Emergent Village

It's Not All About Today [2]

2009-07-06T06:00:00Z

By Samir Selmanovic, re-posted from FAITH HOUSE Manhattan:

Every morning as I step out of my apartment in Manhattan, I grab two free daily newspapers from the stand at the street corner. I then walk four city blocks to the subway station, reading while navigating my way through the crowd, and by the time I arrive six minutes later, I have read them both! It is a skill I have honed over time that integrates fast reading, selective attention, finger dexterity and navigating the traffic around me with peripheral vision only, never lifting my eyes. But this is becoming dangerous. I might knock down an elderly person, step into a construction site or get hit by a taxi cab.

And if I stop taking time to watch people, sensing their presence, and imagining where they are coming from and where they are going, I might lose my love for the city. When I come home I find my wife’s and two daughter’s heads buried in their laptops, checking their emails, text messages and Facebook accounts. I am beginning to think this diligence about knowing today’s news is not worth it.

We are continually urged to get the most from the present moment. The past is left behind and the future is unreal. And it is not only about our individual lives and families. Our economies have been oblivious to the lessons form the past and severed from the concern for the future, and have crashed as a result. But is the same self-sufficiency plaguing our religions threatening them with their own crash?

While a thoughtful critical tension with our religious traditions is a wise way to hold on to one’s past, the disdainful neglect of the tradition is not. G K Chesterton wrote these words of warning: “Tradition is only democracy extended through time. ... Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by accident of death” (G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy).

In 25 years of religious life, I have picked up plenty of stories and personal experiences about how silly, broken or downright toxic tradition can be. It has hurt individuals, destroyed communities and alienated institutional religion from society. I once heard Christian speaker Tony Campolo quoting reformer Martin Luther quoting St Augustine who said, “The church is a whore, but she is our mother.” This statement seems painfully brash. A whore is something no one wishes to be called—or have their mother called. But the second part of the statement matches the first with its exquisite tenderness. My church is my parent who gave me life and loved me to where I am. It echoes the commandment of God, “Honor your father and your mother” (Exodus 20:12).

Our fathers and mothers don’t have to be perfect for us to honor them. They are to be respected, cared for, forgiven, healed and loved despite their apparent faults. Without those who came before us, without their love and hard work, none of us would be here. Our frustration with the past must be paired with forgiveness and our bitterness must be tempered with gratitude. We are not better. Our time to make mistakes is here and the more we fashion ourselves in reaction to the mistakes of the past, the more likely we will be reacted against by future generation.

Our disdain for the past has been matched by our disconnection from the future. After watching the documentary An Inconvenient Truth, my 11-year-old asked me, “Dad, what have you done?” When I asked what she meant, she said, “When you grown ups were making all these decisions in the past, what were you thinking?” She meant, “I am scared and disappointed. Why weren’t you thinking of us, of me?”

We are leaving to them not only a planet in shambles but other things, including religion. By and large, religion today has grown impotent or destructive instead of potent and constructive. We are leaving religions that do not know how to work together to make the world a better place. Religions replicate a civilized market, peacefully and politely coexisting in competition. But like toddlers playing separately, there is no synergy.

Furthermore, much of religion has had a death-wish approach to the future of the world, counting on a Cosmic Fixer to redo the whole thing after the end of the world. Such religion has spurred—or at least failed to resist—society’s plunge into ecological disaster. More importantly, however, religion has been failing to stir human imagination about the future.

I recently spoke with Jeffrey Sacks, an author and spokesperson on issues of poverty and sustainability. He asked, “Did you notice we don’t have Ethics of the Future?” Thinking back to graduate school, I realized there was no ethical systems that asked, “How will this decision affect people who might live 200 years down the road?” People of the present are always the only consideration. Chesterton’s “democracy extended through time” has started after our past and before our future. Our locus of concern has narrowed to nothing but today—another way of saying we have become self-centered and therefore ultimately self-destructive.

But there is a way forward. First, we can live our religions in a place larger than today and for community larger than ours if we can pay tribute to our ancestors and their faith, stamina, vision and integrity. Any good we do, we do because of those who have gone before us. And if don’t know how to name and forgive the past, we will become the kind of people who will make it harder for the coming generation to forgive us.

As we pay tribute to our ancestors, we are also to bless our successors. We don’t have to understand everything they are doing, let alone control it. A new kind of Christianity by definition requires a new kind of thinking. And such innovation begins with questioning the thinking that went before. Those who are emerging will break the rules we have constructed, and produce their own theology and expressions instead of indiscriminately mimicking ours. They will take the vision to places we could not imagine and in the context we cannot understand. Yet they must be released from our expectations and given the holy burden of blessing and hope we have for them.

If God can believe in us, respect us and work with us, why can’t we do that with each other? Our boasting about the self-sufficiency of the present has taken a blow and we are yearning to have a more responsible and meaningful role in the story of God. This story did not begin only when we came on the stage and will not finish when we leave.

We have to regularly lift our eyes from the news of today and look where we are walking. Without perspective, we tend to hurt ourselves. Where we come from and where we are going is as important as where we happen to be now. In the world where economy, politics and popular culture have enthroned the opportunity of the present moment, religions can provide a conversation about our stories, ways to remember where we have been and imagination for where we want to go.

(adapted by the author from Signs of the Times, Australia)

Photo by Alberto Cerriteño

Samir Selmanovic, Ph.D., is a founder and Christian co-leader of Faith House Manhattan; director of a Christian community in NYC called Citylights; author of It’s Really All About God.

Follow the "Poets, Prophets and Preachers" Conference Online [5]

2009-07-05T06:00:00Z

The “Poets, Prophets and Preachers” conference—featuring Rob Bell, Peter Rollins, and Shane Hipps—begins tonight in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The conference runs July 5-7, and Jeremy Bouma will be liveblogging the event over on novus•lumen.

You can also follow updates from the conference using the Twitter feed ticker below (#ppp09):

#ppp09

The Palatable Gospel [55]

2009-06-29T09:22:00Z

By Nic Paton:

There’s a meme that has been doing the rounds, and this is the charge, primarily from the detractors of emergent spirituality, that its followers are compromising the Gospel in their attempts to make it “more palatable” to the world. Take for example, these comments critiquing the emergent POV:

“the error … in the emergent church … [is] we become whatever the audience needs us to be in order to make the gospel palatable.” (Paul Edwards talking to John MacArthur)

“Their hope is to make Christianity more palatable to the world” (Marsha West)

There are a number of ideas inherent in statements such as these.

Firstly, there is an admission that the gospel as normally presented might not be that palatable. However instead of directing the question towards themselves, the detractors aim it at Emergents. Instead of asking “What is wrong with my gospel?” they would rather say “Your gospel is wrong.” It hardly needs to be said that this posture is a matter of the splinter in the eye of another obscuring the log in one’s own.

Then there is an assumption that Emergents (from their critic’s point of view) share the same “market space”, asking the same question but arriving at different answers. That the Emergents “bottom line” is selling tickets to heaven (and escaping hell). That they are part of the same framing story, but offer an alternative ending. That Emergents are using the same ingredients and cooking up a competing dish, instead of “Pizza Evangelista” they are offering “Pizza Emergente”.

The very use of the term “palatable” reveals an assumption that spirituality is but a matter of “taste”, and by extension, attractiveness, to a targeted demographic, within a marketing paradigm. But it can be argued that this very paradigm is what Jesus referred to when he said “You cannot serve two masters … you cannot serve both God and Mammon”. Marketing is a matter of Mammon, while the Enterprise of God is often about losing market share, being unpopular, perceiving the potential in small “mustard seed” beginnings, and forgoing worldly profit for the eternal reward of obeying God and loving the world.

To these detractors, Emergents are in competition for the market of “lost souls”, vying to retain a Christian following in a culture in decline. But that Emergents are doing it wrong — in giving up the Evangelical, Modern worldview, they have in effect rendered this gospel null and void. There is often very little appreciation amongst these voices that perhaps Emergents have a different vision of God and Gods purposes, and that is why the meal they serve tastes so fundamentally different. Rather than simply sweetening an essentially bitter pill, this vision might involve an altogether different understanding.

In saying “You’re here to be salt-seasoning that brings out the God-flavors of this earth” [Matthew 5, The Message] it becomes apparent that God sees palatability not as compromise or unfaithfulness, but as a good and natural thing. To believe that that which is true must therefore be tasteless, unpleasant, unimaginative, gauche or dowdy is to deeply misunderstand the Lords Pleasure. It might be said that the call of the Gospel is to do the very thing that Anti-Emergents accuse us Emergents of: to allow by our worship of God, and our presence in Her Kitchen of Mission, the natural aromas of the creation to be savored and enjoyed by all.

Another problematic assumption of the “more palatable” critique is the notion that “My presentation of the meal of truth is the only way it can be served. To serve the meal differently is to abandon truth”. “My truth” becomes synonymous with “The Truth”, rather than a view on Truth. This pernicious fantasy of modernity, an excessive overconfidence in our ability to perceive the absolute, is something that remains a stumbling block in creating a Christian spirituality that can take us forward beyond the decaying carcass of Christendom.

As we have seen, the question of hypocrisy must be asked. What if those who accuse Emergents of compromise are themselves the compromisers? What if the charge that we are merely “making the gospel more palatable to our generation” is exactly what some evangelicals, fundamentalists, or Anti-Emergent’s, are doing?

To those who prefer declaration over conversation, absolutes over contextualised truth, the literal over the metaphorical, the rational over the mystical, the individual over community, the conservative over the creative, the historical over the cosmic, I ask:

Is your gospel of an ideal, absolute, holy, perfect (and punitive) God not simply pandering to the tastes of a generation who prefers individualised salvation, unsustainable material prosperity, a way of life which continues to violate the already disenfranchised, passive consumption over creativity, and continued exclusivism at odds with the loving, embracing God of Grace?

Instead of Emergent’s diluting and compromising truth, perhaps it is the modernist understanding which is doing just that; allied with the World system, the Modernist gospel is becoming discredited: as spiritual food it is as best stale, and at worst, putrid.

Yeuch; enough already. Pass the salt, please.

“Look, everything is on the table, the prime rib is ready for carving. Come to the feast!”

Photo by Tom Leuntjens

Nic Paton—Postmodern Liturgist, multi-instrumentalist, VJ, and scullery theologian—lives in Cape Town, South Africa, and contributes to Emerging Africa.

How to Be a Spiritual Person [8]

2009-06-25T05:00:00Z

By Christine Sine:

I have been thinking a lot lately about what kinds of practices I need in my life in order to consider myself a spiritual person. It all began when I posted reflections on my blog a a few months ago on What is a Spiritual Practice? and Reimagining our Spiritual Practices. I asked people about how they connected to God and what practices most renewed their faith.

The responses to these posts were astounding. Most did not mention prayer or Bible study. It seems that most people encounter and connect to God not through their daily Bible reading or through going to church, but through either nature or the ordinary every day activities that fill their days.

Of course this is not an empirical study, but the anecdotal evidence suggests that most people encounter God much more powerfully when they are walking through the forest or when they are sitting at their work desk struggling with a problem than they do when reading the Bible. Parents see God reflected in the faces of their children, and aid workers see God reflected in the pain and the suffering of the destitute and the homeless. One person even talked about encountering God in the midst of “lostness” when we feel far away from friends, family, and the God we believe in. In this kind of faith, prayer is more likely to be a few words of blessing or a spontaneous word of appeal to God for the conditions that tear our heart apart than it is to be a half hour spent in intercession each week.

What this makes me aware of is that most Christian leaders and pastors are not good at helping followers of Christ interpret these encounters in the light of the gospel story and the Bible message. Neither are we good at enabling others to recognize these events as an important part of their faith walk that need to be both encouraged and nurtured.

I think that it is time for us to redefine what we mean by a spiritual practice or discipline. I am beginning to recognize that a spiritual practice is any activity we perform on a regular basis that connects us more intimately to God and to God’s purposes for us.

When we only view spiritual practices as prayer and Bible study, we really do divorce ourselves from the many encounters with God that occur throughout the day, and we make it very difficult for those around us to fully enter into the gospel story as it is reflected in their daily lives. We talk about the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, but the only place that we enable others to encounter that reality is when they go to church or read the Bible. Which reminded me of a comment someone made to me years ago that I have never forgotten: Don’t you think that pastors and church leaders are preparing us to live in the world they inhabit not the world that most of us live in?

I think that this statement has a great deal of truth to it, and the ways that we practice our faith and teach others to practice faith really reflects it. I wonder, are we blind to the spirituality of the world around us because we live in a world of sermon preparation and book writing, in which life seems to revolve around scripture, prayer, and the reading of books?

Over the summer I will be posting several blog posts on “What is a spiritual practice?” I have already started this series with posts on The Spiritual Practice of Taking a Shower and Is Breathing a Spiritual Practice. I have also enlisted the services of a number of friends to join me in this enterprise. I already have bloggers signed up to write about their experiences of God in everyday activities including parenting, cooking, and walking.

One of the concerning trends in Christian faith today is that many sincere people of faith are disconnecting from the church, and I suspect that our lack of ability to help them connect their spiritual practices to the everyday world in which they live is one of the reasons. So this post is also an invitation. If you would be interested in participating in this summer learning party by writing a guest post for my blog Godspace please let me know. We all need to learn more of what it means to be spiritual people and how to practice our faith 24/7 in ways that connect to the world we live in and the cultures that we are a part of. I hope that you will join us in exploring ways to deepen your faith through everyday encounters and share ideas that can help others deepen their faith too.

Photo by tread

Christine Sine is co-founder (along with her husband Tom) of Mustard Seed Associates, a passionate organic gardener, and a contemplative activist.

How Churches Are Like Record Labels and Newspapers [5]

2009-06-23T02:30:00Z

By Fernando Gros, re-posted from Fernando’s Desk:

Neo-Baptist has fast become one of my favourite blogs for challenging and intelligent commentary on churchy stuff. In recent months the blog has rally found it’s voice in terms of humour, criticism and encouragement.

Today’s post, on Learning To Love Generation F, really got me thinking. The point really isn’t about Facebook, per se, but rather about how online “community” is challenging our assumptions about real world community.

For a long time I was a critic of what I saw of local (Baptist) church culture because it reflected and to a large extent aped, the corporate world. However, that’s something of a historical anecdote, but the corporate world today has, in many ways moved well beyond what we see in churches, with a lot of business leaders exhibiting a greater sense of the importance of relationships, self-reflection, education and critical thought.

I’m not saying that everybody’s working life is a haven of human flourishing, but many workplaces embody a culture of openness and collaboration that for sheer scope of freedom put our so called “free” churches to shame.

The 12 work-relevant characteristics of online life that are cited just highlight that. Consider, for example,

Hierarchies are natural, not prescribed.
Resources get attracted, not allocated.
Power comes from sharing information, not hoarding it.
Intrinsic rewards matter most.

For a long time I was puzzled by the way some church leaders reacted to the Web and social media. There was a rush to dismiss websites and then blogs and even the compliments handed out to online communities were backhanded. At first I thought it was simply because these media allowed alternative voices to be heard and present themselves as challenges to the status quo.

Now I wonder if these new media, present a more fundamental challenge not just to power structures within church life but to the core of some kinds of ecclesiology.

Increasingly I’ve come to wonder if churches are, to some extent, analogous to record labels and newspapers. The latter two business built their limited resources and high barriers to wealth; printing newspapers and promoting hit records is an expensive game. But, the Craigslist, blogs, DAWs and MySpace have become deal-breakers — especially if you don’t lay awake at night dreaming of wealth and a home in the Caribbean. Both record labels and newspapers created wealth through the way a resource problem was answered and structured. You needed a label to get your music out, now you don’t. You needed a newspaper to create a PR buzz or post a classified, now you don’t.

This truly is a blessed time for those for whom doing is a reward in and of itself, regardless of the rewards. The way of doing for the “ordinary” person has changed, if they are really focused first on the doing.

How does this relate to church? Forgive me for waxing economical, but to me church is a kind of resource problem (or collective action problem). We “do” church because there are things a Christian just can’t “do” by themselves. In a way, ecclesiological power was like the power of the record label or newspaper in time when access to theological education and resources was scarce and expensive. A lot of theological education is still built on that model today (Matt Stone has been blogging on this topic lately).

There was a time where possession of a Bachelor of Theology degree put your near the top of the educated within a western society. But, today it is usually very unlikely that a pastor would be anywhere near being the most educated person in their congregation in most churches. Moreover, the explosion of christian publishing means that theological resources are more available than at any time in the history of the church. And, it doesn’t stop there, the possibilities for mentoring, retreats and spiritual direction are no longer confined to clergy and their professional development.

Which brings us back to the online thing. The open, flat, collaborative, fluid dynamic that marks out online culture is a place that problematises a lot of the assumptions that feed the church-as-answer-to-scarce-resources model. Put simply, we no longer need that kind of church or the denominational structures that were built to support it. If anything, that kind of church is becoming more and more repulsive to people of my generation and will be totally alien to digital natives.

That’s not to say that there are no more collective action and resource problems because there are. But, they have largely changed from problems of access to problems of choice. Or, to put it another way, the economics have shifted from a problem of scarcity to a problem of abundance.

We still need wisdom and to some extent leadership. But, there’s no question we need a different kind of church, different habits and to be blunt, different leaders.

Photo by Kathleen Bennett

Fernando Gros is a writer and musician, living in Hong Kong. A former pastor, chaplain, banker, and pizza maker, he blogs on issues on faith and globalisation.