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Things are moving along swimmingly at Smyth & Helwys. The official title of our book is: “Baptimergent: Baptist Stories from the Emergent Frontier.”
The similarities in title to Tony Jones’ book “The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier,” are intentional. These are tradition-specific dispatches if you will. Stories that are a smattering of a larger multitude of creative, imaginative voices out there among Baptists today.
The irony in the title is that the publisher and I joked about the word “baptimergent” being cumbersome and downright ugly. The fact that it made the title is a lesson of its own. This is a cumbersome and ugly plight — this thing we call emergence. Then again, so is any birthing process.
The book is set for publication in March 2010. I am in the process of getting endorsements, and Tim Conder is wrapping up the Afterward. Tony Jones has already gotten his endorsement in. I hope the book will get yours once it hits the shelves. I’ll have more updates coming soon.
Teaser: Tripp Fuller and I also have some plans underway to do a podcast series with all the chapter writers on Homebrewed Christianity. I’ll be sharing those names and bios later on once the content gets finalized for publication.
Stay tuned!
I’ve been carrying this blog as an internal dialog for a while, and a recent conversation with a colleague has inspired me to share it here.
My good buddy Tripp Fuller, of Homebrewed Christianity fame, and I started the Triad Emergent Cohort (Greensboro/Winston-Salem, NC) several years ago. It was a great venue for what was a largely new and burgeoning conversation about emerging trends in theology and church practice.
It was also a venue for recovery – mostly recovering Baptists – who were suffering an identity crisis along with vocational uncertainty. As a participant, I credit this cohort with keeping me sane during a time of vocational upheaval.
Recently the emergent cohort phenomenon as a whole has itself suffered a bit of an identity crisis. I have since moved to Raleigh, NC — that at one time had the first emergent cohort in this region. It had disbanded by the time I got here last November. While Tim Conder and I have discussed a revival of the group, life, work, books, and such have slowed any progress.
I have no idea what my former cohort has been up to, if anything.
Like any “movement,” (motion is inherent in the word) emergent is evolving. The cohort model was an effective piece of structure that helped many people find a home. A home that gave them the space to ask questions, cross boundaries, heal, rant, and so on. Yet, as the movement has evolved, so to must its structures. Yes, Emergent has structure. There’s nothing wrong with it either, and we shouldn’t fear it. What we should fear is idolizing those structures. (soap box)
Call me silly, but I still think local groups of committed people are the engine for any movement, and I believe that is still the case for emergent. However, these groups need a purpose beyond therapy and conceptualization, and they need a communications network and all the possibilities that come with it. These sorts of groups are also transient, and perhaps that is the very way they remain organic.
Where do we start? Think local and start talking to people. As I have listened and read my context, I have recognized some things. (Results may vary!)
1. Many established clergy know that they have to feed the machine or starve. This doesn’t preclude them from living out of their own emergence. What does prohibit them is lack of opportunity to do so. Cohorts could create opportunities for clergy to practice emergence. Notice I said practice rather than discuss. This will go a long way in keeping current creative clergy persons engaged in the church. Traditional churches are largely closed-off to creativity. Any reimagining of practices, structures, or processes can create panic in many churches. Clergy suffocate in such conditions. Cohorts could be a venue for exercising creativity in the liturgy (artistic multi-sensory worship off church premises on a week night), formational programs (pub groups, etc.), and in missional engagement (community garden for local soup kitchen or farmers market).
2. We have a back-up (in our moderate/liberal Baptist system anyway) wherein young theologically trained clergy are jobless. This is ironic since our leaders talk about being “concerned” about the lack of young leadership in the church. The truth is there is a generation and a half worth of creative hexagonal pegs, and everything out there is a 50’s model square hole. Add to that the fact that the only positions still deemed acceptable to newly trained creatives are youth and associate ones; where they are patronized to death for being naive starry-eyed little youngsters; and kept a safe distance away from the reigns of power. (soap box) Cohorts could create opportunities for young clergy to freely exercise their creativity and be taken seriously. (see above) They would be able to network with other clergy, and with people from the community.
3. Mainline university ministries are in rapid decline as denominational structures continue to come up short on giving, and cut their personnel costs. There are little to no emerging theological voices on the local campuses. While InterVarsity has, at times uncomfortably, been engaged in Emergent, it too has wrestled with just how much it is willing to emerge. The dominant voices on campus are the para-church fundamentalists. While they have the right to be there, we know that they do not speak for all of us. Cohorts could engage clergy, Div. schoolers, and anyone else in campus-related ministry projects. A cohort could develop a volunteer network of people to operate a campus ministry that over time might be viable enough to sustain itself financially.
I am not sure what your context is in need of. Are you asking?
I get it. We’re busy. We’ve got churches to lead and families to feed. I feel those pressures constantly. However, these things I’ve listed above trouble me deeply. I also believe that we cannot deny our place in history as stepping stones along the way to a new threshold. One we’ll likely not see.
Cohorts can still be a useful structure within the present emergence. I believe their purpose in the movement has evolved from recovery to action. In some ways they can be laboratories for reimagined forms of ministry, worship and practice to take place. They can be spaces where clergy stay alive and fresh, and where young leaders spread their wings. They can be this and so much more.
This is slanted pretty heavy toward clergy and church leaders because of who I am, and the conversational contexts that have informed this post. One great reality about emergent cohorts is the potential for anyone to participate. These are not closed communities, though they can be when they’re one-dimensional evangelical recovery groups. Organizing them around projects & practices will go a long way in opening them up to broader participation.
I’d love to hear thoughts from other folks about cohorts. What would be effective in your location? What would keep you alive and engaged in the greater emergence happening within western Christianity?
If anything is conclusive, its that this past weekend’s gathering of Emergent Village leaders was, in a word, “intense.” So far, only four participants have recovered to the point of being able to blog about their experiences. Julie Clawson (@Julie) was the first to share which, as reported by @emergentvillage, was ironic due to Julie having lost her voice by the start of the gathering. Shortly after Julie posted, Makeesha (@makeesha) posted her thoughts over at her blog Frenetic Peace. The next post came from Tim Snyder. Last but not least, Sarah Notton shared her thoughts via Faceboook note.
There will be more to come I am sure. As I have read these, I find a good bit of resonance with my own concerns, questions, & hopes for Emergent Village. Much of which I shared in my April 24th post here at Baptimergent. So far I like what I read simply because it honors the process of emergence. We’re still unsettled. We’re still entangled more with questions rather than answers. We’re still moving. We’re still hopeful and anticipatory. Most of all, we recognize our role in a bigger kin-dom/historical picture.
I believe clearer distillations will be forth-coming, especially when we honor our commitment to generative friendship and conversation, and to imagination and incarnation. As a group that takes its identity primarily from the Greatest Commands, this sort of timely discernment will likely be a regular ritual; both at the national and the local level. Gatherings like this lend credibility to a movement that claims to be fundamentally relational in contrast to more triumphal movements of Christianity’s past. I am encouraged by EV’s course, and you should be too
Since posting this earlier today, several more perspectives have come in from the EV gathering. Read about Moff’s experience here, which offers a great metaphor; and Travis Keller’s post which asks some good questions about feeling at home in the Emergent Village.
Staying up to date with the voices coming out of the EVD09 gathering last weekend, here’s a great post from Mike Clawson who, like me, is really happy about the make-up of the participants. By far, my favorite post is Mike Stavlunds “Poems of Emergence.” He writes two poems that emerged from his experiences over the weekend.
This weekend chair-members and leaders of Emergent Village are gathering to discern how the movement will continue its evolution. In case you’ve missed the news, you can read the post on the EV site and Tim Hartman’s explanation there as well.
I posted on Twitter yesterday that I believe the word “emergent” is suffering from the classic postmodern distaste of the familiar and over-done. I noticed this in early 2008 when I started seeing “emergent” bloggers writing to that end. One in particular confessed a frustration with how the word had become a marketing label for books published in the “emergent” genre. That this was taking us down a road that did not seem to fit with who we are.
This touches on a concern I have always had for the emergent movement; how do we continue emerging and define ourselves at the same time? Initially, for me, this meant avoiding mainstream popularity or being willing to critique it when it arose. Recently another understanding has emerged alongside that. I believe “emergent” must embrace its mortality.
I don’t mean that as an ending. I’m a resurrectionist (is that a word?). What I mean is that emergent must embrace its transient status as a generative nexus of creative people-of-the-way who are participating in a birthing process. A process that is bigger than the church. And as we all know, birthing is a process with a time-limit.
If we take seriously our place in history, we know that we’re roughly 50 years into a 150-200 year period of transition out of “Western Civilization” and into something that’s not clear yet. That means our instituting, structuring, and organizing will be messy, transient, and sometimes painful, but no less necessary and important in shaping what’s to come. But when “what’s to come,” gets here we’ll need to be able to move on with it, or allow those after us to move on with it.
One thing the story of Moses tells us is that leaders & movements emerge to bring people through transition, but often fail to experience the fruit of their labor. This is what I mean about embracing our “emergent” mortality. Could it be that we are here at this point in history simply to creatively navigate a wilderness transition? To bring the church to the edge of the Jordan and send her with our blessing?
Emergence is a global phenomenon. Its not our place to structure or control it, but rather to find those spaces where we can participate in it. Perhaps our discerning should be in the area of who and where we’re to be in this global process — then to go to those places and do it as people made in God’s image. Heck, you don’t even need a name for that.
I wish my emergent friends in Washington all the best this weekend. Thank you for your willingness to adapt and move. Blessings on your deliberations this weekend.
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