out of 10. It’s called playing the odss, and people do it all the time in casinos, riverboats and smoky rooms above meat markets.

But at that moment, in that place, I knew that it wasn’t anything like that. God was working through this very proper Englishwoman in her rather stiff Anglican robes, who had no way of knowing that in that small crowd of visitors and downtown Londoners that there was indeed someone who was struggling with God’s call in his life. I began to weep uncontrollably, overwhelmed with the knowledge that God had found me 6,000 miles from home, where I had run like Jonah from a destiny I was afraid to embrace. Six months later, my wife and I were driving a huge truck filled with our earthly belongings from Florida to Chicago. We’d sold our house, a car, my lawn mower and deep fryer—nearly everything that wouldn’t fit in a downtown apartment, and headed for the midwest so I could attend seminary. That Third Sunday of Epiphany changed my life.

So there I sat, five years later in roughly the same spot where I had heard God speaking to me through the Rev. Canon Patience Purchas, and I was expecting more of the same. I know that lightning doesn’t strike twice and all of that happy horse-poo, but there I was. I wanted to hear God’s voice tell me what I was going to do next, what the next five years would bring. The truth was, I was kind of at a crossroads–at least in my own mind. I’d been feeling antsy, wondering when God might be ready to promote me to something bigger, better and hipper. I knew that I was ready to lead my own church, or to engage in a larger ministry than the one to which I had been called. I also knew that I wasn’t getting any younger, and that time was soon going to be working against me. If I wanted to be bright, young reformer I only had a few more years to make that happen. In the business world there is a window for upward mobility and when you get to a certain age, the window becomes more and more narrow until it finally closes. I just knew that God had something in mind for me, because that’s how it works, right? That’s the kind of thing that happens to preachers and other people who go chasing after God-dreams—they hear voices, they get visions, they have epiphanies while sitting in the middle of a centuries-old cathedral with the smell of incense and candles in the air. And then success finds them. By success I mean that they are granted entry into the most hallowed halls of Christendom—halls that are reserved for people with big book deals, television shows, and really big churches. I knew this was coming because the story of my life that was being written needed something dramatic to put in the introduction.

Then I looked at my worship bulletin.

“Prominence & Obscurity: The Poetry of George Herbert,” it read. I remembered reading Herbert in a Renaissance poetry class that I took in college. The only thing I could remember about him was that he’d written a poem about Easter that was in the shape of an angel. That was the extent of my Herbert knowledge. When I realized that the entire worship service was going to be one big Herbert love-fest, I was devastated. I had come to experience a life-changing worship service, and I was going to be treated instead to some sort of glorified poetry reading. Still, I was in St. Paul’s–in London. I was resigned that although it was the Third Sunday of Epiphany, there would be no epiphany for me that day. I decided to be content with just being there.
At one point in the service, one of the liturgists read from Herbert’s poem The Priesthood, which exemplifies in so many ways what Herbert was all about. He had tasted success and had tasted power and chose in the end to dedicate his life to serving God. I remember hearing these words being read:

Blest Order, which in power dost so excel/That with th’ one hand thou liftest to the sky/And with the other throwest down to hell…I am both foul and brittle; much unfit/To deal in holy Writ…Wherefore I dare not, I, put forth my hand/To hold the Ark, although it seem to shake/Through th’ old sins and new doctrines of our land/Only, since God doth often vessels make/Of lowly matter for high uses meet/I throw at his feet…

I realize to a lot of folks that last bit sounds pretty much like seventeenth-century poetry would sound: formal, stuffy, old… But to me, on that day as I sat there in that ageless place I felt like time had been stripped away and the words of Herbert found me sitting there and wrung out my heart. I thought of him, this poet, this would-be wealthy and powerful up-and-coming scholar and politician, who flung it all away to become the pastor of an obscure parish, and I was ashamed. As my wife and I walked out of the church that night and on to the busy London streets, it began to rain. I let it pelt me in the face. It felt like baptism. And the London rain soon mingled with the tears that began to fall because I am just like that–a big baby… at least when it comes to the important things in life. Nothing, in the end, is more important than doing what you are called by God to do.

I should return to the San Diego part of the story, which is where this all came together in a mixed-up, muddled-up, shook up way. I was attending the National Pastor’s convention (where Eugene Peterson was one of the keynote speakers). I was probably one of twelve Presbyterians who attended out of probably a few thousand or so other pastors, most of whom were Southern Baptists or “non-denominational,” which is the same thing as being a Southern Baptist—only more profitable and with a more casual dress code. I walked around the convention feeling more than a little out of place. Nearly all of the pastors I encountered were older, had higher hair and introduced themselves and their wives by saying, We pastor a church in [insert southern city here].” I have never really been fooled by that use of “we” to be perfectly honest. It’s patronizing, especially coming from people who often do not believe that women have the gifts for ordained ministry. If my wife wanted to, she would make an awesome pastor, and we happen to belong to a denomination, which (despite the fact that it is “dying”) would affirm that call. There are many things that don’t feel very emergent about my denomination (remember the silver closet?), but the fact that we believe Scripture upholds the fact that God calls whom God calls is about the foremost “emergent” quality we Presbyterians (the USA kind) possess.

Anyway, I decided to take a break from the convention so that I could take the trolley into downtown San Diego. I figured that I would wander around the Gaslamp district for a bit and hopefully find a bookstore that would miraculously contain a book of George Herbert’s poems. Besides, I just really wanted to get away from Christians for a while. I put on my Johnny Cash t-shirt, and put in all of my earrings (all three) because I feel safe enough to wear them when I am not anywhere near my own church. Figuring that I looked suitably un-pastor-like, I walked to the trolley stop and got on. After a brief interlude to eat at In-And-Out Burger—only the best burger place in the world–I boarded the Blue Line trolley into downtown San Diego.

I noticed that this guy got on at the same I did, and he was–shall we say–a little wobbly on his feet. He was barefooted, carrying his worldly belongings in a clear plastic trash bag and reeking of alcohol. I glanced at him when he wasn’t looking and noticed that he was dirty and wearing a battered, filthy baseball cap that was slightly askew on his head. He had on a pair of reflective, wrap-around shades. When the train lurched forward he almost fell. I saw him take a look at the young man standing next to him–a guy who was well-dressed, well-groomed and looking like he was on his way to a job interview. They couldn’t have been more un-alike. The dirty guy gave his neighbor the once-over.

“How’s it going, man?” he asked him.

“Cool, man. How about you?”

“Just chillin’ man, you know. Just chillin’,” the dirty guy responded.

“Outstanding,” his neighbor said. Then the dirty guy went to sit down. Every time he would do something differently he would announce his intentions. So when he went to sit down, he told everyone, “I’m going to sit down, okay?” then he did it.

I put on my own shades for no other reason than I wanted to watch him a bit longer, but didn’t want to make eye contact. I had learned from my three years living in Chicago that if you made eye contact with every dirty, drunken fellow on the train, you would spend every ride listening to their tales of woe, and would most assuredly end up getting solicited for money. This wasn’t always the case, but it was the case enough of the time for me to form a preconceived notion about making eye contact with dirty, drunken guys on the train. Still, I wanted to the see the complexities of the human drama unfold, so I put on my shades to stare.

The Guy, as I will call him henceforth, was trying to make conversation with everyone, who was seated next to him. “I’m trying to get downtown,” he proclaimed. No one responded. “Man, I need to find a liquor store,” he said. No one said anything, nor acted surprised, for that matter. All of a sudden he looked at me and got up from his seat. “I’m going over here,” he told everyone.
I immediately looked away, out the window, at my seat, but to no avail. He sat down in front of me and looked right in my face.

“Hey man, give this ticket to someone who wants to take a round trip back. I don’t need it.” He stuck out his blackened hand and handed me a crumpled round-trip trolley ticket. “Find someone who needs it,” he added. “I’m going to stand over here,” he told me, and stood up by the door of the trolley and peered at the route map that was above it. I didn’t know what to say.

“Cool, man. Thanks.” I put the ticket into the book I’d been reading.

“Hey man,” he said to me again. “Does this go downtown?”

“Yeah, it goes downtown, dude.”

“Oh yeah? Well which stops are for downtown?”

I looked at the map above the door. For a moment I thought to say that I didn’t live in San Diego and didn’t know anything about which stops were which, but that would have been a lie. I had taken the same trolley two days before, and knew where it was going. Besides, over time I have skillfully used public transportation in lots of major cities: New York, London, Paris, Rome, Chicago, Boston, Atlanta, Miami… yeah, that’s it. I figured that I could handle giving directions to a dirty, drunken, ex-hippie. On the map there was an area that was outlined in grey and labeled, “downtown loop” or something like that.

“Do you see that grey area?” I asked him.

“No,” he said.

“Well, that’s the downtown area. Pretty much every stop will put you downtown somewhere.”

“Cool man,” he said, after a long pause. We rode in silence for a bit. “Hey man, what do you play?” he asked me in a stage whisper.

“What?”

“What instrument do you play, man?”

“I don’t…play an instrument,” I said with a nervous laugh.

“Dude, come on. I know you play an instrument. It’s cool.”

“No, I don’t.”

“What do you do then?” he asked.

“I’m a pastor,” I told him. “Like a pastor of a church… you know?” I finished lamely.

“What?”

“A pastor,” I said in a kind of stage whisper of my own.

The Guy sat there for a moment staring at the floor. Then all of a sudden he brightened.

“I get it! You’re going incognito. That’s cool, man.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about but, but cool,” I said at last.

The Guy grinned at me, and said, “I know that Bob’s in town, man. Yeah, Bob’s in town, man. House of Blues. You’ll be kicking it with the band, right?”

“Bob?”

“Yeah, right. I get you man. You’re concealing.”

Since I had no idea what he was talking about, and couldn’t convince him that I wasn’t a musician and did not know Bob, I figured he was making some sort of drug reference.

“No man, I’m not concealing,” I said hoarsely.

“Do you play bass, man?”

“No, I don’t have any idea what you are talking about.”

“Cool.”

The trolley came to a stop and he asked if it was a downtown stop. I told him that it was.

“Dude, I have to find a liquor store?” he said.

“Are you sure you want to do that?”

He stumbled to his feet and tried to go out the door before it closed, and didn’t make it. The trolley door shut in his face. He cursed. I started to tell him that all he had to do was push the button by the door and it would open for him, but he sat down again.

“Guess I won’t be getting off here,” he muttered.

“Try the next one,” I told him. Luckily for both of us, the “next one” came almost immediately. He rose unsteadily to his feet and headed for the door.

“Later man,” he said to me. “I’ll see you up on the stage.” With that, he exited the trolley. I saw him immediately approach a black man with a shopping cart and begin asking directions. I gave a short laugh and looked around at the other passengers.

“I don’t think the liquor store would be a good idea.” I said. A few of them laughed. I noticed that they were all looking at me strangely. I began to wonder if maybe they actually believed the Guy, and thought I was the bassist in Bob’s band, whoever Bob was. I got up and prepared to exit the trolley, feeling their eyes on me. When the trolley stopped and the doors opened, I bolted out of the car as quickly as I could.

The street where I exited happened to be the very same street where the House of Blues was located. I looked up at the marquee. “Bob Weir & Ratdog - Feb. 9″ it read in big red letters. I looked around and saw that the entire street was flooded with disheveled, filthy young people. Most of them had dreadlocks. All of them were carrying backpacks or rucksacks of some kind. They were gathered in small groups around the House of Blues waiting to be let inside. It all came to me in a rush. Bob Weir had been in the Grateful Dead. “Bob Weir & Ratdog” was the band he had formed and was apparently touring with that month. Suddenly what the Guy had been saying to me made sense—sort of. These were modern day Deadheads–the people who used to follow the Grateful Dead around the country, attending all of their concerts and living in an endless haze of pot smoke and tie-dyed shirts.

I began to weave my way through the crowd of Deadheads that were waiting for the concert. More than a few of them had dogs that growled at me menacingly. The hippies themselves were not friendly. They stared at the rest of us as we passed through their gauntlet of body odor and pit bulls. I felt decidedly unauthentic as I went. Here I was, trying to be incognito, trying to be cool with my Johnny Cash t-shirt and my earrings. I had my iPod going by now and was listening to a “Gospel & Christian” playlist. The song that was playing was David Crowder’s “Rescue is Coming.” I turned it up so that I wouldn’t have to hear if the Deadheads were saying things about me, indicting me, calling me out, commenting on my fashionably ripped jeans and my hip Pony walking shoes. I felt as though they knew that despite my efforts to conceal who I was….they could spot my phoniness, my denial. And if they couldn’t then the pit bulls sure as hell could.

David Crowder sang in my ear There’s nothing wrong with me/It’s just that I believe/Things could get better/And there’s nothing wrong with love/I think it’s just enough to believe… I wondered if it was just enough to believe. I believed once that I was called. I believed that God had a task in mind—thissemper reformanda kind of task. Semper Reformanda is that wondrous Reformation-era phrase that seems to be bandied about so much these days. Everyone seems to want the church to reform, but no one seems to understand how to do it, or where to even begin. As I walked the streets of San Diego feeling the accusing stares of the nuevo-Deadheads, I felt my shoulders slump and my heart grow weary. Who was I kidding? I didn’t even feel like a pastor, much less some sort of church leader, much less a part of the emerging church conversation—even less like a reformer.

After wandering around in the Gaslamp District for a while, I finally found a Borders bookstore and went inside. Moments later I was standing in front of the Poetry section staring at a copy of “George Herbert: The Complete English Poems.” It was the only Herbert book on the shelf. I opened it. There was a poem on the page called The Offering. The first two lines read, Come, bring thy gift. If blessings were as slow/As men’s returns, what would become of fools? My eyes filled with tears. Come, bring thy gift.

At the cash register, the young woman who rang up my sale commented on my purchase.

“I can honestly say that I have never seen anyone buy a book of Herbert’s poetry. Well done.”
I smiled a small smile, and wished that I could convey to her the journey that I had undertaken
to stand before here with my money in one hand and Herbert in the other.

“What do you do?” she asked me. “Are you a student, or an English teacher?”

I took my receipt and paused a moment before starting for the door.

“No,” I said. “I’m a pastor.” I pushed the door open and stepped out into the street. The trolley
went by across the street, turned a corner and headed away. A young man wearing a tie-dye shirt
and dirty pants passed me on his way toward the House of Blues. I nodded at him and smiled.

He smiled back.

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.

I had the privilege to host a conversation with Emergent Village at Columbia Theological Seminary in January of 2007 about the topic of Mainline Emergence and we saw over 400 folks turn out to hear from Mainline Practitioners (Presbyterian, Episcopal, Luther, and Cooperative Baptists) as well as some of the usual suspects in the Emerging church. From that experience, my own encounter with many of my co-laborers at Presbymergent, and the various mainliners I’ve met through Emergent Village, I laid out a brief character sketch of the Presbyterian Emergents as I’ve seen them.

This is pretty liquid, and perhaps the list will give us/y’all at Presbymergent something to react with and build upon as we explore this new frontier. Emergents cultivate communities of hope:

• As Designers: adapting Order according to the in-breaking world of God, asking, “How does this space, polity, or liturgy function?”
• As Translators: integrating the good news arriving amidst both church culture and wider culture.
• As Joiners: Incarnationally involved in a context “already in progress” toward God’s reign.
• As Cultivators: tilling open space for alternatives to volunteer themselves.
• As Artisans: instead of chasing “fads,” deeply acquainted with contexts and media at hand and fashioning them into beautiful new visions.
• As Critics: humble about the socializing dangers of self-referential order.
• As Agitators: Mixing oil and water to reveal new gifts from the spirit as well as artificial preservatives or expired ingredients from yesterday’s faithful.

The Designer, Translator, Joiner, and Cultivator are explored in the Part One of this article in Fuller’s site. This online Part Two will explore the last three of these profiles: Artisan, Critic, and Agitator. I will then continue a discussion of the article and Bolger’s overall findings at my blog, Church as Art.

Artisans

Mainline Emergents are utilizing much more than simply their classic training to bring new possibilities to bear. Like artisans, they take the material context with utmost seriousness. The new reality, to which the church points, includes more than us, and more than our classic tradition. But pointing beyond ourselves is an awkward posture. Such pointing requires the nimbleness and flexibility to program with the goal of pouring our resources and imagination into God’s kingdom on Earth as it is in Heaven. Yet all too often the traditional church (institutions of all sorts, mainline and evangelical) has reversed the worship and service goals of the church, attempting to pour God’s heavenly kingdom into the church. Clear examples of this are in the “target market” approaches to style in worship, fellowship, and educational programming. In these approaches worship leaders are charged to “tell” a message in a certain “style.” Artisans, on the other hand, rarely set out to “tell” something, or to copy a “style.” Day after day they pour their hope and discovery into the everyday mediums of acrylics or photo gels, and they allow the materials of wood or granite to speak to them.

In Emergence, “stylistic” differences are not new genres employed in an effort to become more relevant or progressive. After all, genres don’t come into existence to advance markets. Genres emerge naturally as artists build deeper relationships with their contexts. Romanticism gave way to Impressionism and Impressionism to Cubism and Cubism to Post-Impressionism because the changing context of these guilds required artisans to reach for authentic expression of the world’s story or their story. Without the Great Depression, the rise of the American tycoon, Marxism, and the Mexican revolutions- there would have been no Diego Rivera or Frida Kahlo. And the Art of Emerging Christian Community is similar: without the Jewish practices of Pentecost and the pluralistic Hellenization of the Greco-Roman Empire, the birthday of the church would not entail the culturally diverse cast that we readily associate with the Pentecost. Without the Athenian statue to Zeus reading, “In him we move and live and have our being” Paul may never have quoted this to teach the preeminence of our Lord Jesus. Emerging “styles” are as such, they emerge from a particular social context. Everything is in play.

The Way of Jesus is incarnation. Being the church has always involved the gospel en-fleshed in the context already in motion. Church is, by definition, contemporary with culture. Without the Gothenburg press, the emergence of the nation state, and the academic progress of the humanities, much of what we now call the Reformation would not be. These disciplines and shifts could not have emerged in a vacuum. Why is it, then, that we uncritically accept as authoritative so-called Presbyterian forms–be they parliamentary majority-rules processes, or per capita giving, or 16th century academic robes serving to model ‘minister as teaching elder?’ What if these very things are also meant for adaptation amidst an open-source, globalizing, conceptual age? Why can the intuitions of our various traditions not be recycled, put to use again, for today’s task of pointing to the new reality promised in Jesus the Christ? Emergence in the Mainline happens when churches give our resources and forms to the Spirit and receive them back as gifts for those ahead of us.

Critics

Artists are often their own worst critics. A finished work is open to scrutiny and is always something to be improved upon. And this will, perhaps, be the inevitable challenge that awaits Presbyterian Emergence. All too often I have watched seminary colleagues argue about their fixed commitments to forms or ideologies in utilitarian ways out of an unexamined commitment to a former precedent and to the exclusion of God’s future generosity to the World. Whether it be designated funding, membership, seminary support, or college ministries the conversation on the presbytery and General Assembly floor is waged using Tradition as the highest trump card. This polarizing self-referential practice will constrict our denominational institution until we suffocates.

Tangled in disagreement between the fixed meanings of Word and Sacrament, Presbyterians are becoming complicity committed to a fixed Order as our identity. In such cases we no longer consider ourselves as provisional, we no longer point beyond ourselves to a new reality in Christ. And so the Presbyterian Tradition has become the ultimate trump card, and whoever is holding it redefines it to her or his own advantage. We forget to learn from our words and the Word. And we forget that the very context and materials to which we appeal have changed. Just look at the difference between the sixteenth century Roman Catholic Church we reacted to during the Reformation and its practices, beliefs, and varied contexts today. Emergents are not arguing that Tradition is “old fashion,” “out of date,” or “irrelevant.” No, our argument concerns the way in which defensive appeals to Tradition functions.

In the previous half of this article I suggested that the work of architects and city planners known as adaptive reuse serve as a metaphor for our own work of faithfully ordering the nexus of word and sacrament. Lets return to the line of questioning from adaptive reuse, what does arguing from the precedence of tradition “do”? Such practices socialize us for something other than “faithfulness and usefulness… to God’s activity in the world” (G 3.0401c). Our arguments about precedent are generating a sub-culture, a people of a certain text–one that is past-tensed and that is self-preoccupied. Alternatively, Emergence attempts to draw upon the intuitions of our traditions to help us meet a coming culture by living in future tensed and others-focused ways.

The balance struck by this future tensed and other’s focused posture, is described in our Directory of Worship as simultaneously “consistent with God’s Word and open to the newness of God’s future” (W-3.1002). We aren’t going to bring back the balance between God’s word and God’s future as it was struck 50 or 300 year ago. We can only negotiate our calling “to a new openness” today, while being critical of “the possibilities and perils of [our] institutional forms” as it comes to us, as potentially perilous inventions are handed off from generation to generation, context to context. There is no pre-determined, auto-pilot, outsourced way “to ensure the faithfulness and usefulness of these forms to God’s activity in the world” (G 3.0401c). It is our daily task.

This is also my caution to those who would like the Emergent movement to serve as yet another special interest group lobbying for a certain Presbyterian future. The very existence of Emerging Mainline communities and the alternative forms that preceded us serve as witnesses to the deconstructive character of the gospel introduced by Christ into culture. But, if perceived as renewal movement, Mainline Emergence will find itself dependent upon the very structure it must hold loosely.

Agitator

Often, Mainline Emergents are agitators, in the best sense. Like the chef who mixes vintage vinegars and with heirloom oils to get just the right dressing, Mainline Emergents find themselves mixing two very different things to get the desired hybrid.

I mentioned earlier that new possibilities can be cultivated by making open spaces. While this may be the case, elements such as blank space, silence, and altering the expected can be risky business when good church-goers attend with the usual expectations. Agitation is not always a welcomed leadership characteristic.

During a year as designated pastor with a 45-year-old congregation exploring transformation, we drastically reshaped our worship space and our worship gathering. We set up all of our chairs to circle around a communion table, leadership was shared, and the week’s leaders sat with the congregation, we stretched into prayer postures we had learned through Chi Gong, we handed out sketch pads, and we provided times for discussion. The introduction of these practices and shapes to the worship gathering functioned by putting worship attendees in play in ways they had not been before. While these practices and shapes were deeply theological, they were also open and decentralized, and often very disorienting. One eighty-year-old sports buff–who confessed to me once that he was addicted to sports because “they were the one thing in the world that could completely change overnight”–said, after one such adapted worship gathering, “I’ve never sat in silence like that before… this gives me a lot to think about.” The mixture of the expected with the openness was an informative and yet disorienting agitation in the settled space of predictable worship forms.

I joined this congregation hoping that emergence and congregational revitalization could happen simultaneously. I was right, in part. They did happen simultaneously. But what I and the congregation’s leaders underestimated was the difference in leadership required to walk a congregation through taking up their crosses and at the same time encouraging them to discover new gifts. Every existing congregation is called to conversion, to daily take up their cross. And so the leadership of existing congregations must courageously stair death in the face, and resolve to give themselves away to God’s World, before any sort of transformation can be truly realized. If a congregation cannot admit their imminent death, they will be paralyzed by fear, like Harold Crick in the middle of the movie. Agitators intuitively push this limit and end up in new situations with blank canvases because of it.

Living into our provisional shape is risky business; it disappoints many who need mainline denominationalism to operate as stable and fixed. One example of this is a couple who wanted to celebrate their marriage during the Lord’s Day worship gathering. I met on several occasions with the couple as well as the worship committee to order the ceremony and the entire worship gathering for that day. The event, however, was intentionally decentralized. The “function” of the marriage ceremony was to join this couple in their promises before God and to enact the future of a promised humanity joined with God in Christ’s Way of fidelity and love. While the couple did not want me to sign the marriage license as an authority of the state, I did announce them as husband and wife after their shared vows, prayer, and the whole church community laid hands on them. However, a question arose shortly thereafter as to the marriage’s legitimacy, for I did not “pronounce” them man and wife using the phrase “by the authority vested in me by….”. This seemingly insignificant omission was disorienting for those who found comfort in an expected form, the posture of authoritative pronouncements. And yet our order is not to function as comfort but as openness to the Spirit’s guidance and God’s future.

A third example comes from the committee I mentioned in part one who have partnered with three emerging fellowships in the greater Atlanta area. In a desire to remain open to the possibilities of new ways of belonging to the denomination, the committee chose to use the language of midwifery and surrogate motherhood to describe our oversight. Our committee is reintroducing to “connectional Presbyterianism” the practices of conversation and co-learning. While the precedents of our Reformed intuitions are being lifted up we are also being forced by real ministry situations to address expired ingredients and artificial preservatives introduced to these precedents over the centuries. Old settled categories of membership, evangelism, and liturgy are being brought back into play. Agitation exposes these possibilities and, as such, they are the source of many growing pains.

For the sake of the world

The Presbyterian Emergents that I continue to work with and learn from have not ended up where they are as a career move. Instead, they have stepped into the imminent death that is the church’s and continued through to ways of seeking the Way of Jesus and translating the intuitions of Presbyterianism into the here-and-now. Our protagonist, Harold Crick, had to learn the same thing. He had to give up. After negotiating with his narrator, after reading the manuscript, he recognized and was inspired by the beauty of that future for which he was designed. He had the courage to step into his end and to live with courage and generosity.

For better or worse I speak in a Reformed tongue. I can’t help it, it is in my blood as far back as my Dutch ancestors. And after seminary and years of ministry in the PC(USA) I still imagine possible Presbyterian ways for emerging communities to intentionally order their contexts with practices as followers of Jesus. And I continue to find more folks who are doing the same. They are as varied as designers, translators, joiners, cultivators, artisans, critics, and agitators. I think that these are the Mainline Emergents: those hearing the Narrator tell us that our days are numbered, that our end is imminent, and yet adapting all we’ve been given to make a life in relationship with tradition and context out of love for God’s wider world.

——————–

Troy Bronsink makes a life with his wife and daughter in Capitol View, an inner-city neighborhood of Atlanta where he is a worship consultant, community organizer, singer-songwriter, and pastor. He speaks, writes, and consults with churches from churchasart: a mashup of emerging missionallity, spiritual formation, and the arts.

Troy is a contributing author to Baker Books’ Manifesto of Hope, a coordinating group member of Emergent Village and Presbymergent.org, a leader in the Emerging Church Committee of Greater Atlanta Presbytery, and organizer of conferences including Columbia Theological Seminary’s “Mainline Emergent/s” and Emergent Village’s “Brueggemann and the Bible.” Troy is a PC(USA) minister and has been an active part of this expression of Presbyterianism for ten years.

For the first part of this article visit Fuller Theology News and Notes. To read an interview with Troy Bronsink and Ryan Bloger about this and other Mainline Emergents visit Troy’s blog: www.churchasart.com.

That little essay was born out of the struggle that I was going through at the time as I began to identify more with Emergent or Missional theology and ecclesiology and sought to lead the church to which I was called accordingly. At the time, the church I was serving could be defined as containing both “emerging” and “existing” traits. On Sunday mornings the existing aspect of my church met for worship, and on Sunday evenings there was an emergent worship gathering/community that regularly met in the same space. These communities could not have been any different, but they both formed and informed one another in interesting and exciting ways. It was good to reflect on my struggle as an emerging leader in an existing church, though. Because of that time of reflection I came to understand that in many ways I was embodying the very struggle in which my church had become engaged. My efforts to put my feelings into words was a part of that struggle—an effort to write a story that was far from complete. But there was something unsatisfying in that effort, to be honest. It felt like I (and to some extent my church as well) had come to the end of a chapter, but didn’t know how to finish the last sentence in a way that felt good and right. We had both come a long way, but not far enough.

In the end, neither one of us could put a period at the end of that sentence.

When I wrote that first essay, I knew that my time at my emerging/existing church was going to be cut short. The senior pastor of the church accepted another call, and I became the interim pastor/acting head of staff for over a year. All the while, I was also exploring other opportunities and trying to discern where God might be calling me to serve. I imagined and dreamed about the possibilities of serving a community of faith that was already part of the “emerging conversation,” a place where the word “missional” did not have to be unpacked. I dreamed of a place of diversity–in worship, in mission, in ministry and constituency. These dreams carried me through some fairly tough times of doubt and uncertainty, but they were my dreams, and no one else’s.

God’s dreams for the community of faith I was destined to serve were quite different from mine, as it turned out. I was called to serve an historic, traditional, established, corporate, existing congregation in a small town in Central Florida. I was called, and I knew deep in my heart that I would go as soon as I heard the invitation. When I realized that God’s dreams for me did not include any of the things I thought I wanted for myself, I grieved a little, to be honest. Further, shortly after I accepted the call to serve my historic, traditional, established church, I was contacted by three different churches who were extremely interested in calling me as their pastor. They had been the three churches who were at the top of my wish list when I was dreaming of the kind of community of faith I [selfishly] longed to serve.

As I pondered all of this and grieved a bit more over what might have been, a friend of mine told me a story from her own life. She said that her father, a Presbyterian minister, once visited the “perfect” church to determine if he was being called to serve there. Her mother loved it, she remembered. The manse was large, the church was in a beautiful mountain community in North Carolina, there were no financial worries, it was well staffed and the congregation was happy and motivated. But her father declined the church’s offer. My friend remembered him saying, “I don’t want to go somewhere that doesn’t need me, and they don’t need me.”

Then I realized that the period had just been placed at the end of that troublesome sentence.

The first pastor of my church was called 125 years ago. His name was [seriously] The Rev. Dr. James Hair Potter. You can’t make this stuff up. There is a huge Tiffany-style stained glass window in the sanctuary–a sanctuary that was dedicated in 1914. Dr. Potter’s picture is in a glass case in the parlor [complete with huge wingback chairs, coffee tables and large oil paintings depicting deer, landscapes, etc.]. He was an austere-looking fellow with a beard that reached all the way down to his waist. Potter served my church for 20 years. I think about him sometimes when I stand by myself in the sanctuary preparing for my sermon. You can’t help but think about him, really. The stained glass in his honor is huge, beautiful and stately. I like looking at it.

A friend of mine who was part of the emergent worship gathering I used to lead visited a worship service at my new church recently. As I greeted her before the service she looked at me all decked out in my robe and colorful stole, peered at the pipe organ and all of the old wooden pews, the Potter stained glass, and said to me, “I cannot picture you in a church like this.” I considered what she said as I made my way up to the somewhat high chancel [six feet above all controversy] to begin the service. She was right. I would have never pictured myself in a church “like this” either, but God did, and I am glad that God has a more active imagination than I do.

I happen to love my new church…a lot. I understand a bit more about what God has called me to do here. You see, I’ve spent a lot of time talking and thinking about what it means to be an emergent church leader. I’ve led what people have come to call “emergent” worship services [which is really a misnomer, if you ask me], and I have had long, passionate discussions and debates with colleagues on what the Church needs to do to become more missional. And God in God’s infinite wisdom and mercy has seen fit to make me put my money where my mouth is.

This thing that has come to be known as the Emergent Church has moved from idea to reality in so many ways, but still is hard for most of us, who care about these things, to define, and even more difficult to put our arms around. I recently read that some of the pioneers of the emergent movement have broken from it because it was too all-encompassing, too ecumenical, too open and affirming of different beliefs, Biblical interpretations, blah, blah, blah [indicates my impatience and frustration]. But I see things a bit differently. I feel so strongly that in order for the Church to be shaken from her sleep she must be missional and relational, embodying what it means to be the Bride of Christ and evidence of the kingdom of God on earth.

But the Church has become fearful and anxious in recent years—fueled in large part by huge declines in membership, conflicts over theology and the interpretation of Scripture and yes, even by the emergence of new ways of understanding what it means to be the Church. Fear and anxiety [as we have seen in our own country over the past 7 years] can result in irrational behavior, acts of radical self-preservation and perhaps even destruction. Edwin Friedman prophetically wrote of these kinds of things in his book, “A Failure of Nerve.” Friedman stated that when good leaders dare to rise up and take a stand for what is right and healthy, our sick and anxious society does everything that it can to sabotage them. In order to be an effective leader, according to Friedman, one must become a non-anxious, reflective presence–a voice that speaks the truth, and works to help the community, culture, society become healthy enough to fight off the diseases that plague it. A leader like this requires the kind of nerve to remain steadfast where they are called, even though it would be easier to retreat, easier to find a corner of the world where everyone tends to agree, speaks the same language… understands what it means to be missional.

Theologian Wesley Carr once wrote that the Church needs to be formed and informed by the Spirit of God that is calling to it not only from the past, but the future. For me helping my congregation truly see this is an epistemological task. I know beyond any doubt that I have been called to my historic, traditional, historic church to journey with them as they emerge from their past and move toward a new and uncertain future. I desire so fervently that my church will begin to see itself differently, will understand what it means to be the Church, the very hands and feet of Christ in the world. I pray that this desire, this call, will not be weakened by my own fear and anxiety. I pray that I will have the strength to stand and to speak the truth in love. I pray that this emerging leader will be able to carefully guide this existing church. I pray that I will be a good and loving pastor. I pray.

I recently read The Great Emergence. It is an important piece in the conversation and there’s a lot to talk about in it. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s an easy read, and it’s friendly for lay people. Phyllis Tickle places the emerging church in the context of gritty history, and her writing style shines when she reminisces. The way that she details the women’s movement, for instance, is charming.

Tickle has a refreshing perspective, and much different than most Episcopalians that I’ve met. As an example, she highlights John Wimber and the Vineyard Church has an important moment in church history, while I’m often hard-pressed to find a mainliner who knows what that is.

At the heart of Tickle’s analysis, there is the question of power. And in particular, she points out the threat to sola scriptura. In the Reformation, “scripture alone” (along with the five other sola’s) became the source of authority became the passionate cry for so many who wanted to critique the Roman Catholic Church.

And now, in the midst of postmodern upheaval, with the evolution of literary criticism, we are beginning to realize how one cannot rely on the words of Scripture alone. There has to be someone reading, there has to be someone interpreting. And since we are all different, with a multiplicity of passions and histories, when we sit down with the Scriptures, we cannot divorce ourselves from the process.

We bring ourselves into it. We have on that page, not only the words, but also the context of the author. And the choices of the translators. Add to that, we have our own our educational background, our personal history, our historical context, our motivations. The page gets very crowded. And so, we realize that a plain reading is not possible. When there is a text, there is disagreement. And sola scriptura breaks down.

So, where is the power now?

It is in Scripture and in the community, the conversation, the network.

I appreciate the way that Tickle broadens the conversation, explaining the upheaval not only from the conservative corner of the church (which we most often hear about), but also pointing out what is happening with Social Justice Christians (Mainline denominations like PCUSA), Liturgicals (Episcopalians, Lutherans, and Roman Catholics), Renewalists (Charismatics, Pentacostals), and Conservatives (Evangelicals).

There are a couple of places that I have some disagreement, maybe in what was left out more than what was there. Although Tickle brought up the women’s movement and much of her conversation hinged on Diana Butler Bass’ important idea of sacred re-traditioning, I was hoping that she would write more about women.

All of the amazing and fresh work that is happening in theology, where women’s voices are being heard and taught. They have been earth shattering and courageous as they have take on texts of terror and demanded that their perspective be heard in our academies, with all of their particularities. What women have been doing in our pulpits for the past fifty years, surely that has shaken the foundations of Christendom. Feminist critiques, whether they be from Julia Kristeva or Rita Nakashima Brock, have had a highly significant impact on our faith in the midst of postmodernity.

Unfortunately, The Great Emergence does not reflect the great diversity of gender or ethnicities that are causing shifts in American religion. It is an account of players who are almost exclusively white males. This is not a new critique of the emerging church, and certainly not a new one from me. I was just hoping that Tickle would bring a much-needed corrective to the conversation.

There are other points of discussion that I could bring up. For instance, we could talk about technology, crowd-sourcing, and whether is it truly egalitarian (Albert-Laszlo Barabasi’s convincing me otherwise).

There also seems to be a sense, from Tickle’s analysis of the gathering center, that there are pure emergents, and others who are more on the edges (she nods to the metaphor of rose petals).

I would tend to disagree with this. It seems to me that we are all emerging from something, but Tickle seems to be saying that those who are emerging from evangelicalism are somehow more central to what is happening in the whole Christianity.

Am I understanding this correctly? And if I am, if evangelical emergence is at the heart, then that could explain the movement’s propensity for glossing over important women’s voices.

I’ll close with a question. In the pages, Tickle says that the hyphen-mergents (presbymergents, Angli-mergents, Metho-mergents, Luther-mergents) will need to decide, “Which are we, and where do we belong?”

This aside is probably the one place where I disagree with Tickle the most. I am a postmodern Presbyterian. I may not fit into a chart very easily, I may not fit into my own denomination very easily. But I do not feel any pressure to make a decision one way or the other about who I am or where I belong.

So, what do you think?

1. Bruce Reyes-Chow, our esteemed Moderator of the Presbyterian Church (USA) started up another meme, called Presbymeme II.
2. Neal Locke, a member of our esteemed Coordinating Group here at Presbymergent, “tagged” literally EVERYONE at Presbymergent to respond to the meme.

Now, I’m not sure if you simply wish to respond in the comments section here, or if you’d like to post your own responses as separate posts here in Presbymergent, or if you’d like to go post it on your own blog and leave us a link here, but one thing is for sure - we’ve been tagged.

The information for Presbymeme II is below. I’ve gone ahead and posted my response over on my blog, pomomusings. Let’s all join in the fun!

The Rules

• In about 25 words each, answer the following five questions.
• Tag five presbyterian bloggers and send them a note to let them know they were tagged.
• Be sure to link to this original post.
• Leave a comment or send a trackback to this post so others can find you.

1) What is your favorite faith-based hymn, song or chorus?

2) What was the context, content and/or topic of the last sermon that truly touched, convicted, inspired, challenged, comforted and/or otherwise moved you?

3) If you could have all Presbyterians read just one of your previous posts, what would it be and why?

4) What are three PC(USA) flavored blogs you read on a regular basis?

5) If the PC(USA) were a movie, what would it be and why?

1.@ clay: what is church for? I think a clearer way of shaping this is to consider church as a verb- those Spirit filled moments (synchronicities, to borrow Jung) when Word and Sacrament are ordered to join and anticipate God’s purposes in creation. This is more incarnational and avoids the platonic urge to pre-design an air-tight formula.

2.@ clay: can deep shifts happen in a 1/3 of the congregation? I can;t think of a time when transformation does not originate in “practices” or “postures” that catch on. In other words, a few folks begin to “do” and “act” differently and their minds are then transformed. Until a few more join them. And then a few more. So why not start with this third and invite them to include those from the other 2/3rds to reflect with them on what is happening. The “traditional” services do not need to change their style to join this more participatory way. An imaginative Traditional Worship Leader like Tony describes is a great way for this to start.

3.@ david: what is contemporary? David, most american church goers who consume pre-fabricated worship formats see contemporary as a closed genre. It is the byproduct of CCM’s successful branding in the 80s and 90s. Try introducing the word “contemporaneous” (remember this from Greek tenses- I believe it was Aorist) and asking how does the worship style or material we use in worship come from the actual everyday world around us (you can grab You-Tube videos, newspaper clippings, popular music, folks music, movie quotes, and styles/chord progressions). We can learn from the Word of God whom/which we follow into the world (C-67) as much as from a Word of God remembered.

4.@ steve: Interesting to pair up “force feeding” and “calling.” CCM and denominational(or ecumenical) top down curriculum has created a consumptive Christian way. How do we reverse this tendency and equip worshipppers to produce, to make their own testimony? Borrowing some of Tom Wright’s pneumatology, the community is sent gifts from the Spirit almost like the Israelite sampled fruit from the promised land brought by the spies. As such, the fruits of enthronement, adoration, and lamentation are gifts from the promised eschaton for worshipers to taste and enjoy. So worship is born out of calling and not out of a top down “force feeding.”

5.@ tony: You wrote, “gatherings exist for the sake of the world.” I love it! Spot on. Somehow blending our “target audience” to include God with us, the body of Christ in which we are united, and the Christ of the Emmaus way- these are how worship looks beyond our congregations. A friend of mine says it this way: the church is not the end user of the gospel. I agree, and neither are we the end users of worship.

6. @ tony: to paraphrase you said, “our worship and everything else would be better if it were subservient to the Word.” I have found folks use this to marginalize order/art/testimony to only “illustration of the preacher’s sermon or the platonic idea presented by the Bible.” I would suggest that the Word is hidden and being revealed, and that the risk of missing is unavoidable… The Word is hidden in our past (such as Jesus’ exposition of the collective memory of the Emmaus road disciples) AND the word is also being revealed ahead of us (such as the angel instructing shepherds to go and see these things, and the voice telling peter to get up and go meet…). As such worship is discovery and not “explanation” or “illustration.” We meet God as we sing and pray. Our bodies are put into play as we kneel and raise hands and kiss one another and wash feet and ‘pray double’ through song. And as such, worship that serves the Word is less of a coersive predetermined posture and more of an open receptive posture. I might be splitting hairs here, but my purpose is to suggest that we cannot avoid the risks of stylizing or crafting or “ordering” our acts of worship by being more “Word” centered. Instead worship is to enter into that risk. Perhaps we can, however, make space for the hidden Word to be revealed in our sacramental habits. And, then, to make space for faithful-yet-risky responses of conversion.

Weston’s thesis is this: The anti-establishment attitude of the 1960s is what led to the decline of the denomination. Our preoccupation with political correctness (“a straightjacket for the church” p.12) has removed from power the “tall-steeple” pastors who should rightly lead the denomination, and thus contributed to the PC(USA)’s lack of influence and authority in society. The solutions: remove representation rules, “abolish all the current advisory delegate categories”, and reinstate the core of tall-steeple pastors who lead the Presbyterian Establishment.

How much longer will we continue trying to preserve Christendom? This paper seems to me to be an example of the church failing to rightly interpret its context: Christendom is over, and the national structure of the denomination is never going to have the authority it thinks it once had. Weston certainly does have some ideas which would benefit the church: actual parity of ministers and elders, smaller presbyteries, smaller (or non-existent) synods. But the very term “Presbyterian Establishment” connotes a desire to preserve the institution for the institution’s own sake. Do any of the suggestions in “Rebuilding the Presbyterian Establishment” really help the church adapt to its context in the mission field of post-Christendom North America? Are there better ways to renovate the PC(USA) than by re-roofing a building whose walls are crumbling?

This past Sunday I had the pleasure and challenge of filling in for the pastor of my church to preach and lead worship (putting that M.Div. to work). It is a classic reformed building in the style of a large raised center pulpit, stained glass windows, etc. You have been at a church just like it and perhaps preach in one on a regular basis.

Since my wife and I have been going to this church, now for the past two years, it has been in a rebuilding stage after a less than amicable stage in its development about a year or two prior to our arrival. It is strange because looking around at the congregation demographics of regular attenders, an entire generation is missing. There are a lot of golden agers and a lot fo really young families, including my own, but there is no youth group. We have a lot of small kids, but no real high school age group yet. Our pastor’s vision has been to rebuild what had been damaged.

The weekly attendance is normal for what constitutes most membership roles in the PCUSA. We get about 100-120 each week over three services. As of 2006, almost half of all PCUSA congregations have a membership of under 150. There is something vital and important about the small church ministry that in some ways seems anachronistic in our culture of larger than life spectacle and consumerism. In many communities, such as the one in which I live, the small church still plays a vital and central socio-cultural role.

Yet there I stood, towering above this modest, yet normatively sized congregation behind this massive edifice to bring the Word of God. I felt distant and very alone up there. In short the architecture did not serve its purpose, it actually betrayed its purpose to a degree since it physically spread people apart.

As we continue to build and restructure the identity of my small church, there seems to be something of vitality to the ideas of being incarnational, missional, and non-hierarchical (emergent buzz words) to fostering community development. In many ways, the house church model would seem to cater well to a small church seeking to build and reimagine itself. What I find it hard to do is to wrap our community in these ideas that are so often socio-culturally alien to the expected form of community and worship that people tend to bring to the table namely, the pastor as the traditional head of the church, traditional use of architecture in worship, and on and on. Postmodernity is miles away from these types of communities.

So what are your thoughts? What can the emergent ideas do for smaller congregations such as my own that are trying to rebuild and re-imagine their roles as an important part of the community? What can emergent ideas do in the midst of the rather foundational lives of the local residents? How can these ideas bridge clear generational expectations by continuing to respect the elders while at the same time seek out and be vital to younger generations?

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