From the Emergent Village

You can find the original post of this wonderful letter, here.

by Laura Baker

And he’s gonna be maaaad when he finds out.

My father is a republican, federal-government-employed electrical engineer who has been married to my mother for over forty years. He is also an elder in the Presbyterian Church of America.

I, on the other hand, am a politically independent, feminist, divorced single mom with a Ph.D. in literature (my focus was on African-American and working-class stories).

It will not surprise my dad that I’m involved with emergent circles. But it may surprise him that he led me straight to them.

You see, I love post-modern culture, and the language it gives to multiplicity of meanings in life and art. My motto is from Emerson: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” But my father is an Enlightenment Man. He is a rational, linear thinker who believes in empirical data, black and white, true and false, good and evil. To put it nicely, he thinks post-modern thinking is absurd (which, of course, it literally is). To be not-so-nice, he thinks it’s touchy-feely hooey.

When I say that my dad led me to the emerging church, I’m not saying it in any kind of hippie, he-taught-me-to-love-and-value-all-opinions kind of way. He didn’t. Not intentionally anyway.

In fact, there’s very little in the public arena that my dad and I can agree on. We used to spend evening after evening, arguing across the dinner table. My brother (smarter than both of us) would usually moderate, with a general leaning in my father’s direction. And my sweet mother would often leave the room with a nervous stomach, thinking the family was coming apart. But those evenings are absolutely what led to my ability to make a pointed argument in a flash, and thus any success I had in academics.

I spent 30 years in school studying fiction. My dad won’t read stories because “they aren’t true.” But still, when he talks about Civil War history, he spins a most amazing yarn. I’m telling you, don’t ever pass up the opportunity to walk a Gettysburg battlefield with him. Before long, you’ll be seeing the ghosts of those young but duty-bound boys hurtling towards their certain deaths.

I love Nietzsche, Gadamer, Foucault, and Derrida. My dad loves Luther and his Bible, and he reads them both regularly. He thinks my conversations about perspective and narrative-subjectivity are “psycho-babble.” But he finds Luther much more palatable than John Calvin, not to mention a lot more fun. My dad is quick with a laugh, and he doesn’t (always) take himself too seriously.

My dad is right in calling me a “bleeding heart”; the stereotype fits me at least a little bit, causing my father endless sighs and eye-rolling. Talk to him about politics and you’ll get a powerful earful. On most hot-button issues, I usually walk away thinking, Man, my dad’s a hardass. But he’s also a lifelong volunteer, serving the Boy Scouts for over thirty years. My entire childhood was filled with an endless line of smelly, rumpled, pre-pubescent boys heading down my basement stairs for Green Bar meetings. And, according to my mother, Dad still gets late-night calls from old scouts needing anything from a few bucks to a letter of reference, and sometimes just an ear and some fatherly advice.

My dad sounds tough, but is deeply kind. He quips that he doesn’t care how you feel, only what you think; but he will do more for a stranger than anyone I’ve ever seen. And his apologies are epic—if he feels he’s hurt me, he will absolutely address it and take full responsibility.

No, he won’t read a novel, but he can tell endless stories about when I was little and when he was little and when his mom was little, and even when Confederate General Robert E. Lee was little.

Maybe my dad is why the endless contradictions in the Bible don’t bother me much—they are beautiful and complicated and irritating and transforming. Like my dad. Even though neither always makes perfect sense.

My dad’s gonna hate reading this but it’s completely true: he gave me almost every post-modern leaning I have. He helped me form ideas which I’m pretty sure would bar me from membership in his own PCA church. And he is why I will continue to dedicate much of my time and energy to stories. He is also why I will refuse to debate when the only point is to humiliate my opponent. My father would argue tooth and nail against any emergent-ish theology, but he lives the love and tolerance and integrity and community that I value so much in emergent circles. I’m emergent, and it’s all his fault.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad.

Laura Baker is a freelance writer living in Charlottesville, VA.

Back in the saddle again...

Took a bit of a break from posting, but I am going to get back in the saddle again.

I just completed reading Listening to the Beliefs of Emerging Churches and I really appreciated the last two authors presented in the book.

If you have not heard of this book it asks 5 "Emergent Church" leaders to write a chapter and also write a short response to each of the other chapters. So there are 5 chapters but there is one main voice with 4 responses in each chapter. It attempts to embody the emergent value of conversation and authenticity (there are some niceties but there are several lines of harsh criticism of theology and even some people).

This book solidified my disdain and inability to connect to Reverend Mark Driscoll. However, I have become new convert to Karen Ward and have become a greater supporter of Doug Pagit.

If you are looking for a look into the emerging voices and the development of "emergent theology" that is accessible and entertaining, I recommend this book.

If I get some time over the next day or so I will upload some notes and highlights I made on the Kindle.

Kindle Notes from "The Great Emergence"

Thanks to "My Buddy" I have the ability to quickly load up all the notes and highlights I have made on the Kindle.

This feature is great.

Here are some of the ideas in the book which I have pulled from "my clippings":

About every five hundred years the empowered structures of institutionalized Christianity, whatever they may be at that time, become an intolerable carapace that must be shattered in order that renewal and new growth may occur.

all would do well to remember that, not only are we in the hinge of a five-hundred-year period, but we are also the direct product of one. We need, as well, to gauge our pain against the patterns and gains of each of the previous hinge times through which we have already passed. It is especially important to remember that no standing form of organized Christian faith has ever been destroyed by one of our semi-millennial eruptions. Instead, each simply has lost hegemony or pride of place to the new and not-yet-organized form that was birthing.

It is the business of any rummage sale first to remove all of the old treasures that belonged to one's parents so as to get on with the business of keeping house the new way. As a result, there is also a very good reason why much commentary about the Great Emergence today remarks first that it has been both characterized and informed by increasing restraints upon, or outright rejections of, pure capitalism; by traditional or mainline Protestantism's loss of demographic base; by the erosion or popular rejection of the middle class's values and the nuclear family as the requisite foundational unit of social organization; by the shift from cash to information as the base of economic power; and by the demise of the nation-state and the rise of globalization. Well, of course it has been! We are holding a rummage sale, for goodness' sake! Cleaning out the whole place is the first step toward refurbishing it.

The two overarching, but complementary questions of the Great Emergence are: (1) What is human consciousness and/or the humanness of the human? and (2) What is the relation of all religions to one another-or, put another way, how can we live responsibly as devout and faithful adherents of one religion in a world of many religions?

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle has been reduced, by now, to an almost commonplace tidbit of everyday conversation: You can measure the speed of something (in Heisenberg's case, a particle) or you can measure its position; but you can not measure them both. That is, the more you know about the speed of a thing, the less you know about its position until finally one has to concede that the act of observing itself changes the thing observed.

The car was a boon that, like a sharp knife, cut two ways, however. It freed Americans to roam at will, thereby loosening them from the physical ties that had bound earlier generations to one place, one piece of land, one township, one schoolhouse, and one community-owned consensual illusion, of which a large component was the community church. The affordable car enabled city dwelling in a way that had not been possible for many Americans in the past. It also provided, very early, the mechanism by which what had been the Sabbath became Sunday instead.

But there was also a genuine attractiveness to Marx's ideas, and we must be quite clear about that. Good people with bright minds and empowered backgrounds, many of them artists and singers and intellectual leaders, earnestly argued, often to their own social and professional detriment, the virtues of a socialist or a communist state. They argued against the chaos of money-based power and the recurrence of the devastation of worldwide depressions like the Great Depression of 1929. They argued, instead, for the advantages of an authority based on a rational determination of what is best for the most people at any given time and for a kind of proto-secular humanism. This approach, they argued, trumped completely some God-infused, biblically defined code or hierarchy that had been designed for premodern societies. Enlightenment and reason, they said, had set humanity free from ignorance and social vulnerability by furnishing us, instead, with scientifically accurate descriptions of what the cosmos really is and how it works.

When one asks an emergent Christian where ultimate authority lies, he or she will sometimes choose to say either "in Scripture" or "in the Community." More often though, he or she will run the two together and respond, "in Scripture and the community."

community." At first blush, this may seem like no more than a thoughtless or futile effort to make two old opposites cohabit in one new theology; but that does not appear to be what is happening here. What is happening is something much closer to what mathematicians and physicists call network theory.

That is, a vital whole-in this case, the Church, capital C-is not really a "thing" or entity so much as it is a network in exactly the same way that the Internet or the World Wide Web or, for that matter, gene regulatory and metabolic networks are not "things" or entities. Like them and from the point of view of an emergent, the Church is a self-organizing system of relations, symmetrical or otherwise, between innumerable member-parts that themselves form subsets of relations within their smaller networks, etc., etc. in interlacing levels of complexity.
The end result of this understanding of dynamic structure is the realization that no one of the member parts or connecting networks has the whole or entire "truth" of anything, either as such and/or when independent of the others. Each is only a single working piece of what is evolving and is sustainable so long as the interconnectivity of the whole remains intact. No one of the member parts or their hubs, in other words, has the whole truth as a possession or as its domain. This conceptualization is not just theory. Rather, it has a name: crowd sourcing; and crowd sourcing differs from democracy far more substantially than one might at first suspect. It differs in that it employs total egalitarianism, a respect for worth of the hoi polloi that even pure democracy never had, and a complete indifference to capitalism as a virtue or to individualism as a godly circumstance.'

Emergents, because they are postmodern, believe in paradox; or more correctly, they recognize the ubiquity of paradox and are not afraid of it. Instead, they see in its operative presence the tension where vitality lives. To make that point, an emergent will quite often offer the most simplistic of proof texts: X squared = 4, and that is a fact. Since it is a fact, what is the value of X? Quite clearly, X = 2 ... except, of course, X also quite clearly equals -2. What is one to make of that contradiction, that impossibility, that paradox?

Building vs. Nomatic

I have been struggling with the idea of a church having a building because buildings often result in the Church looking inward to maintain the building at least as much as they look outward to help usher in the KoG.

This is part of the "Church as a verb" sort of thinking, where Church is something you do (verb)and not some place you go (noun). If Church were a verb then there would not be a building but if Church is a noun than a building is essential.

Jesus was on the move a lot and so was the early church. They did not build buildings to my knowledge but met in each others homes and businesses for worship and fellowship. This is part of my own hesitation with a Church building, we may be missing some of the message of Jesus in building a structure. And then I heard something on the radio...

Buildings make a statement - "We are going to make a commitment to this community." The building is symbolic of the nature of the mission of the building. So perhaps a building is not too bad at all? But then I got to thinking, "couldn't actions make the same statement?"

Couldn't being a verb church say the same things as a building would suggest (commitment to the community, care for community, provide and serve community, etc.)?

So for a second I was back on board with a church building, then I wondered...

I still am on the fence.