Emerging Christianity Conference

Day Four.

Sunday opened with q & a with the presenters. The highlight was McLaren responding to the "why are there so few young people and people of color here?" question, by noting that it is the white church that is in trouble right now. Good point. It is also older white people who tend to be more likely to have continuing education allowances and other resources to attend such conferences. Rohr also commented on the possibility of moving conferences like this one out of the snazzy hotels.

In their summations: McLaren drew the distinction between a movement and an institution. Institutions are rooted in past movements and oppose new ones.

Rohr quoted a remarkable story about how Kalahari Bush-people would, when traveling, occasionally just sit down, saying that they had to "wait for their souls to catch up with their bodies." We don't give our souls time to catch up with our frenetic movement. Emerging church work is soul work. The soul wants meaning, not answers, seeks depth, not breadth. We need patience.

Stabile: the antidote for exhaustion is wholeheartedness. "What is it you don't have the heart for anymore?" We often hold onto the last word of God as a way to resist the net word of God. Every expectation is a resentment waiting to happen. Waiting is active: stay awake!

The communion liturgy was very powerful, except that Rohr should not try to preach. He can't do it. He should have handed this off to McLaren. It was a barely interesting lecture, and he never actually read the Gospel. But the service itself was excellent, with a shared eucharist across a long table, and music by a trio of women singers. Liturgical material from Taize and Iona. Even a traditional Protestant hymn thrown in.

All in all a good conference, though without the magic and electricity of last year's. Maybe it was just our table, but there seemed to be more of a Roman Catholic presence this year, which means discussing issues that have no relevance to me, having to do with the hierarchy and the Pope. Some seemed to identify "emerging" with a) more social action, and b) working towards women priests.

I am wondering if it is time to stop going to conferences and to start doing something. Future conferences will be valuable to the extent that they deal with practical, hands-on, active practices that can be shared and learned from.

Read Cynthia Bourgeault's book on the plane home: Centering Prayer and Inner Awareness. It's very good and helps to bring together the contemplation and action sides of the emerging church. This agenda is vitally important, and it is why Rohr is getting in on this. With McLaren and others, they seem to understand that this really is a paradigm-shift, new reformation, "rummage sale" time, and the new thing that is being born will need deep and strong spiritual roots. (As opposed to some corners of the emerging church movement who seem to view it as little more than the latest youth ministry gimmick.)

The conference also revealed again the bankruptcy of much of Roman Catholicism (not that I am not quite aware of the bankruptcy of much of Protestantism). But the Catholic inertia is so entrenched and virulent that I wonder why anyone even stays over there....

Emerging Christianity Conference

Day Three, cont'd.

Brian McLaren continued to work on finding the unity beyond duality. The early church exhibited a non-dual inclusiveness. What went wrong? Different models presented themselves until the experiment was aborted with Constantine's "solution," which was to reassert the homogeneity/hegemony model. The cross had been a sign of oppression and violence which Jesus subverted and turned against itself as a sign of liberation. Constantine sees it as a sign of conquest... and the church bought into it.

At the heart of the struggle for Christian identity today is the meaning of the biblical narrative. The creation-fall-redemption framework is largely assumed, even though it is inherently dualistic and imperialistic, based on Greek philosophy melded with Roman politics. It reflects Constantine's "assimilate or be destroyed" (ie. "the Borg") plan: imperialistic, violent, exclusive, and dualistic.

He reiterated a buch of stuff from his recent book, especially how we have learned to read the Bible backwards, through the subsequent tradition, and that it would be more fruitful if we could read the Bible forward, recognizing Jesus in his full Jewishness.

The emerging church has three resources in this: 1- a 3-dimensional, expanding biblical narrative, 2- a social understanding of the Trinity: perichoresis, interbeing without absorption, communion without conversion, one-anotherness, preserving difference in unity. 3- the gospel of the Kingdom which is non-dual: us-for-you, us-with-you.

The afternoon workshops I attended: the one on art and drawing was helpful in getting us to use both sides of our brain. But the one on ritual I found to be not as helpful and pretty lame. There was a lot about ritual and ceremony generally, but little was done to tie it into either the rest of the conference theme or the biblical narrative. Furthermore, I feel we needed to hear some practical application, like how to integrate different kinds of ritual into our local experience, and there was none of that. So that was frustrating.

The evening session was a "Lamentation." I did not see the point to this in the schedule but I went anyway. It turned out to be a kind of lament/dance of old white people/boomers, which I didn't have much patience for. Just about everyone here is fairly privileged. I could see a lament for the Earth or a lament for the poor, and some of this did come out. And I understand that we all have stuff that has slapped us down and disappointed us over the years. And I see how suffering is kind of the doorway to a non-dual mind. But we need to celebrate what is emerging. This could have turned into a giant whine about the church we have lost, and I get enough of that in my normal life. But it didn't. So I was ambivalent.

More to come....

Emerging Church Conference

Day Three

Richard Rohr came back to the podium on Saturday. The theme for this day is ministry.

The early church held the "prophets" in high esteem; but the church soon marginalized, domesticated, and eventually eliminated the office of prophet. Their role was to provide validation from the intuitive/imaginal level. It was a recognition of demonstrated abilities and gifts.

He spent a lot of time complaining about the ordination process in the Roman Catholic church, which is not that different from what goes on in Protestantism. We ordain people before they show any gifts, as if the act of ordination itself conferred spiritual gifts and authority. This puts the control in the hands of the institution, instead of the Spirit.

Suzanne Stabile identifies 4 "mantras" learned from Jonah: 1- show up; 2- pay attention, 3- tell the truth, 4- don't get attached to the results.

In authentic ministry we don't do it, we serve what God is doing.

True liminality leads to increased awareness.

True liminality leads to increased consciousness of pain.

True liminality leads to increased knowledge of ourselves and others.

True liminality leads to increased knowledge of your own shadows, and those of others.

She shared a wonderful joke by Jack Kornfield about the bedoin family going across the desert on camels, when the father turns and tells one of the children, "Stop asking if we're almost there; we nomads, for God's sake!"

I will summarize McLaren's next talk next time.