Ruminations about hermeneutics, theology, theory, politics, ecclesiastical life… and exercise.
I gather that today was the all-time heaviest load on flickr (which makes sense, once you think of it). I had set our Jennifer up with an account, and she was having a hard time completing uploads; evidently there’s a good reason. This is a picture she took of our local fashion model; she says she’s uploading a picture of me singing into a Dishmatique, but so far that hasn’t appeared in her photostream. The picture of Si and Laura is cute, though.
I think I left off here:
[Again, entirely unauthorized pontificating follows. And I’s sure that Soularize is wonderful, I was just grabbing the name, Jordon, since I knew it was a big get-together.]
For the second, I would put little emphasis on the formal status of leadership and more on how leadership is carried. To indulge in a pop-cultural figure, I wouldn’t in the least mind having Aragorn as my king — much less, indeed, than I mind having Bush as my duly-elected President. By the same token, I would pay less attention to whether a pastor be ordained, or elected, or dragged off the street on Saturday evening, than on whether such a leader exercises her or his authority so as to shore up his/her own standing, or (alternatively) to cultivate the maximum strength and leadership among other participants in community life. You can do that as an appointed rector, or as an elected elder. You can grasp for power in indirect ways in an “emergent” setting, and you can disperse power in an apparently hierarchical setting.
So the formal structure of a congregation — whether it be constituted as a top-down magisterium or a bottom-up populist forum — can imply a certain distribution of power, but the formal structure can also mask the way power operates. “Emergence,” as I understand it, has less to do with the way corporate legislation gets passed than with the ways that a community would arrive at a sense of what might be possible, plausible, the right thing to do — before any formal decision gets made. (As my colleague John Dreibelbis often says, “If you have to appeal to the canons, you’re already in trouble.”)
Is my money, evidently. Yesterday I felt the whimsical impulse to listen to the Boomtown Rats’s track “Me and Howard Hughes,” from the Tonic for The Troops album. I looked in the iTunes Music Store — no luck there, just greatest-hits compilations from the Rats. Rhapsody and emusic seemed unwilling even to let me know whether they had what I wanted unless I registered; sorry, I’m not going there. Allofmp3.com and Napster? Only greatest hits (but at least they let me search before I register). Insound would sell me the whole CD for $23.
The punch line is that in the halcyon days of Napster Classic, one can be sure that somebody would have had “Me and Howard Hughes” available for sharing. It’s exactly the kind of selection that online distribution works best for: a relatively obscure track by a marginally popular artist, not worth keeping in stock in a store, not worth manufacturing onto CDs with jewel cases and printed covers, but simple to make available online, for aficionados to buy — unless, of course, no one bothers to make it available commercially.
And I’m still looking for the track of Tom Robinson playing “1967 (Seems So Long Ago)” from the first Secret Policemen’s Ball album. . . .
(wood s lot reminds me that Ani DiFranco seems to get it, which makes me glad I bought her last album the minute it showed up online.)
Just want to cast a trackback vote in favor of Jon’s advocacy of rolling category-variable templates into the core functionality of Moveable Type. Part of my plan for the Seabury redesign involved setting up different templates for each of the categories. I can probably use the Salo Maneuver from the Disseminary design (I have to re-implement that in the aftermath of the MT reinstall), or Stepan’s Per-Category Templates plug-in at nonplus.
But ingenious as Dorothea’s workaround is, I’d rather just be able to call on a different template for each category. Please, SixApart.
So, if the term “emergent” applies to churches in a non-Pickwickian sense, what might that term indicate?
[Warning: I bear no certification to talk about “emergent church” matters. I’m a certifiable theologian with interests in technology and church life — but I’m not the kind of guy who gives influential presentations at Soularize or writes popular essays at TheOoze. Consult official spokespeople for official insight.]
I wrote to Kyle about four possible manifestations of a spirit of “emergence” in an end-of-term email. I suggested to him that the emergent spirit shows itself in breadth and depth of congregational involvement in activities that observers might identify with the church; in lack-of-investment in leadership as power, and strong investment in leadership as voluntary commitment to heightened service and accountability; in worship that in which the congregation senses itself intelligibly involved (not the object of an indifferent display, but participants who understand and relish their roles — whatever those roles may be); and commitment to an understanding of theological truth that attends less vigorously to borders than to satisfactory ways of articulating the truth.
For starters.
Thus, for the first (“breadth and depth”), I’d argue that “participation” is a wan characterization for distinctive features of emergence in congregations . One can “participate” in pro forma ways that have no real relation to the mode of ecclesial vitality that’s worth bothering to identify as emergent. At any given Episcopal parish, plenty of people participate — but that doesn’t make St. Alphonso’s an emergent Episcopal parish. Congregations marked by a spirit of emergence would have a higher general degree of engagement in various community activities, and more diverse activities associated with congregational life (the poetry readings and gallery activities we hear about, along with more conventional outreach ministries). There might be less (internal) sense of particular behavior as a “church” activity, since it arises readily from the convergent interests and shared commitments of congregants; that would, of course, communicate powerfully the congregation’s sense of who it is and what it stands for, such that interested people might notice and join in.
In other words, I guess that an “emergent” congregation would be recognizable precisely to the extent that its common life doesn’t entail saying “Jesus” all the time — not because Jesus is unimportant to them, but because the congregation’s love for Jesus doesn’t come out explicitly at the bowling alley, or the informal [un]employment counseling get-together, or the bicycling group. That’s not a missed opportunity for evangelism; it’s exactly the kind of deep commitment that will speak for itself, over the long run, if people will stop chattering about Jesus long enough to allow space for a quieter voice.
In a couple of important ancient-history posts that came to my attention in the past month or so, John O’Keefe (at TheOoze) and Diana Baldwin (at ginkworld) write about the morbidity of the many congregations they visit. Their posts date from more than a year ago, so it’s possible that they have seen a dramatic reversal in church vitality — possible, but (from what I can tell) not likely.
Having come to the end of Kyle’s directed-study course on “emerging church,” I have built up a backlog of portentous advice on this general topic. Since I hate to waste a good backlog, I’ll unleash some of it online. My garrulousness does not constitute a warrant that I speak with particular authority. It just means that I’m advancing to the age that provokes people who should know better to talk and write on topics about which they don’t know enough.
But before I start, does anyone ever encounter pundit-consultants on church growth who say, “That’s not my kind of congregation at all — in fact they drive me crazy — but they provide a sterling example of one way that churches can thrive”? It’s all too easy to find hucksters who pitch a do-it-my-way gospel, whose favored one-size-fits-all approach defies he accumulated experience of generations in the church. I particularly respect a church consultant who can support the vitality of a congregation that’s not doing things his or her favored way.
That digression becomes relevant as I ponder, in discussion with Kyle, what point there might be to calling any congregations “emergent.” Pedantic as I am, I’ve insisted that the lexicography of “emergence” matters for an understanding of why one would apply the label in the first place (though usage will, over the long run, determine what it does mean). In a nutshell, I tend to think it most useful to identify as “emergent” those ecclesiastical tendencies that resemble emergent phenomena in nature (to this extent, “emergent church” can fairly be said to amount to Roland Allen’s Spontaneous Expansion of the Church: And the Causes That Hinder It in postmodern dress).
What about congregational life bears any resemblance whatever to emergence? I’ll try to write about that tomorrow, but in the meantime, go to the experts.
It’s after midnight, Eastern Standard Time — soon enough for me to wish everyone in Blogaria a happy new year.
There’s much left over from last year for us to work toward ameliorating, even remedying, while in so working we are free from our bondage to the past’s limitations on our capacity for goodness and generosity. We can do better, and by grace, I trust we will. Thank you so much for the grace and charity you all show.
From the New Yorker. . . .
My friend Steve Himmer takes the opportunity this morning to reveal the arcane method by which I compose my best sermons. Luckily for me, Steve didn’t figure out what those giant multi-colored concrete letters spelled — or the jig would have been up.
At least David didn’t disclose any of my secrets. I’ll say this, though: No more Saturday-afternoon garden party invitations for Steve!
Today Micah and I have spent the day fiddling with Seabury’s website. Our working space is at this site, which we’ll delete in a few weeks, when we go live with the final version of the new page.
The point of the exercise — not completely realized yet — is to get Seabury’s site into an easily configurable, easily up-dated, standards-compliant framework. We’ll use the categories feature from MT to organize the navigation links (as Dorothea showed us to do in her design for the Disseminary site). It will make life so much easier than editing a miscellany of inconsistent Dreamweaver pages with needless navigation Java.
About a week or ten days ago, Pippa started a new venture in experimental hydroponics: an avocado pit plantation. It began humbly enough — just two pits, one of which was a pretty poor excuse for an avocado from the outset, in two jam-jars on the kitchen counter. As you can see, her small-time start has blossomed into a modest industrial installation, soon to rival Del Monte or Monsanto or Archer Daniels Midland. In a few years, she’ll be holding the Super Bowl guacamole market hostage.
We’ll keep everyone apprised of the progress of the various pits. So far, three are cracking, and the one sad specimen (lower left) is not showing any prospect of vigor. The time to invest is now!
(Perhaps one can use avocados to power electrical devices, too.)
