…as we succumb to someone else’s definition of who we are, we lose our sense of true self and of our right relation to the world. It makes no difference whether those projections make us the hero or the goat: when we allow others to name us, we lose touch with our own truth and undermine our capacity to cocreate in life-giving ways with “the other.”
– Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness
There’s been a little dust up recently regarding the status of the Emerging/Emergent Church. Nick from the Nick and Josh Podcast voiced his disappointment here. Josh chimed in here. Tony Jones has a response here.
I don’t begrudge Nick or Josh’s frustration but I think the frustrations are misguided. Nick writes:
My friends and I believed that there was a massive tide of change coming. We believed that everything was going to change. We found more and more people reading books by McLaren or others and we thought the interactions with these books would change the world. We knew that there would be this new kind of Christian. We believed that Christianity was on the cusp of evolution.
I can only speak for my group, but we left the church. We didn’t want to be in the reform game and we decided we would let the change come to the church as we gathered outside, if this wave hit the church, we would rush back in and embrace it, but we couldn’t deal with Christianity in it’s present state and these Emergent Conversations were our only way to hold on to Jesus at all.
We didn’t want Emergent to become the new club, but we wanted it to organize so that through gatherings, cohorts, and online social networks it could create it’s own grouping and lovingly force some voices out into the open. That happened a little. But it seems that recently we have lost hope in the Emergent movement. It took it’s hits from the conservatives and instead of coming out stronger for it, it sort of fizzled.
So with that out of the way, Nick and I had a little video chat about it all and here it is:
I really appreciate Nick’s willingness to chat about it and I’m really glad we were able to do this rather than just me writing about it.
I’ve had a few conversations about this very topic where I’ve been laughed out of the room. The reason being is that I totally agree with Bob Wright here. If we are holding “enemy combatants” but cannot convict them for whatever reason, we must stay true to the values on which we’ve built this democracy and release them. Indefinitely holding an individual for any reason without due process is a total rejection of our core values. This is the cost of living in a free society where we are all innocent until proven guilty. I understand that politically, this is an almost impossible issue. But we must not be cowards. We are over-estimating the threat to the point where we unflinchingly ditch values that make up the foundation of our society.
I’ll stop here. Bob Wright articulates my view better than I can so I’ll just leave at that.
If you disagree, let me know.
Yesterday I attended my first “tweetup” at Liberty Market in downtown Gilbert. If you don’t know what a tweetup is, it’s simply a gathering of folks who use twitter to organize the event through using their twitter networks.
Most of the conversation on this blog about twitter has been to take a look at its dark side. You can check out a little video chat between myself and Shane Hipps here where we discuss the unintended consequences of Twitter and online communication in general. While I agree with Shane wholeheartedly on the potential downsides of “virtual community”, I still enjoy using twitter and find it valuable in many ways.
One of the ways Twitter can be valuable is that is allows you to make initial connections with people you would have never known otherwise, and the idea of a “tweetup” is to actually meet some of these folks face to face.
I had a great time yesterday meeting a few people who I would probably never have met otherwise. Not only that but the conversation was engaging and friendly. I say that because I sort of half expected for everyone to be glued to their laptops or constantly looking at their cell phones. It was the exact opposite. Everyone truly seemed engaged in conversation, undistracted and open. It was a great experience. Thanks to Liberty Market for hosting. Hopefully I can make to some other tweetups in the future.
On a side not, a honey badger beats the cobra.
In my review of Bart Ehrman’s newest book Jesus, Interrupted, I wrote, “The Bible does not need to be inerrant or infallible in order for it to be the inspired Word of God.” As I read that back I realize that I sort of said that and left it there without going in depth as to what that means or looks like. I’ve been thinking about how I could articulate how one could wrestle with that tension and was meaning to write a clarifying post……and then I read this from Pete Rollins’ Fidelity of Betrayal:
“While I’m an advocate of biblical criticism, I wish to argue that a truly religious reading of the text involves bracketing out these questions and engaging with the text as it is received, without justifications or explanations. This does not meant that we have to place our critical faculties to one side when reading the Bible, somehow ignoring the various antagonisms at work there. It simply means that when engaging with it in a religious register, we bracket out such questions in order to perceive a spectral presence that lies beneath the various antagonisms that mark the text.
In this way one can say that an academic reading and a religious reading of the Bible do no clash in any way, for they operate in different, incommensurable registers and approach different dimensions of the text. For instance, when reading in Revelation about the 1,500 square mile New Jerusalem descending from heaven, with walls of jasper and streets constructed from pure gold, the religious reader does not ask whether or not something like this is possible but rather allows the image to burn itself into the imagination. The religious reader endeavors to approach the impenetrable source that gave birth to this wondrous image while simultaneously allowing the vision of an aweinspiring city with gates that never shut, bathed in eternal light, overflowing with mercy and full of people from all nations to impact the way that we live today.”
Not surprisingly in the slightest, Rollins put into words this idea much more effectively and eloquently than I ever could have. I echo his sentiment and I hope it more clearly reveals where I’m coming from. Ehrman is fighting fundamentalist fires with his own fundamentalism and in many ways it’s very important work, but my hope is that we can include and then transcend that conversation for an entirely new one.
Check out Rollins’ blog for some more great reading.
I just installed a new iPhone friendly theme for Finding Rhythm. I activated the theme with the WPtouch Wordpress plugin. So if you find yourself in need of some Finding Rhythm on the go, try it out.
