Loyal Radicals
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.
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!
For anyone attending the Presbyterian Global Fellowship conference in Long Beach, CA, August 14-16, Presbymergent will be hosting an informal dinner gathering at 5PM on Friday night.
We’ll gather at the conference center and head over to Yard House for conversation and fellowship!
More information contact: dave_barry@fuller.edu
If you are in Louisville on September 01, 2008 we are having our first gathering. We are gathering at The Old Louisville Coffeehouse from 7 to 9 pm. If you would like more information on this developing worshiping community cheack us out on facebook, twitter, or our blog.
You can also email us at nunidecommunity@gmail.com
A bit about us…
We are a worshiping community in Old Louisville seeking to be the Body of Christ to our neighbors. We wrestle with today’s church and its inability to transform the lives of those that find themselves on its shores. We seek new ways to be an incarnation body to the world. We desire to be free of the chains of differences and celebrate diversity, in all of its beauty. We answer the call on our lives in service to our communities as we endeavor to be the church and cease doing church.
We gather to create a safe place for all to explore faith, grace, love, and compassion.
We are not a “church” founded in bricks and mortar. We are a worshiping community founded in the principles of Gods unbiased love and never ending grace.
We are not just Presbyterian, Lutheran, Methodist, or Catholic…or even Christian. We are seeking to be Christ-like, sans all the religious pomp and circumstance. We subscribe to a belief in God as witnessed in Jesus the Christ. We are inclusive and open to all. All are welcome…come.
Hello Presbymergeniacs!
There is a beautiful air of transformation blowing through our denomination. There are many conversations on what tomorrows church will look like and how do we get there. Doors are opening up for new ways of being church. The collective hearts and minds of the PC (USA) are scrambling to offer places to gather and participate in the growth of a culturally sound and engaging church. These same folks are hoping to inspire and equip current leaders with something more that the traditional ministerial tool belt.
I want to point you towards the folks over in the Office of Evangelism & Church Growth. They are hosting an event from Sept. 29 to Oct. 02, 2008 in St. Petersburg, Florida. Those of you who are pastors, or soon to be pastors of churches in transformation, are in need of transformation, or if you are discerning a call to a church in transformation, please consider registering for this conference, here.
…plus, it’s on the beach…
More information can be found on PresbyGrow.
Also be on the look out for Presbymergent Conferences in your area in 2009. Contact us if you would like to sponsor, host, or participate in a Presbymergent conference in your area.
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.
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