AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Ekklesia 2004 Part One

During registration, I ran into a man named Jeff Bullock. Our encounter very rapidly exemplified for me the strength of weak ties; he caught onto my vital commitment to the vision of the Disseminary. He and I had never met before, but we had been told to look out for one another, and when we ran into one another we feel right away into an animated conversation of mutual encouragement to brgin the Cluetrain to the life of the Episcopal Church.

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Jonathan Wilson began the conference by proposing that we think of our topic not so much as “the upside-down kingdom of God,” so much as the right-side up; refusing to concede the reality of the disordered cosmos, and asserting the greater reality of the rectified world. The Grain of the Universe flows with Jesus’ way, not against it. That contextualizes our discourse as a proclamation of Good News, of a positive Christology (as opposed to messages that the world and faith are uniformly grim and frightening) — otherwise, Christians internalize and reproduce the assumption that the temporal world is the only world that counts, that the temporal world sets the agenda for our lives; that the bondage to decay and frustration that characterize temporality are not the last word. Christian theology is about the good news that entropy does not govern the cosmos.

I Cor 1:18-25 expounds the right-side-up-ness of the theological message in the face of an upside-down world. The celebratory element of play bespeaks the vision that Mary’s word invokes. Playful interrogation of the world’s foolishness stands to accomplish a great deal more than solemn, detailed critiques of the economy, the state, and the idols that captivate us. Stan H observes it’s too easy to let our critiques of the world become more interesting than the Gospel.

Similarly, disciples are not obligated to effect change in the world, but to stand in the way of the right-side-up world, among people who see only the upside-down world. Jonathan described his vision of “standing in the way” in the sense of “getting in the way of,” or “interposing ourselves,” but I’d want to stretch his usage to include “getting ourselves into the Way” of Christian discipleship — even when all the apparent paths diverge from that Way.

Stan proposed several playful slogan-critiques of the world’'s practices, such as “Greed — its good for the economy,” “Vanity is only for the beautiful” or “Vanity — not for you,“ “Satiety is for the dead,” He notes that one reason Christians get so upset about sex is that we have fairly clear lines of demarcation for knowing when we’re doing it wrong, whereas there aren’t such bright lines that tell us when we’re being greedy. “How can you tell?” Stanley asks; “When you have two SUVs? One isn’t enough?”

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The session on “Ekklesia and Emergent Church” is being led by Scott Bader-Saye of the University of Scranton, and blogger Geoff Holsclaw of up/Rooted and Life on the Vine Christian Community. Scott and Geoff are devoting some of the workshop time to defining the emergent church (“the emerging church conversation,” as Geoff emphasizes). He sets the emergent church in the context of varying generations of evangelicalism and its instrumentalist outlook, and in the context of the church’s relation to temporality (where evangelicalism has tended toward an atemporal “me and Jesus” worldview, where many mainstream traditions have succumbed to the weight of their traditions).

Scott proposes that the Ekklesia Project may have put too much emphasis on the “counter” of our counter-cultural identity, and acknowledges that the positive theological vision of the emergent movement, and its self-consciously rich and critical celebration of contemporary cultural make its discourse an edifying complement to EP’s intellectual and ethical spirituality.

Scott suggests four vectors of interest from EP to emergent:

• Pragmatic ecumenism


• Ancient-future worship


• Generous orthodoxy


• Recovery of missional identity

Scott notes that “mission” tends to refer either to “converting people to be church members” or to “good deeds on behalf of others,” but for both Ekklesia and emergent, “mission” refers mostly to a way of being in the world that bespeaks the Gospel in action. Both Ekklesia and emergent derive a great deal of the energy toward self-identification from the matter of integrity, on the Ekklesia side with regard to the ways that the churches have compromised themselves through their dalliances with the state, with modernity, with capitalism — and on the emergent side, through the lived experience of the vacuity of the churches’ discourses, the distractions and busy-ness with which churches preoccupy themselves as a way to keep the radical demands of discipleship at bay.

Geoff suggests forgoing the construction of our neighbors as objects-of-evangelization (“Gen-X-ers,” “postmoderns”), and forgoing the spatial metaphors that tie the church to immobile geographic dimensionality (such metaphors as contrast-culture, resident aliens), but putting into play a sense of the church as culture of fulfillment. By this he means that Ekklesia could productively develop a sense of making the very best of the best that the world offers.

Scott problematizes the notion of “relevance,” but notes the need of a term to do the work of relevance; he proposes emphasizing the incarnational mode of the church’s identity, the manifestation of God’s presence in human activity. That entails both the churches’ very humanness and activity, and also its calling to make the God’s ways perceptible in the human sphere. Scott also cites Rowan Williams’s advocacy of the mixed-economy church, where the church honors the growth at its fringes (here Scott is thinking especially of the emergent church, of intentional communities and cell-based churches, pub church and café church). On one hand, you can say, “That’s not really church,” exclude and isolate them; or on the other hand, one can recognize these stirrings and affirm them and welcome them.

Posted by AKMA at July 19, 2004 07:56 PM | TrackBack