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Debbie and I had dinner with some friends last night. Les and Fiona Cowan have a great retro Christian record album including the full range of Larry Norman and a few Randy Stonehill and Barry McGuire records. Cool! I heard Barry when i was 11 years old and got to meet him a few years back in San Francisco.
Never met Larry. And I almost met Randy.
UPDATE: ahhhhh. . . . how rude of me to get this introduction soooo wrong.
Heidi just arrived. And its Dr Heidi Campbell, having completed her PhD on internet community and theology in 2002. She now teaches new media and religion at A & M in Texas. Its her second time in Orkney and she will be teaching next week in Oxford with Pete Ward. Heidi blogs at When Religion Meets New Media and I think we have connected a few times through the internet but never face to face.
ORIGINAL: TWO interesting people flying into Orkney today. Jamie Oliver to meet with Orkney foodies and Heidi Campbell to meet with me and discuss internet communities.
Heidi is a PhD student and has written this interesting document called "A New Forum for Religion: Spiritual Pilgrimage Online" [PDF]. She will stay until Friday and, I hope, help me to build a chicken coop for the laying hens that arrive this weekend.
If I see Jamie at the airport, I will be sure to pass on comments from the angry students up here who are sick of the school menu.
I bought about 65 old theological books today from Scapa Books which is going out of business. They will be added to the library of Suddenly Seminary. I scored a few more hymbooks from Sankey = not sure of the age but the advertisement on the back cover is worth blogging.
Quite a serious buzz in London about the movie Amazing Grace. I saw it all over the buses during my time here, as my little video clip below will show. Hope it does well.
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In London again. Meetings all day. I have a cold and my body hurts. But its sunny.
A few of us are learning what "fellowship" means and are putting it into practice. It started a month ago when my wife told me a few people in our community wanted to go in with us in buying shares in a cow. I said, "Thats what 'fellowship' means. It means to have half shares in a cow".
[image from mooworld.org]
This is what Kiwi Viv Grigg told me years ago at a Fuller Seminary class. He also suggested the word "fee" comes from the same word in old English. I did some research on the roots of the word and found out that the English word "fellowship" comes from the Nordic word "fēlagi". Interestingly, that was pretty much the language spoken up here in Orkney during that time.
This 2000 year old village in Orkney (Broch of Gurness, about 20 minutes from my house) shows how close everyone lived together. Livestock gave meat, milk and heat for the homes in winter - organic heating and organic smell. Families would often share these animals among themselves by becoming 'fellows' with each other.
[Middle English felau, from Old English fēolaga, from Old Norse fēlagi, business partner, fellow, from fēlag, partnership : fē, property, money + lag, a laying down.] Answers
Word History for "Fellow"
"A jolly good fellow might or might not be the ideal business associate, but the ancestor of our word fellow definitely referred to a business partner. Fellow was borrowed into English from Old Norse fēlagi, meaning “a partner or shareholder of any kind.” Old Norse fēlagi is derived from fēlag, “partnership,” a compound made up of fē, “livestock, property, money,” and lag, “a laying in order” and “fellowship.” The notion of putting one's property together lies behind the senses of fēlagi meaning “partner” and “consort.” In Old Icelandic fēlagi also had the general sense “fellow, mate, comrade,” which fellow has as well, indicating perhaps that most partnerships turned out all right for speakers of Old Icelandic." Answers
This idea of re-imagining fellowship in economic terms came up later with the idea of chickens. Four families, including ours, are going together to buy some laying hens so we can all get fresh organic eggs. Thats fellowship for you. Maybe "partnership" carries the idea a little better.
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The Portuguese crowd had a conference last weekend which went really well. Barbara, who i have mentioned before, is raising money for some land near Lisbon where many of them will live in community and have a base for ministry around Europe and among street kids in the cities. Some of us are putting a little money towards it because we believe in the vision and in this exciting and passionate emerging leaders. Read more about this land on Barbara's blog ShantiPilgrim. Check out her little hut in the woods . .
I had a fantastic time in Portugal back in 2004 [blogged it here] and I will be there again September 10 -12, 2007
Technorati Tags: emerging church
Insightful article on Out of Ur called "The Future of the Emerging Church: Are we experiencing the next reformation of Christianity?". Phyllis Tickle discusses the 500 year cycles that change the world and suggests that we might be building a post-protestant model that could last 500 years.
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I will be in London for a few days (Tuesday to Thursday) to discuss missional cells with CMS. We are getting ready to launch a number of initiatives and we need to get on the same page. We are still very interested in mapping out new churches and new movements and finding ways to support what is going on, as well as igniting new efforts. Also talking about Bible study and small group/cell resources for missional cells. Have you come across anything that might help? Let me know.
Pilgrimage is something on our hearts also. I will be meeting with Mark Berry and Shannon Hopkins to lay out some plans for promoting and supporting this movement. Ideas so far include websites, pilgrimage points, learning trails, resources, etc. Speaking of pilgrimage, our family will be on pilgrimage this summer in UK, Poland, Czech Republic, Germany, and France. We will be at Taize from July 29 to August 4 if you want to join us. You and 5000 others.
Huge wind last weekend and its still blowing and snowing right now. Our friend's caravan was damaged beyond repair, despite being tied down. We lost one of our windows that got sucked out and blown away. I will be climbing on the roof later today to put another pane of glass up. Its an old house and we get it for pretty cheap rent in return for fixing it up.
Dr Mark DeVine has released a paper called "Fast Friends or Future Foes: The Emerging Church and Southern Baptists". Good thoughts and well written. Not too many examples of emerging church movements within the Southern Baptist Church but maybe Mark will write more on that another time.
Speaking of Southern Baptists, I am speaking three times at the Easter Camp for IMB missionaries (SBC) here in the UK. We will explore an incarnational missiology and will draw from about a dozen Baptist missiologists and theologians. Plenty of material there inside the SBC world and plenty of examples and stories from within the camp.
My paper on the emerging church movement in the Southern Baptist world (1994 to present) will be coming soon.
UPDATE: An email was sent to me informing me of Paul Hiebert's death on March 11. Thanks Linda. He was a great man and will be missed. I dont think I ever met him personally, despite studying at Fuller SWM.
"The Rev. Dr. Paul G. Hiebert, missiologist and missionary to India, has died of cancer on March 11, 2007 at the age of 74."
ORIGINAL POST "Paul Hiebert Not Well" (Feb 20)
Mennonite missiologist Paul Hiebert seems to be finishing out his race in a hospice near Baltimore. According to an email, he is not in pain and does not pray for longer life. I read Hiebert's "Cultural Anthropology" as part of my missiology training at Western Seminary. His thoughts on centered sets and bounded sets made a lot of sense and that meme has since reverberated through the emerging church over the past 2 decades. We are learning to see the church as people on a journey towards Christ as the center. There are also "fuzzy" sets and recently a few of us have been discussing "distributed" sets.
But if i procrastinate then they will never see the light of day.
AJ Vanderhorst talks about the emerging church fuss in the Southern Baptist Church.
Stop the Traffick one minute video clip
Entrepreneur[ship] day March 31 with Bill Bolton. Wish I could be there.
Steve Knight of SIM kicks off a new blog called Kingdom Journalism
Phil Kingsley says you HAVE to watch this video on YouTube on Amazing Grace pre-screening in Ireland. Start here.
Barbara and the young emerging types in Portugal are raising money for a piece of land for quasi-hippie-monastery-community thang.
More are on their way.
I had to endure 6 audio sessions of Michael Frost. This is part of the required preparation for a camp I am teaching at in a few weeks for American IMB missionaries in UK. Frosty is a Baptist teacher that i met down in Sydney in 2002, when he invited me to speak to a group down there. He is also the author of Exiles (see Len's review), and co-author of The Shaping of Things To Come which I think are among the top ten books for emerging church.
The series is Unless a Seed Falls 1-6. Its actually pretty good stuff. Actually, it was great and my wife listened in. She is not a big fan of many of my emerging church friends. She thinks they are usually far too traditional. But Frosty she liked. I like him too. He does HONESTY in a way that only Aussies can do and he brings that into his talks. Worth a listen.
When I get a chance, I might also listen to Michael Frost interviewed by Rodney Olsen.
After 5 fantastic years of blogging, Andrew Careaga has closed down his original blog - BloggedyBlog. He will still podcast his views of music and spirituality through his BloggedyPod site. Andrew also authored a few good books on ministry through the internet - e-vangelism and e-Ministry.
It seems a lot of us are observing Lent right now. I am not drinking caffeine and my kids have given up chocolate and sweets. During this time, I have discovered "FEAST DAYS", those 6 occasions, normally falling on a Sunday, that allow for breaking the rules and scoffing whatever food or drink one is fasting for Lent. In fact, not only have I discovered and employed these Feast Days, yea and behold, I have even added to their number.
Why stop at 6 when you can have 10 Feast Days during Lent? Or 12? Heck - Why not have a Feast Day EVERYDAY during Lent like most Protestants I know.
Interesting article in Lancaster Online regarding Lent observance among Protestants. They blame the emerging church for this trend . . and they might be right:
"The trend toward Lenten observance by Protestant churches isn't brand-new. It has been boosted in the last few years, though, by the "emerging church" movement, which increasingly looks to the ancient church as a pattern for the future.
Too, more Protestants are turning to spiritual disciplines, another tradition once viewed as "Catholic," to deepen their faith at a time when contemporary megachurches are being accused of producing shallow Christianity." Lancaster Online
Jonny Baker from London is going over to Lancaster, PA, at the end of this month to sort them all out. Look out for him at the Lancaster Seminary March 21-28. Hope he has a great time. When our family passed through Lancaster in our Winnebago (1999) we stayed at an Amish campsite and learned about how they did house church. Ate a few shoo-fly pies. And my kids bought the Amish gear - hats, bonnets etc. We looked like an Amish family, except the dad [me] who looked like a backslidden Amish father with a ponytail.
Also on Lancaster. I just read a book on the Reformation by Stephen Nichols, who teaches at the Lancaster Bible College. The Reformation: How a Monk and a Mallet changed the world. [thats mallet . . not MULLET] Nichols says, and I like this, that the Swiss Reformation was started when Ulrich Zwlingli refused to observe Lent and demonstrated his newfound freedom with a now famous sausage supper in March 1522. More on this book on Thursday when i do a book review party here.
And so you can see why a lot of Reformers are not happy with the Emerging Church. After effectively getting rid of quite a number of meaningless rituals like Lent [and Christmas in Scotland] as well as the English monastic system and other things associated with Popery, the emerging church seem to be undoing some of these gains.
Don Carson describes the emerging church as a protest movement. Is it true? Are we protesting the protest? Are we rebelling against the Reformation or are we helping the church to reform again to regain its status as the one holy catholic church? I hope its the latter.
. . . generally have a Christian worldview, according to the findings of a 9 year study. These movies make far more money than those with explicit language and nudity. Check it out on Ric's blog. I remember Michael Medved saying something very similar many years ago.
“God, my friends, is with the poor and God is with us if we are with them.”
Bono, NAACP acceptance speech [Youtube].
We are staying at home today and doing alternative worship, alternative fellowship kinda stuff. A few young people stayed over last night. For our special meal later today [i like the word “love feast”] i will probably play Bono's acceptance speech at the NAACP. Bono gives a superb word on loving our neighbour and God being with the poor.Dan Wilt's blog tipped me off to this.
"The current worship transition from old media to new media is as radical as, and in some ways similar to, the shift from "Ars Antiqua" to "Ars Nova". From around 1300 AD, church music broke away from simple Gregorian-type chants into chords, polyphonic masses and harmonies that were not constrained by parallel movements of the foundation line (cantus firmus). Despite being condemned by Pope XXII, the new approach to music opened the door for similar movements in art and literature, setting the stage for complexity and modularity in church worship. And now through new media, complexity and modularity once again find new expression."
Andrew Jones, from "Transcoding Worship: When the Parts Become Pixels", Worship Leader, Jan-Feb 2007 print edition. [No web access]
Sad to announce that the Culture Watch column that I help write for Worship Leader Mag will be stopped so you wont be hearing from me anymore if you subscribe to WL. I enjoyed writing for it and always tried to look beneath the surface of what we do and find something deeper. It may have been a little too technical or philosophical for the readers who just want to know what the next cool thing is and how to implement it, but i appreciate the WL people who let me say my bit. Thanks to Jeremy Armstrong for the recent articles, and to David Di Sabatino (ex-editor of WL, producer of Frisbee) who pushed me to contribute my first article on alternative worship for WL back in 2001.
Jael and Sisera turned up in my daily readings this morning. Quite a gruesome story.
"Then Jael wife of Heber took a tent peg in one hand and a hammer in the other. She crept up on him, drove the tent peg through his temple into the ground while he was asleep from exhaustion, and he died." (Judges 4)
Which reminds me of the Prayer of Jael, or at least what I imagine she prayed . . .
"Oh Lord,
please let this #*!!@#!* SCUMBAG die quickly
and not bleed all over my tent.
Amen."
I know its not as perky as the Prayer of Jabez, but there might be a lot of people who would benefit from a small group experience based on this prayer.
btw - I posted this prayer a few years back, about the same time Mark Riddle posted on 'Biblical scenes you will never see on a Precious Moments figurine', including David's pile of Philistine foreskins and a figurine of Onan. To which i would add the nose piercing of Rebecca (Gen. 24) and belly plunge of Ehud's knife into Eglon massive tummy (Judges 4) which also happened to feature in todays daily reading.
Also, Cathryn Thomas just recommended a bo-peep at When Abimelech was not killed by a woman in the Brick Testament.
I had a dream last night about John MacArthur. He had set up an event inside a small trailer and I was there - and we had a good chat. He was congenial and we shared some laughs. We also shared our different viewpoints and he pushed hard on his own thoughts. But it was a good experience . .. ahh . . dream . . and I feel close to the man. Maybe dreams don't count for much in the dispensational theology of Dr John MacArthur but they make a difference for me.
I just noticed that his big event - The 2007 Shepherd's Conference - starts today. Now there's a coincidence. Tim Challies is live blogging the conference.
Related: John MacArthur's book called the Truth War, coming out really soon, will not be complimentary of the emerging church at all. Dan Kimball has already posted somewhat of a defense called "Please dont stereotype the Emerging Church".
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Jean Baudrillard died yesterday. I often stumbled on his thoughts (hyperreality, gift, etc) but never spent much time with his books. Wikipedia gives a good guide to his contributions in postmodern theory and post-structural semiotics.
HT: Dan Hughes
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Listening to an MP3 of Tony Jones telling stories of the early days of Young Leaders (I remember some of those) and answering questions from Scot McKnight about Emergent, emerging church, etc.
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I have said this before. Maybe you cant stomach the emerging church but you will still end up using their software. I use it when i can because i like to keep things in the family. Cleave (Adam Cleaveland) has a wicked cool wordpress 2.0 template that i just downloaded for one of my blogs. Its called Cleaker 2.0. More stuff at Cleave Design.
Technorati Tags: blog, emerging church, wordpress, web 2.0
Akiane is an incredible child prodigy. Yesterday the youth showed some images of her paintings in church and told the story of how she often gets up at 4am to pray before she paints. “Lonely” (below), painted when she was 5, was my favourite. See the rest here.
Yesterday our whole family went to see an exhibition of drawings by a local group of artists at the Waterfront Gallery. My daughter Elizabeth (15) modeled for them one evening and ended up on the invitation.
The Spirited Exchanges UK Website is up. There has been a lot of interest in this from Greenbelt and it was just a matter of time before a website and network started to take shape in the UK. This will be a support network for people on the edge of church or beyond, or as I like to say . . . the OTHER HALF of church. There will be a connection to the mother ship in New Zealand where the ministry started. Nice country. You should go there sometime . . .
If you have left traditional church but still want to be a part of a spiritual community that follows Jesus, this network might be a good one for you. From my encounters with their leaders, it seems they have a special gift in dealing with those who have suffered spiritual abuse in church situations, or in their words, an "control based spirituality".
Nothing to say this morning except a happy Sabbath to you all, and if you take a different day off than Sunday .. . then happy Sunday.
We are all well. Weather is good. Lots of young people around. I am working on plane tickets for my various conferences and trips, reading books, preparing teachings, working on websites and doing some administration work for a number of emerging church networks in Europe. Not today though.
I will be in London all next week. Staying at Ashlee House Youth Hostel. Thursday and Friday is a retreat for the 30 people known as the "Creative Group" - leaders of new things popping up in the UK. Its another private party, but i will let you know how it goes. Should be good. Jonny Baker is leading it. But it should be good anyway . . . . hi Jonny!!! [correction: ben edson and ian mobsby are leading it -thanks]
Andy and I took a ferry to the island of Hoy and and stayed the night at a youth hostel. No shops. No internet. No pub. We both got a lot of reading done. The best book i read was Retrieving the Tradition and Renewing Evangelicalism (1998), by Baptist theologian D.H. Williams. Excellent read. Wish i had found it earlier. I have found some inspiration from the book to blog through the early Fathers - i might use this for ourdailyblog.com as soon as i get it sorted out. Images:
UPDATE: New Brochure
![468X60Emergenc[2]](http://tallskinnykiwi.typepad.com/tallskinnykiwi/468x60emergenc%5B2%5D.jpg){kind=small}
An important series of events for the Emerging Church in USA. These events are connected to the book "Listening to the Beliefs of Emerging Churches" [see my review] and the pending release of The Emergent Manifesto of Hope". I am very impressed with the choice of hosts - especially since I am one of them (Minneapolis, May 18-19). The others are Krista Tippett from Speaking of Faith (Seattle, June 1-2) and Scot McKnight (Austin, April 27-28)). The speaker-line up is good also - some very cool people with experience in different facets of the emerging church. We will be exploring the possibility of a "post-evangelical church for a post-Christian world".
Register, learn more or download the larger brochure [PDF]
Speaking of the brochure, I think Scot is being cheeky when he is introduced as Technorati's Number One site for emerging church. OK - so I'm second! Big deal! Did you hear me carrying on and on when I was first for all those years???? Never! Ma genoito! May it never be! But now that Scot kicks me off the perch, I never hear the end of it. Still, he's a nice guy and his conference in Austin will be almost as compelling as mine in Minneapolis. I cant make it to the other events. I will be in Denver during the Austin event and will be in the UK during the Seattle event. But I am sure they will be worth attending.
Technorati Tags: emergent, emerging church
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