Slow your roll Emergent morticians…

My friend Steve Knight tells me I should keep an eye on the blogosphere. Apparently there’s been buzz surrounding disappointment of Emergent Village. I’m writing this as I prepare to missionally engage my community this morning. Hoping to spark good conversation and dream up kingdom experiments with a group of folks I’ve been meeting up with here Salisbury, North Carolina. Ever heard of the city? So…I’m getting ready to fuel discussion and nurture an environment for creative kingdom activity in a community that has a gang problem. I’m stoked for the Jesus movement that is emerging here where I live…I’m also excited about the recent activity of Emergent Village 2.0. Alot of planning and strategy going on. I was one of the 24 that met in DC some months ago. So…there’s activity taking place. Christianity 21 with Jopa productions (Tony Jones and Doug Pagitt). And I’m sure many others are doing something emergentesque and missional in their parts of the world. The shift is taking place. Folks are out and about playing their role in this emerging Jesus-movement in the United States and abroad. That’s why I’m curious about the disappointment people are describing with Emergent Village. Emergence are everywhere in the kingdom of God. So…as I step out into the missional stream this morning looking for God’s activity @ the local hub I will pray for those who are disappointed. I pray they find their place in this wonderful Jesus-movement that is sprouting up all over the country now.

Emergent Village DC Gathering: Reflections

Friendship, Perepeteia, and Emergent Village  2.0

Several months ago Emergent Village sent out a survey to capture the rumblings in those places where signs of life were emerging. The survey was about the future of Emergent Village. A leading voice in what many folks call the emerging church movement. Months later an email/newsletter went out announcing a gathering of EV participants in D.C.. The weekend before last 26 people converged on D.C. to dream, dialogue, and listen about the future direction of Emergent Village. I was honored to be among this group of kingdom co-conspirators. The gathering would be facilitated by Pam Wilhelms and Dwight Friesen. We were taken through an interesting process called the “U”. This was more than reaching a consensus. It was digging deep for an innate collective wisdom that we all shared as a group. It was collective discernment regarding the future of EV. We went through a fairly intense process of exercises, dialogue, and testimony. And when I say intense…I really mean a good spiritual, emotional, and intellectual intensity that I’ve only experienced a couple of times in my life.

It was great meeting folks I’ve only dialogued with on the web. Putting names to faces. Oftentimes in these kinds of meeetings its like you’ve known a person for a long time. I won’t recount blow by blow what  happened. Many other EV bloggers have done this. I’ll post their links at the end of this post.

My thoughts during this process:

Friendship. This word was used a lot. As it should. EV has always described itself as a generative friendship of missional Christians. During our gathering we talked alot about friendship. And what I witnessed was the beginning of many life-giving friendships. This aspect of EV I hope will never go away. I was refreshed and encouraged by the rich diversity of friends present. My hope that the diversity of friends will become a harbinger of things to come for EV. Diversity of race, gender, and Christian traditions. My thoughts would go to Aristotle’s notion of friendships of virtue.  Good friendships, we are told, encourage virtue. Of course, in the kingdom of God we know that true friendships does encourage good virtue but it also brings one in greater unity with God’s Spirit…good friendships do this I believe.

Perepeteia. In every good story there is a turning point. EV has a story. We talked about this story. A good telling of it you can find in Tony Jones’ recent book The New Christians. We recognized that our gathering represented a turning point for EV. Which gave all of us pause. When one considers the  story of emergence  that Jones narrates in New Christians humility is the first posture required when venturing into these waters. There were no elaborate concrete projects planned for emergent.  But there was something new that emerged. What that is will be coming out in a more collective voice than I could represent here on a personal blog. I’ll say though that EV will be more localized than before. I believe there will be more of a harnessing of life from the various nodes spread throughout emerging church culture than we’ve seen before. In other words, I believe we’ll see more of a public grassroots movement emphasis than we’ve seen before. But these are my observations. I could be wrong. As far as turning points are concerned that’s a major one I anticipate.

Emergent Village 2.0. Expansive, more localized, more prophetic , more provocative, and definitely more diverse than before. With this upgrade I believe it will be hard to make the case that Emergent is a gathering of white 20-30-something Mac-users. There was a beautiful diversity in our gathering. But it was a harmonius diversity…I didn’t detect any scent of tokenism. There was a shared ethos present which made it easier to discern the collective wisdom in the room. 2.0 will be more diversity or at least the diversity already present in Emergent will be more public than before. To be honest I had this sneaky suspicion that EV was going to die. Which is partly true. Something did die during our gathering. But something also emerged. A more diverse, prophetic, organic, kingdom collective voice emerged to life. We shall see.

Sweet home Alabama!

I’ll be home in Birmingham for the next couple of days seeing about my dad. He suffered a stroke recently. He’s gotten a lot better. Thanks to all my twitter and facebook friends for your prayers.

What’s in my iHymnal?

Something close to home would be The Birmingham Sound: The Soul of Neal Hemphill Vol. 1.  I discovered this album the other day. I ran across it looking up an old childhood friend of my mom (Sandra Pigrom), Frederick Knight (aka Ratman). He is known for such songs as Ring My Bell and I’ve Been Lonely For So Long.

I was excited to find out that my mother’s hometown Bessemer, Midfield, and surrounding Birmingham area was a mecca for soul music during the 60’s and 70’s. So much so there is an expression called the ‘birmingham sound’  that goes back to gospel quartets emerging from this region during the 30’s and 40’s. Alot of them touring the United States and world giving gospel concerts and creating their own distinctive gospel sound. The soul music in this particular album is a musical child of the gospel quartet.

There is a distinctive Birmingham sound that I hear when listening to this. Some of these sounds I remember as a child listening to my parents music in the basement while sifting to piles of vinyl records or listening to my uncle P.A. (Presh Alley) in the back room of my grandmother’s house vibing on some Marvin Gaye and sipping on a fresh bottle of Thunderbird (he’s let me get a sip now and then or I’d sneak one). Ah…the good ole days.

But the sound is quite a distinctive soulful sound. You hear in the background a history of gospel, Civil Rights, blues, alive-ness, body movement, finger snapping, street sounds, soufulness, and for me personally it reminds me of weekends on the five mile creek with my cousins, adolescent girl crushes, catching brim-fish with my hands, watching family spats in the summertime, etc.. Nostalgic.

Transforming Theology enters my world

For the next couple of months I’ll be engaging one of my favorite theologians, Joerg Rieger. This will be a part of a larger project titled Transforming Theology. Follow the link to get a sense of what is taking place. From what I can tell this will be a conversation between academia and the streets.  My good friend Tripp Fuller has invited to be a  part of a consortium of theo-bloggers that will be engaging theology from their particular contexts. I look forward to engaging Brother Rieger from my place. My location is that I am an African-american engaged in various kinds of ministry in an predominantly black church context. Of course I have my feet in different worlds. One is the emergent/missional stream and the other is in the world of the black church. This should be interesting.

The text I’ll be conversating with will be Rieger’s God and the Excluded: Visions and Blind Spots in Contemporary Theology.

Lectio Divina – John 3: Wild is the Wind

You know well enough how the wind blows this way and that. You hear it rustling through the trees, but you have no idea where it comes from or where it’s headed next. That’s the way it is with everyone ‘born from above’ by the wind of God, the Spirit of God.

- Jesus

In our sacred text intimacy and ‘knowing God’ are one and the same thing. I am usually cautious when using this language to describe relations to God. Largely because words like ‘intimacy’ are wedded to our overly-sexed culture.

 

Knowing God is an intimacy that goes deeper than the intimacy involved in sexual relations. God goes into places, secret places, that no human partner can go. God is never fooled by the various masks I wear to fool people or hide from people. God’s holy kiss is both a terror and a joy. It is a joy because I am held by a love that is more than pure and that seeks my highest good. It is a terror in that it will not let me tarry long in its presence with my false self. I can be false while appearing intimate with another human. But not with God.

 

These thoughts come to me while doing lectio divina in this John 3 passage and listening to a Nina Simone song Wild is the Wind.  In John 3 Jesus describes the movement of the Spirit in our lives as the wind. In particular, the Spirit’s midwifery. We are born from above through the midwifery of the Spirit. The Spirit’s movement is like the wind.  But it is a wind that cannot be easily discerned or named. The Spirit’s movement is unleashable.

 

In Nina’s song Wild is the Windwe are brought into a rapturous recollection of a love shared by two lovers. The lover describes the love for the Beloved and the way the Beloved responds. Of course the lover’s love is wild as the wind. It is un-tame-able and un-domesticated. But while it is not easily captured it is very close. Very close.   

 

These thoughts come to me as Scripture reads me:

 

Wild is the wind…the Spirit’s dance in my life. 

Listing and twirling in hidden places

Turning over lies

Springing forth truth

Lighting my heart

Making my eye single

 

Prayer Offering:

 

My God, with Your holy kiss my life began again.

 

 

 

 

 

Elegy I

Art by Andrea Knarr

I loved. With every fabric of my being I loved. But I have the good fortune of living in a world of flux. In constant shifting. There is this continuum I live in of loss and renewal. It is a loss that seems to have gotten the best of me. Loss is a difficult reality. We hold on to things that do not want to be there. We want to place ‘the leaving ones’ in the deepest caverns of our hearts. But they do not want to stay there. How do you go on? How do you let go? They say time heals the deepest wounds. I agree to a point. Yet the pain still lingers even though it may be a faint whisper in a healing soul. In this season of elegy I’ve come to recognize the pain, wound, loss, and lost love as a true gift. Had I not possessed this gift I would not know ‘me’ or atleast the me that God gazes at every moment and in every breath I take. 

 

Love can be painful.   This is the beginning  of my own elegy.  Confession is good for the soul.

Elegy I

 

 

 

Today we stumble upon a historical moment. The United States of America will swear into office the first black President, Barack Obama. I haven’t blogged much on this because I have been at a lost for words to describe how I’ve felt over the past several months. While there is still much work to be done in the area of racial justice in our country no one can deny that this is another major turning point in our history.

 

I’ve learned from prophetic theologians like Stanley Hauerwas that my love for this country should be a Christ-shaped love.  Not an idolatrous pride in nation-state boundaries conjured up by the human political imagination. But I cannot help but feel a sense of pride today.  Mainly for my oldest son Isaiah Smith. He is a trumpeter in the Harding University High School marching band. Their band will be marching for the incoming president during the inauguration ceremonies. Their journey to this point is a story in and of itself. The fundraising for the kids to go to D.C., the practices, the new music he had to learn, and the deep history lessons they have received from those in our community who lived through the Civil Rights era. I recall one conversation I had with his English teacher, Ms. Robertson. She tearfully described how proud she was of the youth headed up for this historical moment. For many Americans this will be a surreal moment. I never imagined I’d see this day. I can say today that I have a sense of joy of what is taking place before our eyes.

 

In prayer this morning I could almost hear the prayers and cries of African slaves:

 

How long O’Lord will you withhold justice from us!

 

I believe that today we will be witnessing God answering their prayers for justice. For sure it is one answer in a long stream of answers that have come and yet to come but it is an answer nonetheless. This answer is really big. Just the symbolic nature of this event alone will briefly interrupt deeply entrenched racial narratives that operate on an unconscious level.

 

I feel a change has and is taking place in our country. I sense a momentum of hope swelling up in the hearts of people. I pray that this bi-partisan spirit take hold of our political, religious, and economic leaders in a way that will be unprecedented.  I feel a change a comin’. God’s grace and peace be with us all.    

Guest blogging @ Beliefnet

….I’ll be guest blogging @ Tony Jones’ blog “The New Christians” this week with Carla Barnhill and Keith DeRose.  Should be interesting.]

http://blog.beliefnet.com/tonyjones/

I texted my oldest son this morning…”Yes you can!”…he replied “Yes sir!”