For you readers who think that those a part of the Emergent conversation/emerging church are still heretics and heathens, here is a diplomatic response written by Tony Jones, Doug Pagitt, Spencer Burke, Brian McLaren, Dan Kimball, Andrew Jones, Chris Seay…

Our Response to Critics

Some “highlights”:

…As we have always said, we hope to stimulate constructive conversation, which involves point and counterpoint, honest speaking and open-minded listening…

…We would only ask, if you accept our critics’ evaluation of our work, that in fairness you abstain from adding your critique to theirs unless you have actually read our books, heard us speak, and engaged with us in dialogue for yourself. Second-hand critique can easily become a kind of gossip that drifts from the truth and causes needless division…

…no, we are not moral or epistemological relativists any more than anyone or any community is who takes hermeneutical positions – we believe that radical relativism is absurd and dangerous, as is arrogant absolutism…

…yes, we believe that Jesus is the crucified and risen Savior of the cosmos and no one comes to the Father except through Jesus…

…we will continue to love and respect evangelical Christians whether or not we are accepted by them as evangelicals ourselves…

…if our work has been helpful to you, please join us in seeking to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace by not becoming quarrelsome or defensive or disrespectful to anyone – especially those who you feel have misrepresented or misunderstood you or us…

…With millions suffering from hunger, disease, and injustice around the world, we hope that all of us – including our critics – can renew our commitment to “remember the poor” (Galatians 2:10) rather than invest excessive energy in “controversies about words.”…

I know many of you will have no interest in this matter. But I ask that you take some time to consider my thoughts.

Today, I went to the TED website (which is pretty amazing) and listened to Yochai Benkler talk about how markets and central power structures are losing their grip on the economy by open-source structures: Microsoft vs. Linux, Encyclopedia Britannica vs. Wikipedia, RIAA vs. p2p networks, telecomms vs. Skype. This was most apparent in the choice of servers most e-commerce websites used. The open-source Apache server completely overtook Microsoft as the choice for a lot websites. The Ubuntu OS is growing slowly but surely as Linux strives to be more user-friendly. Record companies are desperately fighting off the masses in gaining control of profits. So on and so forth.

And this is the direction Christianity may be (or is already) headed.

After the early church sprang out of the miracle of Pentacost, The Way was a radical movement that seemed to threaten and undermine the Roman empire. Fast forward several hundred years and the Roman Empire has made Christianity its state religion. In the midst, the Great Schism occurs between the Eastern and the Western churches. Throughout this transitional period you have the historical councils dictating what texts and theologies are orthodox and heterodox. But these councils, joined by the government, were symbols of power, much like the Microsofts of today. And for hundreds of years after, these power structures held till other power structures rose (i.e. Protestanism) to compete in the Christian worldview.

In contrast, what we see in the early 21st century is the waning of such monolithic theological centers. In its stead, with new manifestations like the Emergent conversation, New Monasticism, and young evangelical movements, new standards of faith are arising. Communities are affirming local and contextual theologies that hold place within the local body’s environment. The likes of John Calvin, Karl Barth, and Dom Crossan are just voices (albeit important) in a myriad of many to be studied. Communities are learning what it means to put their faith to their feet in new and innovative ways as the Spirit leads.  And this is a threat to theological powers. It is a threat to the Vatican and the Reformed institutions. And it is even a threat to the structures of our own understanding of faith communities.

Spencer Burke mentioned that the way we share sermons with one another may change. Instead of the same voice every week, people may opt to share voices with one another via mp3s, live video, or a re-imagining of itinerant preaching. Future communities may be more fluid and city-centric. Does this sound scary or exciting to you?

The two biggest questions that may arise are: What about heresy? How do we know what is of the Spirit and what is not?

If you notice in these open-source communities, the bad bugs in programming, or bad data in articles are found and sifted out. Open-source communities are actively engaging with others in the community about ideas and often tweaking the software or information to give the user the best product possible. The same could happen with theology in the future. Heresy, of course, is a concern. However, communities can communicate knowledge and information much more quickly and more critically than ever before such that faulty logic and information will be… ahem… buried (to use a Digg reference). Although monolithic structures may dissolve, faith that the true voice of the Spirit will carry through will be in play.

So we see already a tension between centralized structures versus decentralized structures. Traverse throughout the Christian blogosphere and you can see it. Hear about the different conferences held to defend one thing or to deconstruct another. Christianity as we know it may shift completely into a whole new paradigm of decentralized networks of faith.

Or Google could come along.

[As a post-script, here are some questions I've been thinking about that are by-products of this topic: Why are some things orthodox (as defined by the historical councils) and other things not? Weren't the Powers of the time involved in forming those central doctrines? What then of the "purity" of those doctrines? Is it the Holy Spirit's role to deem one thing "orthodox" and the other thing "heterodox"? Will this idea of open-source Christianity merely be a Western phenomenon? Moreso a phenomenon of the educated?]

So, I know we merging lanesters are trying hard to keep our identities as anonymous as possible, but I would like to divulge with you, dear reader, that of the 5 original writers on this site, I am the only female. And frankly, I’m kind of proud of that! I hope that I’ve done a good job of holding my own with the boys. Though my posts are admittedly more personal, narrative and less systematic in rhetoric, I hope that my own theological underpinnings have come through clearly, provocatively, effectively.

And I have thoroughly enjoyed engaging with my brothers on this site. Their thoughts and opinions are robust and challenging. Their exposure to various ideologies and cultural artifacts is invaluable to me. You boys are truly top notch.

All of my distant admiration of the brothers was somewhat ruffled, however, when one day, while in a chatroom discussing the future of merging lanes some of our brothers asked that we excuse them of their lack of involvement because they had just started dating.

ummm … seriously?

This seemed so strange to me. And yet, upon further reflection, I realized that a lot of my guy friends became unrecognizeable once they started dating. Their phone calls stopped. Their productivity dipped. Back in college, their grades slipped. We didn’t see them around ministry activities so much anymore. In other words, they went completely AWOL.

Brothers, what’s the deal?? I mean, I’m as romantic as they come, but are you seriously going to tell me that the woman in your life makes you completely … ahem … impotent in the other areas of your life? Bros before ho’s my friends! I mean, isn’t that your manly mantra?

On the other hand, I find that my female friends start dating and become superwomen. They work out more, they look better, take on more responsibility, clean themselves up AND their boyfriends. They pick up gardening. Start baking. Learn how to cook three course meals while simultaneously reading up on current events. They rock at their jobs and get promotions. They serve at church, visit their parents often and go on bi-annual missions trips with World Vision.

My theory is that eventually, the women surpass their men, their men feel threatened, and eventually leave them for someone a little duller, less interesting, less threatening.

Then, out of bitterness, the women become more and more productive (Note: After my own breakup, I took up sewing and German!). In the end, men die off and women rule the world!

Ok, I’m just kidding. But really, is there something you boys are trying to tell us? Is dating that stressful? Anything we can help you with to ease the pain?

love,

nieophyte.

By “really rich”, I mean, you never have to worry about the expense of anything reasonable, like pretty much any car or a house or sending kids to college or having enough in reserve to cover “retirement”.

By “very poor”, I mean, you make a living wage to cover rent and expenses, enough to keep yourself afloat and away from too much revolving debt, but any large purchase or investment would be extremely burdensome and you would not have foreseeable means to cover large expenses, like a car or a house or sending kids to college or having enough in reserve to cover “retirement”.

By “almost no free time”, I mean that your working schedule eclipses the schedules of others, that people can generally know that when they are free, you probably are not.

By “have a lot of free time’, I mean that you have MORE free time than most of your friends, that you have late afternoons and evenings consistently available for your leisure, and your weekends are always your own.

And finally, by “free time”, I mean exclusively time not spent working. Participating in other activities, family obligations, etc., all fall under the umbrella of “free time”, because they are activities that would cease to exist if work were interfering and assigned higher priority.

So, what do you choose?  And why?

One of the biggest struggles in my life has been doing quiet times. I am in large company; admit it. I would have “off-seasons” and “on-seasons” where during the off-season I would feel guilty and in the on-season I’d be waiting for someone to ask me how I was doing with God so I quickly respond with, “oh man, I’ve been praying and reading scripture everyday! How wonderful!” Pride is ugly.

About 6 months ago, our own nieophyte recommended the lectio divina to me, an ancient Christian practice of biblical contemplation, meditation and prayer. Being of Korean descent, I was informally taught to pray with intense passion, which usually translated to LOUD NOISES!! So this new form of the discipline of prayer and scripture reading was very revolutionary for me. So much so that it’s influenced a lot of the meditative nature of my worship song writing and the practices of my faith community that I engage in currently.

I loved it so much. Basking in God’s presence while remaining silent: I shut up. God speaks. I let scripture speak to me rather than scrounging for a way for it to apply to me. I fought through the boredom of silence understanding that God was meeting me. I even felt connected to the ancients as this was how they met God in their solitude. But that dwindled. I couldn’t maintain it for so long. It required… discipline. That dreaded word.

And so came another period of my life where I was not actively engaging with God on a very regular basis.

Tonight, while eating ribs at a rib shack on Edgewood Ave in Atlanta, I felt so lonely all of a sudden. I felt so far from God. I realized how much I miss intimate, regular connection with God. And so I decided to do something about it. I would purchase The Divine Hours by Phyllis Tickle.

I heard so many wonderful things about Ms. Tickle’s book and how it inspires intimacy with God through praying at certain hours of the day. Using scripture, ancient prayer texts, and poetry, Ms. Tickle set out to help reignite the ritualistic prayer methods of ancient Christianity for our time and for our spiritual benefit. Coincidentally, I’ve been really inspired by Muslims and their practice of Salah, praying five times a day. It was a discipline I wanted to incorporate in my life and I took the initiative and purchased two of her books.

Tonight I came to a conclusion. Prayerful intimacy with God is crucial. It’s not about how many times a day you do it, how you do it, or when you do it. There was a period of intellectual rebellion where I painted quiet times as almost silly. I take it back. I’m sorry. I feel starved and I want God again. It doesn’t matter where I end up philosophically, theologically, ecclesiologically, or blah blah blah. I need God like food.

And I don’t feel sad for purchasing a book to help me be close to God. Whatever works, as long as I can feel the breath of God coursing through me. I’ll let you know how this goes. And if it doesn’t hold out long enough, maybe I’ll try Doug Pagitt’s BodyPrayer next. The fight is just as important, isn’t it?

I hope you have a way of finding God, whether it’s reading through the bible with pen to journal, praying while walking the dog, sitting silent for several minutes a day, praying your Hail Mary’s, using prayer knots, Salah, lectio, etc.

And please share with us know how you meet God in the secret, quiet places of your lives.

Wow… I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

The 8 final American Idol contestants sing Darlene Zschech’s Shout to the Lord, a song that just refuses to die. Yes.

The swaying back and forth in step, the all-black choir, the videos of disenfranchised black children. It’s just all so condescendingly beautiful.

That’s almost as bad as this other horrid video I came across.

A very interesting article about the intersection of faith and politics in relation to the Obama campaign up on USA today.

Never mind the flap over his “Muslim-sounding” middle name, or the controversy generated by his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. Over the past several weeks, a far more interesting question about Barack Obama’s “true” religion has emerged in the news media’s fascination with the “Obamessiah” …

Even though, as Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift recently observed, his media halo has “tarnished” a bit, pundits and political operatives remain at a loss to explain what Hillary Clinton herself referred to, in a Feb. 26 interview on Pat Robertson’s The 700 Club, as the Obama “phenomenon.” They are particularly befuddled by the intense involvement of so many young people, many of them university students and first-time voters. They dub them Obamaniacs and Obamabots: “glassy-eyed, brainwashed cult worshippers,” who chant “mantra-like” slogans and “swoon with euphoria.”

A day in the life of a fumbling newb of an environmentalist.

I just watched “An Inconvenient Truth” over the last few days, sort of my bedtime watching material (too many words at work, causing me to take a break from leisure reading). Wow. I’ve been blown away. Has anyone else seen it?

While at Wal-Mart yesterday, I saw some earth day t-shirts for sale. Wal-Mart has some notoriety when it comes to their textiles, and I usually try to avoid anything that is a Wal-Mart brand (but I don’t feel guilty for buying a 5-pack of hanes undershirts that you could buy anywhere). So when I saw that the Wal-Mart brand, “Faded Glory”, were selling earth day t-shirts for cheap, I sort of snorted aloud. How ironic, that shirts promoting the environment were made with the hands of sweatshop labor.

But I looked at the tag, and to my surprise, the t-shirts were made with “transitional cotton”. Click it and find out a little more; I was impressed, and while I still am unsure of the labor practices employed to generate the product, I bought a t-shirt in good faith. I can’t find an image of it on the web, but it’s a blue shirt that says “Endangered Species” and has a human silhouette below it.

In related news, during this trip to Walmart, I have tried some of these home remedies that were listed in the jadanzzy’s post of his gf’s pure, practical, prudent ways to make a difference. One I’m going to try is air-drying my clothes, although I don’t have access to any outdoor air ventilation and my place tends to smell pretty musty and moldy already. I was also looking for vinegar to add to my laundry, because I hear it absorbs all the detergent in the spin cycle and helps remove odors that sometimes linger on stuff like towels, etc.

But the one I was trying was to use a reusable shopping bag. I bought a fancy one a few weeks back and have been wanting to use it. It’s a fairly large stitched canvas bag with collapsible wheels, probably about 26 inches tall, and I didn’t consider that it wouldn’t be sufficient to hold all of my groceries. I was caught completely off-guard when the bag’s wheels broke under the weight of the contents (granted, I did buy some fairly heavy products, like laundry detergent). I also looked completely stupid trying to stuff groceries that were obviously too numerous into one upright bag in the self-checkout aisle. I have definitely not figured this out yet.

Nevertheless, walking back to my car, lugging this strange about-to-be-broken contraption, along with a few plastic bags I inevitably had to use anyway, I felt like the consciousness of my actions was a good step.

Please do watch “An Inconvenient Truth”. I have a serious, new-found respect for Al Gore, and the urgency of the global crisis has really reached a new level of awareness for me. A lot of the counterarguments and skeptical rationales that I’d heard were addressed in it, and the conclusions were astonishing. I was deeply impressed by Gore’s ability to implore rhetoric that made him such a successful politician in advocating the cause of humanity’s deteriorating ability to live on this planet.

In preparation for Earth Day, just two weeks away, what are YOU doing to make a difference?

A powerful photo set from The Guardian.

A before-death image, and an after-death image is shown with the individuals running thoughts during their last moments of life.

Maria Hai-Anh Tuyet Cao, 52
First portrait:
December 5 2003
“Death is nothing,” says Maria. “I embrace death. It is not eternal. Afterwards, when we meet God, we become beautiful. We are only called back to earth if we are still attached to another human being in the final seconds”

Second portrait:
February 15 2004
Maria’s thoughts on death are permeated with her belief in the teachings of her spiritual guru, Supreme Mistress Ching Hai; she believes she has already visited the afterlife in meditation. What Maria hopes is that she can achieve a sense of total detachment at the moment of death: she spends most of her time in the days leading up to her death preparing mentally for this.

I wanted to share a few lingering thoughts about decision-making using Acts 1:20-26 as a lens, since I led a Bible study on the topic this past Sunday.   Forgive me if this is of the more traditional, exegetical strain and less of the interesting, hip, cool, postmodern strain.

For those unfamiliar with the story, basically, Judas killed himself and the magic number of 12 (historically significant in Jewish culture) apostles were now one short.  To fill the spot, they found two candidates, prayed, and then cast lots (sort of like drawing straws?) for who it would be.  It turned out that Matthias was the big winner.

1.  They considered what the Bible had to say.

Why even decide to fill Judas’s shoes?  Because Peter found verses that say that another should take his place.  I haven’t done an in-depth analysis of this, but the point is, the decision was even brought to the surface because of Biblical instruction.

I don’t think this means we have to scour the traditions of the Testaments for something that may or may not apply into our specific circumstances, but I do think that the Bible is a starting point, as our holy text, that is completely about our God.

2.  They considered their criteria.

This was just a matter of being objective, logical, analytical.  If an apostle’s job is to be a “sent one”, then that person’s testimony of Christ would be essential.  That makes sense.   Today, some may feel that being led by faith in making decisions means blindly seeking divine intervention.  But reasoning is not inherently evil; our brains were created in the ways that they think and evaluate situations.  The Bible is a book full of great adventures and twisting plots, but also filled with a bunch of shrewd people whose common sense takes into account a speaking God.

3.  They exercised their faculties.

This is related to the last point, but somehow, they came up with two.  I’m sure that there were more than two guys out there that could meet the criteria, but in one way or another, they narrowed it down to two.  This goes to show that the criteria were applied, not just considered.  They felt confident enough to act on what they figured out.

4.  They prayed.

I’ve been told that it’s not what you decide, but how and for what purpose you make decisions.  Prayer acknowledges our neediness for the one true God, a real, active being that engages with our lives.  Prayer also acknowledges our paucity of understanding of His heart, because asking God for advice inherently indicates our ignorance, our incomplete knowledge.  We ask because we don’t KNOW.

I think this admission of ignorance is so vital.  So many times, we pray to sprinkle pixie dust on decisions we’ve already made up.  And sometimes we even make those decisions with Biblical principles in mind, with a heart that wants to please God, with intentions that want to be as CHRISTIAN as possible.  But we cannot intimate all such knowledge apart from the Spirit of God, that engages actively to teach and guide and convict.

Again, this all interacts with the entire process, with the God-given faculties, the Bible, our common sense.  As jadanzzy wrote earlier, Christ-following decision-making does not mean endless hours of mystical prayer awaiting a supernatural/emotional response.  But the act of humility in praying to a God whose ways are higher reminds us of the posture of the created in view of the creator.

5.  They basically flipped a coin.

This is the best part, I think, and something that we shy away from.  Dear Lord, may this coin flip be something that tells us what you want.  Amen.

But in view of the exercise of their minds, of understanding their calling and situation, of seeking out the wisdom from the Scriptures, and the assurance of prayer, doesn’t this confirm that there IS an element of a leap of faith?

And in a sense, this is a reminder for us to remember that decisions require faith.  The context and culture in which that faith operates is a conversation that is rapidly changing today, and it is an exciting one.  But one way or another, our decisions are an adventure into the unknown.

No matter how much we know, no matter what new and interesting ideas come to guide our spiritual walks, when confronted with the toughest decisions, there’s confidence in casting lots if we’ve connected with God along the way.

Matthias himself is an interesting character, and I wonder how the apostles’ decision that day affected the worldwide church.