Brian McLaren was in town last night speaking about his new book Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope. It was an excellent presentation, one of those "big idea" kinds of presentations that just build and build. I thought he did a great job of packing all of these concepts into a 1 1/2 hour presentation. While I felt like I was keeping up with him, tracking with where he was going, I still left with my head spinning. There was just so much that he covered and the implications are innumerable.

Later in the evening Brian joined us at the Princeton Emergent Cohort and we were also joined by the North Jersey Emergent Cohort. We packed 20+ people into a small corner of the Yankee Doodle Tap Room. It was a great time of informal conversation and we picked Brian's brain about Narrative Theology, Stanley Hauerwas, Radical Orthodoxy, global economies and local economic practices, Wendell Barry, Plato, eschatology, N.T. Wright, Andrew Perriman, terrorism, the presidential election, pastoral care, dealing with conflict in the local church and the writing process. It was a great conversation with a great thinker.

I've loved all of Brian's books that I've read so far but I had Everything Must Change on the backburner. No more. After last night I want to dig deeper into what Brian's getting at in this book because I think it's going to be incredibly important for the church as we quit playing "intramural games" as he put it, and start addressing how the Gospel frames and narrates our lives in such a way that we are sent into the world in a posture of serving, reconciling, compassion and healing.

If this stuff excites you like it does me, be sure to check out the Deep Shift tour. Brian will be in the Bronx May 2-3rd. If you can't make it to the tour be sure to check out everythingmustchange.org where people are contributing and dreaming of ways to change the world one act at a time.

Labels: Discipleship, Emerging Church, Life, Non-Violence, Politics, Theology

permalink

As I've been preparing for an upcoming series on sexuality in our High School ministry I've been trying to read some fresh stuff that engages sexuality from a theological point of view with special attention towards discipleship. I've been pretty underwhelmed by so much of the church's teaching on sexuality for so long. I've used curriculum that I felt went straight for the "what's over the line" question and felt schizophrenic in it's mixture of guilt and affirmation of sex. As I teach on sex I wanted to really do an excellent job of engaging sexuality, theology and discipleship this time around. So two books immediately hit the top of my "must read" list. 1. Rob Bell's Sex God and 2. Lauren F. Winner's Real Sex. I've heard Winner speak on the topic of chastity in a break out session at Youth Specialties this past year and she was great.

I'm really glad I took the time to read Bell's book before engaging this subject with the youth at our church. Bell's style of writing is so conversational that it belies the deep theological work he's doing in this book. Bell's catch phrase quickly becomes "this is really about that." And over and over again he makes connections between sexuality and spirituality and about how "this" is really all about "that." Bell's definition of sexuality alone was extremely helpful.

"For many, sexuality is simply what happens between two people involving physical pleasure. But that's only a small percentage of what sexuality is. Our sexuality is all of the ways we strive to reconnect with our world, with each other, and with God (42)."

Hmm, sexuality is all the ways we try to reconnect? That means that even the celibate can practice and express their sexuality. And on the very next page Bell makes this point saying,

"Some of the most sexual people I know are celibate.

They sleep alone.

They have chosen to give themselves to lots of people, to serve and give and connect their lives with beautiful and worthy causes (43)."

Bell takes this understanding of sexuality to deconstruct our culture's definition of sexuality. Some of the most overt expressions of "sexuality" in our world are the exact opposite of real sexuality. To illustrate this Bell describes the infamous "Red Light District" in Amsterdam where women sit in store front windows advertising themselves for prostitution. The transaction that happens between a man who goes to one of these prostitutes and the woman herself is just that, a transaction. Physical sex happens, but there is no reconnection. Indeed this kind of sex only serves to further divide and isolate the two parties. The man uses the woman for his own physical gratification and the woman falls deeper into the darkness of her situation. This is the exact opposite of two human beings reconnecting, and we still call it sex.

Bell's treatment of pre-marital sex is good. As far as I remember he never even used the term "pre-marital sex." Instead Bell contrasts "taking your clothes off" and "getting naked." Anyone can take their clothes off and have sex, but in the end this is not true reconnection. Real reconnection happens in physical sex when both parties can be naked with one another. Being naked is about way more than taking off clothes, it's about trust, it's about security, it's about accepting the other person with all their faults and still loving them. It's about being willing to die for the other person and the promise to remain faithful. Getting naked requires the commitment of marriage, the commitment to serve one another as Christ did the church. As always, "this" is really about "that."

I could go on and on... needless to say, I thought it was a great book.

Labels: Books, Discipleship, Emerging Church, Theology, Youth Ministry

permalink

A few days ago I finished Jesus for President and I've already lent it out to the first person on the growing waiting list. What a magnificent book! If you went to seminary and constantly had your nose stuck in a Hauerwas or Yoder book but wished you could lend a more accessible version to someone... this is that book. It isn't dumbed down, let me be clear about that, it's just that this book was really written for the church. This isn't the kind of conversation that takes place in the ethereal upper layers of academia, this is the best Kingdom-of-God theology taken to the streets. And what would we expect? Shane & Co aren't professors, they're subversive prophets living in the abandoned places of the empire. Making their own clothes, living with the poor, dumpster diving for food... always pointing to Jesus. They are living at the margins pointing us to Jesus. They are shouting with their lives (and this book) that the America we live in is a pitiful and fallen Kingdom not worth our allegiance.

The Eagle is fake, the Eagle is dead.

Follow the Lamb!

Labels: Books, Discipleship, Emerging Church, Military, Non-Violence, Politics, Theology

permalink

Last week I picked up a book that I've been looking forward to reading for several months now. I didn't even know that it had been released until I was wondering the isles of my local Barnes & Noble and bumped into the display for Shane Claiborne & Chris Haw's new book Jesus For President. I'm about a third of the way through it now and it's everything I was hoping it would be. Claiborne & Co have taken theologians and biblical scholars close to my own heart and made them scandalously accessible to an general audience. The book (so far) is tackling our own ideas about empire by taking a look at God and the people of God and their relationship to empire. The book is a creative mish-mash of art and prose and Kingdom Propaganda. This book provokes us towards a Christian imagination of politics and calls us to seriously rethink where our hope and allegiance really lay. Go pick it up now!

Labels: Books, Discipleship, Emerging Church, Non-Violence, Politics, Theology

permalink

A few weeks ago we hosted a youth worker training night for the Middle School and High School shepherds at our church. Mike King was gracious enough to come facilitate the training for us. Mike is the President of YouthFront, an interdenominational youth ministry assisting organization. They put on a lot of concerts, community service events, camps, prayer retreats and the like to be a service to youth ministries in the Kansas City area. But another focus of YouthFront is training youth workers and that happens all over North America, primarily through their branch called SonLife. Both Mike and the President of SonLife, Chris Folmsbee, have recently written some amazing books for youth ministry, Presence Centered Youth Ministry and A New Kind of Youth Ministry respectively.

What's funny is that I didn't meet Mike during some big youth event or camp while I was in Kansas City, I met him at Seminary. Mike's in his 50's, he's the President and CEO of an incredibly successful youth ministry organization but he still has a passion for learning and thinking theologically about ministry. If you pick up his book you'll see what I mean. So it was a pleasure to have Mike come and do some training with our youth shepherds. He was very encouraging and affirming about the work that's happening in our church. It's always good to be with friends. Later Mike had breakfast with some of our staff at the Princetonian Diner and after that he and I went to Small World Coffeehouse to hang out until he got picked up on his way to visit Ian Cron and the youth workers at Trinity in Greenwich, CT.

What a great week.

Labels: Discipleship, Emerging Church, Life, Theology, Youth Ministry

permalink

Phyllis Tickle spoke at the general session the second day of YS. She gave us a brief survey in church history of what she called "rummage sales," that is those times of major upheaval in the church, usually when something huge in the prevailing culture challenges the church's assumptions about reality, etc. It seems that these major upheavals happen every 500 years or so. In 70 AD there was the fall of the temple when Christianity became seen as more than just a sect of Judiasm, then there was the decline of Rome between the 400's and the 500's, next there was the Great Schism in 1054 between the East and the West in the church dividing Christianity between Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox. Next would come the Protestant Reformation beginning in 1517 with Martin Luther.

Tickle explained that we are in the beginning stages of one of these great upheavals right now, one she called "The Great Emergence." Of course she was talking about the shift in our culture from the modern to the postmodern and the church's response, largely seen in movements like the emerging church. YS is such a diverse gathering, not lacking in anti-emergent types, so when it became obvious where she was going with this I was delighted. Tickle has such a great gift of communication and I was glad to have her explain the emerging church to a crowd that would be full of both full-on emergents and anti-emergents alike. She briefly explained that technology has made our world much smaller, giving us access to so much more of the world than we had during the previous 500 years. Christians are much more aware of (and appreciate) the rest of Christianity in ways they didn't before. To illustrate this Tickle drew us a diagram which I've tried to recreate here.

In the top left quadrant are the Liturgical Christians (Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, etc.) who are starting to look more and more alike in the current landscape of Christianity. In the top right quadrant are the Social Justice Christians (a lot of our mainline churches fall into this category - Presbyterian, Methodist, Christian Church, etc.) and though they come from different theological streams they are beginning to look very similar to one another in the current Christian landscape. In the bottom left are the Renewalists (she equated them with the Pentecostals) and the bottom right are the Evangelicals. I think she tried to give each group a new name to emphasize that these quadrants are not necessarily descriptive of entire denominations, that is, these days you can find fairly Evangelical Presbyterian churches (I work at one, I should know!) or Liturgical Nazarene churches (again, I've been in a few of those). Her point was, the landscape is changing and we are becoming more aware of the other quadrants. Not just more aware, but many of us are finding those other quadrants to not only be entirely compatible with our own, but attractive and beautiful.

To boil it down even more...

Nazarenes are discovering the liturgy and they're falling in love with it.

Presbyterians are starting to talk about Jesus and having a personal relationship with God.

Pentecostals are buying compact-fluorescent light bulbs and building houses for the poor.

and on and on.

The purple circle are those who are somewhere inbetween in this whole emerging church thing, they're emergent but they're not giving up on their particular tradition (the Presbymergents, Emergent Nazarenes, etc.). This is where I find myself.

This phenomenon of blurring the distinctions between one narrow stream of Christianity and another, the borrowing of someone else's tradition's gifts and using them as if they belong to the whole church... that describes what's happening in the Emerging Church. In some ways it's a (re)discovery of some of the gifts within our Christian faith that we've separated ourselves from over the past few hundred years. Denominations are becoming less important. And I pray to God, that the glue that holds this whole Emerging Church thing together is Jesus Christ. At the center of this diagram, the Emerging Church is an experiment of what it might look like to do church as if the denominational boundaries aren't what hold us together, but Jesus is.

And here's where the corners of each quadrant are so important. The corners are the reactionary anti-emergent voice within each tradition. They keep us from from falling off the face of the map into "unity for the sake of unity"-ism. Their critique's may seem harsh and inflexible, and they may call us heretics for embracing (or at least appreciating) what another stream of Christianity has to offer... but they are our roots, that's where we come from and it's important to remember where you come from. The hardliners will help the emerging church to articulate its faith by challenging it so much.

Tickle gave a warning and a charge at the end of her talk saying, every time there has been one of these church upheavals Christians have deionized each other and resorted to violence in their disagreements. This time we need to remember that there are Christians all over that map, our tradition does not "own" the only true expression of the Christian faith. We would do well to work out the tumultuous future of our faith with humility and peaceableness.

Labels: Discipleship, Emerging Church, Youth Ministry

permalink

Several months ago I incorporated something new into my devotional life... a podcast. That wonderful group of Catholics called the Jesuits have been doing a daily (during the week) scripture meditation called Pray-As-You-Go. It's really very similar to Lectio Divina. The podcast begins with some contemplative music ranging anywhere from monks chanting to solo guitarists singing in Spanish. Scripture is then read and there is a long time for prayer over the scripture passage, then the scripture is repeated and more time is given for prayer. There are usually some questions to think about during the prayer times. As the Jesuits say, it's really more of a framework for your own prayer than a sermon, etc. They usually last anywhere from 9 to 12 minutes long and are always keen to observe the Christian calendar. In the spirit of Mike King any many other wise people, I wanted to practice this and actually have incorporated it into my life before I went and started recommending it to others. That being said, it has been a blessing in my own life and has given structure to my own prayer time that I think many of you might find helpful.

Labels: Christian Time, Discipleship, Emerging Church, Life

permalink

Oh wait... actually Ben Witherington offers a genuine and generous critique of Velvet Elvis while completely affirming Rob Bell's theology, direction and ministry. Oh that we would all learn to be this generous in our "sharpening" of each other.

Check out Witherington's post here.

Labels: Emerging Church, Theology

permalink

There's a great discussion going on over at KC Armstrong's blog Easily A Muse. What started out as a book review has become a conversation about the emerging church and the character of postmodernism and modernism from a Christian point of view.

Labels: Emerging Church, Theology

permalink

Labels: Emerging Church

permalink

Like many you who find yourselves in the Emergent conversation, I have often been asked the question, "what IS the Emerging Church?" I've also been constantly asked "what IS the Ekklesia Project?," but that's for another post. These theological/praxis movements within the Church are really hard to pin down to a pithy statement which sums up their essence. It's akin to asking "what IS North America?" There's so much to say... all that being said, I think I know someone who is doing a great job of explaining what the Emerging Church is in a way that I find very helpful and very encouraging. Scot McKnight who is also a part of the Covenant church (which I currently find myself youth pastoring in), over at his blog Jesus Creed has been making some great posts on the subject, so I've listed here some of the top posts dealing with what the Emerging church is. So, if you're like me and just want to know more and join in a deeper conversation with this movement, or if you really want to know what it is... read on.

1 - What is the Emerging Church?

2 - What is the Emerging Church? Protest.

3 - What is the Emerging Church? Postmodernity.

4 - What is the Emerging Church? Pro-Aplenty.

An Emerging Challenge

Doctrinal Statements and the Emerging Movement

Doctrinal Statements and the Emerging Movement 2

Doctrinal Statements and the Emerging Movement 3

Doctrinal Statements and the Emerging Movement 4

Doctrinal Statements and the Emerging Movement 5

Doctrinal Statements and the Emerging Movement 6

James Macdonald and Emergent

Russ Moore on McAuthenticity

Scripture: Authority and Innerrancy

Scripture: Replacing "Authority"

Seven Habits of Successful Emerging Discussions

Labels: Emerging Church

permalink

As I sit here in my all too familiar spot at the crave cafe amidst piles of Barth, objections to Barth and commentary on Barth I need to take a break. I must say that Hans Frei was right when he said that reading Barth is far more interesting than reading restatements of Barth by others which just appear wooden next to his original work (although Hauerwas is doing a good job for me this evening). So in the midst of my hours of reading Barth this evening I want to take a break and reflect a bit on what happend this morning.
Congratulations to you if you clicked on the "read more" and wanted to know who the picture is of, if that's Karl Barth and what any of this has to do with Brian McLaren (who is actually the above pictured).
This morning through afternoon I was down in "O-town" or "Olathe, Kansas" or "Stepford" as some are want to call it, at Mid-America Nazarene University with about 350 others (along with Mike King, who posted about the seminar here) to listen to a series of lectures by Brian McLaren. It was a good general overview of the shift towards post-modernism/post-colonialism in our world and what this new context might mean for our modern models of ministry. If you'd read Generous Orthodoxy, or A New Kind of Christian or any other of Brian's works a lot of this was review, but very helpful for the throng of Mid-Westerners who showed up to see if this guy was a pluralist afterall, or who were getting some continuing education credit and had never thought of post-modernism in the first place. Anyway... great stuff. I think it was the first time that a lot of these pastors were confronted with the modern marriage of the nation to the church in Civil Religion or "sacramerica" as AKMA Adams likes to call it, as well as the value of habituating ourselves into obedience to Jesus. At one point Brian said, "it wasn't until I was reading the sermon on the mount as a young man that I realized that I'd read about loving my enemy, but I'd never been taught how to do it!" He went on to talk about the value of fasting and how it taught him to not be a slave to his impluses and how after two years of fasting he was finally ready to turn the other cheek. He spoke about the intentionality of our liturgy being Christian spiritual and ethical formation. It was really just a very encouraging time, and I was so glad that so many of our pastors and seminary students were starting to think about following Jesus in ways that might challenge some of their modernist/colonial assumptions.

...well back to Barth!

Labels: Civil Religion, Emerging Church, Life

permalink

Yesterday I got back from a weekend retreat south of Kansas City that YouthFront puts on twice a year. It's called the Altar. This three-day retreat for youth was... well amazing. From the moment we drove onto the campground to the moment we left every corner, every nook & cranny of the 600 acre camp wispered "come and pray to the Lord."

While YouthFront's camp has all the "campy" stuff you'd expect for a year-round youth & retreat camp (a lake, canoes, a big sports field, etc.) what set it apart was the intentionality of creating sacred spaces all over the camp for retreatants to pray and draw close to the Lord. What made it even better was the intentionality of conveying a sense of sacredness in places such as the chapel, where once loud students became silent when they walked into a dark candle-lit room with blue pillars of light that told us visually, this is holy space. At the north end of the campground there was a huge prayer labryinth carved out of a shoulder-high field of wild grass. Prayer at the altar was not merely a "close your eyes and sit" kind of prayer, but the sacred spaces called us to pray as we walked, pray as you create art in the prayer tent, pray as you walk the path of the stations of the cross.

That alone would have made youthfront's campground stand apart in my experience at Christian camps (and I've been around). But what made this weekend particularly special and might I add, Christian, was the focus on the poor. The theme of the weekend was God's special love for the poor and our response to them. Wow. For some reason this crucial revolutionary part of the Christian faith is seldom passed down to our youth (at least in my experience), or if it is, we spiritualize it so that God doesn't really love the poor that way, God doesn't have a bias towards the downtrodden and oppressed, this is just to show that... whatever, insert spirtualized lesson here. Not this weekend. When we talked about the poor, we talked about real issues that the poor face. For instance, Friday night during our worship gathering as we sang quite possibly one of the best worship songs I've ever heard (Words to Build a Life On, apparenly by someone from Jacob's Well), there were images of the victims of Hurricane Katrina on the screen. Interrupting these images were some disturbing facts like:On Sept. 8, President Bush issued an executive order suspending the application of the Davis-Bacon Act in the hurricane ravaged areas of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. The law requires federal contractors to pay workers the average or "prevailing" regional wage for public construction projects. The act's suspension allows contractors to pay as little as $5.15 an hour - the current federal minimum wage - for these projects. Wow. Well that might just ruffle some feathers out there. Of course it does, and so does the gospel of Jesus, the good news to the poor. But so often we don't want to hear the good news to the poor because it is judgement on us, the rich. So for one, it was refreshing to talk about the poor and really talk about it, not skirt around the issue where we all get to stay clean and comfortable. And Hallelujah that this is what we're teaching our youth that faith in Christ is. This is the meaty, revolutionary, life-changing gospel that they want, not the purpose driven, well-marketed gospel of their parents generation.

Built into our time of focusing on the marginalized were several conversations and a film viewing. The film we watched was a documentary called Invisible Children. Wow, that film blew my mind, and better still called my teens to action. We had several conversations about poverty. One that I joined was based around the question "Why are the poor poor?" The other was based on the question "Can we be Christians and ignore the poor?" Without getting into it all, I'll just say that these were great conversations and brought to the forefront a lot of issues that many youths were just unaware of, but now want to be involved in following Jesus and cooperating with God in the redemptive restoration of creation by blessing the poor and working to make unjust systems more just. So this was a youth retreat... wow. I'm really stoked about the vision that Mike King and the leadership at youthfront have for youth ministry.

Labels: Emerging Church, Life, Theology

permalink

So I'm chilling out enjoying my temporary imago dei tattoo enough that I'm actually entertaining the thoughts of getting one and I decide as all good post-moderns do... to google it! So I search google images for imago dei tattoo and came across (this guy's) site. He goes to a church in Ventura called The Bridge Communities and has posted on his site a bunch of pictures of some of their gatherings, a few of which were some tattoo parties. Who knew there was such a thing?

So I start looking around and I finally get to the site for the Bridge here. Love it! If I'm ever in Ventura I'm definitely going to visit. They take artistic expression seriously, very iconic. I love their church statement about touchable Jesus... a far cry from the dry two sentance theologicaly bland statements we usually throw around.

Labels: Emerging Church

permalink

Last night I tried something very different for our teens. I'm starting them through a Tarentino-esqe chronology of the narrative of scripture. We're starting in Genesis, skipping to Revelation, then back to the middle of the story and finally to "Chapter 29" (ie: Acts 29... ie: us, today). More and more I'm learning that I need (and WANT) to be creative in preparing lessons for the teens. As I've been thinking and praying and brainstorming about how to present these stories in engaging and creative ways I've come across some good guides like Doug Pagitt, Tony Jones and most recently Mark Miller. So last night was the first night of starting out this narrative. We began with Genesis.

I asked the students to remove their shoes, grab a paper towel, and prepare for half-an-hour more of silence and meditation. As they entered our youth room they noticed that the windows had been blacked out with trashbags. Then as they sat in a semi-circle I poured cold water on their feet. Lights out. Absolute darkness. Chaotic music began playing (I mixed four songs together: 18 - In Reverent Fear; Setting Sun - Chemical Brothers; Distance is Darkness - As I Lay Dying; Twenty-Three - Project 86). We sat there in the dark, feet wet, with this insane music blasting. In the begining there was a formless void of water, chaos, darkness. The music changes, it's peaceful, a man is calling out (A Dream Within a Dream - Dreadzone). God speaks into the darkness, "Let there be light." I light a candle in the middle of our room, right next to a cross that throws an awesome shadow on our wall. More time for meditation on God's first action in our world. Creating light. Chaos is no more. The music shifts yet again, this time a little more lively (God Moving Over the Face of the Waters - Moby). The accounts of creation, day one through five are read. When God separates the waters from the land we all dry our feet off with our paper towel. Time is given inbetween each day for meditation. As we come to day six when God creates humanity the music shifts again (Resurrection - John Debney) this time it is much more dramatic. After reading the account of God creating humanity in God's own image, I speak for a little time about the gift of the imago dei, the responsibility of the imago dei and how it redefines our identitiy as well as everyone else's. I call each student by name and ask them to come and light a candle as a symbol of God creating them in God's own image. When we finish we light a candle for someone who despises us or whom we despise as a symbol that they too were created in the image of God. I passed around a (non-toxic, water-based... I know which battles to choose folks) marker and ask them to tattoo the words imago dei on each other. It is significant that they be given this mark and not do it themselves because the imago dei is a gift. It is significant that they give it to someone else because we need to be reminded that our brothers and sisters are created in the imago dei.

It was different, but was certianly more powerful and interactive than a lecture... and SO much more fun to plan. Now the hard part is how to continue to be hands-on and physical in helping to embody these stories as I continue to teach... should be fun.

Labels: Emerging Church, Life, Theology

permalink

Once again, ericisrad has made me aware of another cool "theology quiz" here.

You scored as Neo orthodox. You are neo-orthodox. You reject the human-centredness and scepticism of liberal theology, but neither do you go to the other extreme and make the Bible the central issue for faith. You believe that Christ is God's most important revelation to humanity, and the Trinity is hugely important in your theology. The Bible is also important because it points us to the revelation of Christ. You are influenced by Karl Barth and P T Forsyth. Neo orthodox 96% Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan 86% Emergent/Postmodern 86% Roman Catholic 71% Charismatic/Pentecostal 39% Modern Liberal 36% Classical Liberal 32% Reformed Evangelical 29% Fundamentalist 4% What's your theological worldview?

Well I'm glad that I turned up 96% Neo Orthodox since I'm going to the Ekklesia Project conference next month. Now I know I belong ;)

Labels: Emerging Church, Life, Theology

permalink