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Emergent churches seek new ways to worship, serve

Emergent worship folks in the Presbyterian church are trying to figure out where to go from here -- along the way taking the temperature of people interested in the emergent life, and planning more conversations.

A new book -- An Emergent Manifesto of Hope, including some essays written by Presbyterians -- attempts to lay out aspects of emergent thinking. There's ongoing conversation about where and how missional and emergent approaches converge and diverge.

And a tantalizing question asked at a July emergent gathering in San Francisco, according to Karen Sloan, a Presbyterian who's the author of Flirting with Monasticism: Finding God on Ancient Paths and who's been helping to organize some of these events, was: "What is presbymergent's agenda?" and does it intend to change the church?

Emergent worship folks in the Presbyterian church are trying to figure out where to go from here — along the way taking the temperature of people interested in the emergent life, and planning more conversations.

A new book — An Emergent Manifesto of Hope, including some essays written by Presbyterians — attempts to lay out aspects of emergent thinking. There’s ongoing conversation about where and how missional and emergent approaches converge and diverge.

And a tantalizing question asked at a July emergent gathering in San Francisco, according to Karen Sloan, a Presbyterian who’s the author of Flirting with Monasticism: Finding God on Ancient Paths and who’s been helping to organize some of these events, was: “What is presbymergent’s agenda?” and does it intend to change the church?

Her answer: “I want to make more friends.”

What she meant, Sloan wrote at the presbymergent.org Web site, is that she sees her work as “contributing to a network of friends, of finding and connecting those seeking to be a part of reformed missional communities located in postmodern contexts.”

It’s like this: She doesn’t have the game plan.

She’s along for the journey, the conversations, the mutual searching for God.

Connections

All across the landscape, folks from mainline congregations are trying to figure out what the emergent discussion might mean for them. And some in the emergent movement are building connections across the boundaries of denomination and nation, and across the hotspots of polarization within their own traditions.

But for some mainliners, it’s a lonely walk.

They see themselves as post-modern, but their ministry often is anchored in settings where change is not easily won.

Adam Walker Cleaveland, one of the forces behind presbymergent.org, writes about being a “loyal radical” in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

That phrase, Cleaveland writes on his blog, can be attributed to an Anglican, Bob Hopkins, who wrote an essay with that title, in which he said that loyal radicals “really love the church they are a part of, even though they are passionate for change and often immensely frustrated by the built-in institutional resistance to change.”

And “their commitment to missional transformation of the church is fired by a gift of faith that God is able to bring about change even where it seems impossible,” Hopkins wrote.

Emergent Village, a seminal Web site for the emergent community, defines its community like this: “A growing, generative friendship among missional Christians seeking to love our world in the Spirit of Jesus Christ.”

How to start?

Some working in ministry in more traditional contexts are struggling to figure out what an emergent vision might be for them.

One Presbyterian minister wrote that “I’m an associate pastor at (a) mid-size, urban-ish church. We’re not the most old-school, white-bread church on the block,” but certainly aren’t cutting-edge.

The minister wrote that he’s been asked to put together a proposal for considering possible changes, and “I’m worried that I’m going to mess it up.” While he’s come to understand the value of emergent ideas, “I’m afraid that all people will hear is, ‘let’s get a praise band and project a sermon outline in a crappy PowerPoint presentation.’ “

Some of the responses he got were:

·         Take your time. Educate, educate, educate. One congregation spent three years making the case for change — teaching Sunday school classes on post-modern ideas and showing that some folks are not being reached by traditional worship.

·         Drop the hot-button terms — including, perhaps, “emergent” or “emerging.” Gather information about the values and culture of young adults, “bringing them into the conversation about worship that engages them.”

·         Wait for a “community-switch from, ‘If you build it, they will come’ to ‘let those that come build it.'”

But some interested in emergent ideas and approaches say they feel isolated — and they’re not sure what to do. One pastor wrote that:

“I pastor a small congregation, in an isolated community, in a presbytery without any presbymergent presence. What few youth I have are jumping ship to attend ‘those fun programs the Baptists do.’ I’ve asked them about those programs and have discovered that they’re high-energy-activity-Christian-rock-music-oriented, but there isn’t much substance. It’s an emotional and physical high, and not much else. As my homiletics professor used to say about feel-good sermons, ‘There’s no there, there.’

“How can we, who are deep in the trenches of parish ministry, gain exposure to quality presbymergence out in the boondocks, so we can hold onto our younger generation now?”

A new Reformation?

Although some in the trenches are having difficulty seeing how the emergent movement might play out, particularly in small towns or rural areas, others are catching the energy.

Some in the emergent conversation come from a non-denominational context, and lots of friendships are being built among those who share emergent thinking regardless of denominational background. There’s discussion of a “new Reformation,” of this being a seminal time in many ways for Christianity.

A Quaker who attended the San Francisco gathering blogged that the conversations there sounded a lot like the conversations with folks she’s had in the emergent Quaker community — a group she calls “convergent Friends.” The blogger — a woman named Robin from California — wrote that “the internet/non-geographically-based conversations, the cooperation across various divides in the denomination, the concerns that maybe the denomination is dying, all sound familiar.”

There also have been interfaith conversations — for example, a 2006 gathering on “sacred community” involving leaders from emergent Christianity and from the Jewish group Synagogue 3000.

Phyllis Tickle, a well-known author and founding editor of the religion department of Publishers Weekly, said in a recent interview that the West has experienced 500-year cycles — a period of upheaval, followed by settling down, followed by codification, then more upheaval. As she put it: “About every five hundred years the church feels compelled to have a giant rummage sale, and we’re in one of those periods now.”

Tickle also said that “we’re seeing the start of a post-Protestant and post-denominational era,” She is working on a book about the emergent movement, due to be published in 2008.

In May, about 250 people gathered at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., for a gathering called “The Church in the 21st Century.”

According to the Alban Institute Web site, Tickle told that gathering that “we stand — and we know it — on the threshold of Something.”

Something, she implies, really big.

 

 

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