Doug Pagitt's new Book; What do you think of his Quadrants?

What door did you enter by?

At our little meet-up a couple of weeks ago, one of the interesting things we talked about was how we got involved in the emergent conversation. 

What was your entry point?  emergent worship?   theological conversations?  secular postmodernism?  books by Brian McClaren? 

Resources for Continuing the Conversation

Colleagues:

It's great that Emergent Village is resuming the podcast, especially with the Moltmann conversation. See www.emergentvillage.com/podcast. Maybe we can use this to fuel our own Eastern Iowa conversation.

I also just re-read "The Emergent Manifesto" of Hope edited by Tony Jones and Doug Pagitt. Fascinating collection of essays from "emergent thinkers and practitioners" from around the country. It's probably available on Amazon, and well worth the read!

Have a great summer, everybody!

Chris Epting

Rate of Change

In Lon's post on "The Great Emergence" by Phyllis Tickle there is disucssion about these pivotal moments every 500 years or so.  A wave of culture shifting  occurs... even if it takes 150 years to accomplish.

But something I'm wondering in the back of my head is if change occurs faster these days.  On NPR's Weekend Edition, May 1, there was a story about how small generations are becoming.  It is an interview with Larry Rosen, a professor of psychology at California State University, and he talks about how the cultural generation gap has shortened from 25 or so years to only 6-7 years.  Now, much of the story has to do with how technology is impacting the learning and relating styles of these youth... and because technology changes so quickly, so does culture.   But my question is... if culture is rapidly changing, how will that impact the rate of change of church culture? Can we expect this "great emergence" to happen faster than others? Or is the church a giant slow tortoise?  Will we be able to keep up? 

something about truth?

In prep for our meeting tonight, I (at the last minute of course, that's something to know about me), read the email about posting something about ourselves.

Yesterday as I sat in a small group with others from my church, the youngest person by probably forty years, our topic was the unchangeable, the constant.  I just about laughed out loud. I think my adventure into postmodern thought and the emergent church conversation came when I realized that Truth was not constant, not black and white... and yet, here it was, the first point of three in a conversation about what we can count on. The second bullet point was Love - and I'm much more okay with love being a constant - as long as we realize that love is dynamic and moves and changes and grows. The third was God.  Now, they had just spent the entire conversation on Truth talking about Jesus (the way, the truth, the life) and then they talk about God being the constant... didn't we sort of just have the conversation? 

My main interest in these conversations is going to be ecclesial.  How on earth do I reconcile the thoughts of my head and heart with what I share with my congregation?  Where and how can I stretch concepts and problemetize what we have always known... in a pastoral way?  But I also love to read and need to do that more.  I love talking theology and need to do that more. And I'm a big fan of the emergent - missional conversation and more than anything want to help enliven the thought/praxis connection.

So, that's a little about me!
Peace,
Katie Z.