I may soon need to create an “Emergence” category. I’m reading Steven Johnson’s Emergence
which a lot of bloggers read a year ago or a while back, so I ‘m behind the curve, BUT, like with so many things, not finding too much written on how this is related to the Church, or IMPACTS the Church, or helps us to understand certain things better. AKMA has mentioned this from time to time, and he’s a Church-related kind of guy, and the “Emergent Church” has been gaining ground on the “traditional forms” in terms of visibility — This “Emergent” Church is the “postmodern” movement within Christendom. Len Sweet has spoken and written about it for years, in books like, the first one I read, Quantum Spirituality, published by Whaleprints, an imprint of the United Theological Seminary, and came out when I was a Communications student there in 1991)

The book Emergence, which I’m half way through, has me blogging in multiple areas. I began thinking and writing about The Church of the Saviour again, which “just happened” to pop up in a blogging kind of way over the New Year’s celebration. I also will be meeting with a group of people at Old Saint George for a discussion with Brian McLaren, who is in Cincinnati for an “Emerging Church” event on the 9th and 10th. I am reading a book co-authored by McLaren and an old friend , Tony Campolo (just by virtue of my reading nearly all his books and listening to every speech I can get my hands on). Campolo has often spoken of “postmodernism” in his role as a sociologist who has long made his insights available to the Church, and to the evangelical community in particular. Tony has often been attacked as a “dangerous influence” because he has this tendency to question things, especially assumptions behind many theological “doctrines” and their resulting behaviour. A lot of the fundie crowd doesn’t like this. I wouldn’t doubt it if SBC leadership wants to “ban” him as a resource to their Churches, since he doesn’t fall in line with their tendencies to lift up civil religion and unquestioned acceptance of US policies.

The Old Saint George mantra for community is that OSG is a place “where divisive issues become shared concerns”. This is an approach that the SBC and many other fundamentalist groups identify as “dangerously ecumenical”, which also reads as “too open”. For a community to truly flourish, there must be a commitment to reconciliation, in a communal sense , and not neccessarily a theological sense. Our reconciliation, we believe , as christians, is IN CHRIST, and this is a much more powerful arena than our theological systems and dogmas. Reconciliation IN CHRIST , I believe, helps us to SEE CHRIST at work in other people, other theologies, other cultures, and YES, other RELIGIONS and Faiths. I believe in a Christ who is ABSOLUTELY Cosmic; who is truly in and with ALL THINGS. The differences we see are CULTURE and experience; just as there are many “brands” of Christian expression (some of which we tend to question), so it is with “OTHER” religions.

The power , I believe , of the Emergent Church is (as I see it) its underlying affirmation of the Bottom-up, Cluetrainish, idea that God is moving “among us” and not simply “trickling down” from above (also in the sense of NOT simply revealing to leadership and heirarchy, but alive and moving and present in The Community. Which brings us face to face with the CONVERSATION (there’s that word again). EMERGENCE in the Church highlights and therefore celebrates the conversation. And it does so becuase that is where Jesus told us that God is at work.