Thursday, September 2nd, 2010
The Faith & Leadership project of Duke Divinity School has posted a video and transcript of an interview with Phyllis in which she talks about her latest thinking on Emergence and the role of denominations in the future.
Q: What will mainline denominations need to do to survive and thrive?
PT: If one were going to put one adjective to the Great Emergence, and thereby one adjective to emergence Christianity, one would say “deinstitutionalized.â€I’m Episcopalian, and I hear with the same sorrow as my fellow Anglicans that we’re shutting parishes every month now in the United States in the Episcopal Church. That’s alarming.It’s not just that Christianity is changing. It’s the whole culture. Have you looked lately at the number of Rotary Clubs that aren’t anymore or the number of Kiwanis Clubs that aren’t anymore? American Legion? VFWs?Institutionalization is being leveled. One of the characteristics of emergence thinking is there’s a flattening out.
via Phyllis Tickle: Like an anthill | Faith & Leadership.
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Tuesday, August 31st, 2010
Jana Riess
I’ll admit, I don’t know many Mormons. In fact, Jana is one of the few that I know. I like her and consider her a good friend.
One of the things that I like most about her is that she always keeps her good-natured smile when answering one of my questions about Mormonism, questions that are usually laced with incredulity. For all of my (supposed) openness, I don’t tend to be that open or understanding of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. To me, it seems secretive and odd, and its founder, Joseph Smith, Jr., smacks to me of a half-crazed charlatan.
Jana, however, is neither half-crazed nor a charlatan. She’s thoughtful and literate, and she’s an adult convert to LDS, so she went in with her eyes open.
Thus, when she talks about Mormonism, I listen.
For years, people have asked me the hypothetical question, “If emergent is so open, would you allow Mormons in?” And I have answered, “That’s a silly question because I cannot imagine that Mormons would have any interest in emergent.”
Well, Jana has declared herself the first (and only?) eMORgent, a hyphenated Mormon-emergent, and she explains why in the post linked below:
What does Emergent offer to me as a committed Latter-day Saint?
At its best, the Emergent ideal can enliven burned-out people and put some new wine in tired wineskins. Emergent does this by balancing focus on Christ–Christ as savior, Christ as Lord–with a focus on Jesus.
(via “Emorgent”: Can a Mormon Be an Emergent Christian? – Flunking Sainthood)
Jana goes on to note at least one fork in the road for Mormons. She writes about attending a talk during which Rob Bell emphatically stated that Jesus did not come to found a church (or, I think, we could substitute, a religion). Jana says that Mormons believe that, to the contrary, Jesus did come to found a church, and that is the Church of LDS.
I would also ask more pointed theological questions of Jana and any other eMORgents out there:
I’m not saying that any of these questions cannot possibly be answered, just that they loom large in a potential dialogue between Mormon and emergents.
In any case, I am enormously grateful to Jana for opening this can of worms, and I’ll be very interested to follow the comments on her blog and mine on this issue.
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Sunday, August 29th, 2010
It’s no Life of Brian, but it did cause me to laugh out loud at one point (you can try to guess). Here’s a taste:
God: Hey Jews.
Jews: Hey.
God: So listen guys, I’m thinking we go in a different direction with this whole religion.
Jews: What?
God: You know, do a non-gritty reboot. Same God taste, new God packaging. That sort of thing.
Jews: We don’t follow.
God: Okay, work with me here guys. Remember the whole ‘angry God’ thing?
Jews: Vividly.
God: Where I killed a whole bunch of you and-
Jews: Yeah.
God: And forty years in the-
Jews: We remember that.
God: Not to mention Robo-Hitler. Yikes.
Jews: Wait, what?
God: Whoops, forget I said that. “Spoiler Alert”, am I right?
via “The New Testament” by Lev Novak on CollegeHumor.
HT: John Musick
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Monday, August 23rd, 2010
Well, supposedly I am, being that Brett McCracken devotes chapter seven, in the heart of his book, Hipster Christianity: When Church and Cool Collide to the emerging church movement. “The emerging church,” we are told by McCracken, “undergirds much of what hipster Christianity is all about these days.” And, cribbing a quote from my chapter in An Emergent Manifesto of Hope about the ECM being “pluriform and multivocal,” McCracken responds with this devastating critique: “I mean, how hip is that?”
I’m not the first to think that McCracken’s analysis is suspect and grasp of history is delinquent. John Wilson of Books & Culture wrote a brief but withering essay criticizing McCracken’s thesis. In response to a Wall Street Journal op-ed penned by McCracken, in which the author hamfistedly uses books by Lauren Winner and Rob Bell to point up evangelicals’ obsession with sex, Wilson writes,
Wait, wait. We’re talking about books … that prove what? Every workday, new books written by evangelicals (or writers with a strong affinity for evangelicals, whether or not they self-identify as such) appear on my desk. These books take up an enormous range of subjects. A few of them, yes, are about sex. And this is supposed to be evidence for some striking trend? (I wonder whatever happened to my copy of Total Woman.) By the way, why are these two books in particular said to be representative of the frantic, ill-conceived “plan” to keep young people in the fold? As I read them, Bell’s and Winner’s books are both deeply informed by Scripture and grounded in the life of the church.
I’m with Wilson. If McCracken wants to pick on evangelicals using sex to sell books and fill the pews, point to Ed Young, Jr. with a bed on the stage, preaching to his congregation the benefits of having sex every day for a month. Winner and Bell, in contrast, thoughtfully write about sex from a biblically literate and generally evangelical perspective.
What I’d like to ask McCracken is, what’s the better option? For Christian leaders not to write books about sex? For preachers not to preach about sex?
In fact, McCracken admitted yesterday on Doug Pagitt Radio (part one, part two (the audio is not working right — check back on Doug’s site for a fix) UPDATE: hear the interview HERE) that he wished he wouldn’t have used those two examples in the WSJ piece. But, even without the hamfisted use of Winner and Bell, the question remains, What cultural expression would McCracken have us use to communicate the gospel?
That’s what McCracken seemed unable to do yesterday on the radio, and that’s to propose an alternative. See, the deal is that everything is hermeneutics — that’s all there is. We communicate the gospel in our own cultural idioms. It’s the only way we can. McCracken says that the culture of urban hispters is not appropriate for the gospel, for it smacks too much of desperate marketing tactics. Instead, McCracken says that our communication of the gospel should be “real” and “authentic.” (That’s funny, I remember a book from a decade ago that argued that youth ministry should shift “from relevant to real” for the sake of the gospel.)
But what, I ask, is “real” and “authentic”? To what cultural expressions should the gospel be linked? Is English good enough for the gospel, or should we revert to Greek and Hebrew? (I wonder, does Brett know Greek and Hebrew?)
Well, alas, the Grand Rapids-Carol Stream cabal ensures that McCracken will get his 15 minutes. He was, as I said, featured in the Wall Street Journal, an op-ed that has been “liked” on Facebook over 22,000 times (I mean, how hip is that?) And he wrote the cover article for next month’s Christianity Today. His book will sell more than any of mine, so maybe this is all sour grapes.
And this coming from me, a single dad who lives in the suburbs, drives a car with 85,000 miles on it, struggles to pay the rent, and occasionally puts on a tan shirt covered with patches to lead 10-year-old boys in the Pledge of Allegiance at Cub Scout den meetings.
I mean, how hip is that?
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Friday, August 20th, 2010
That seems to be the sweet spot of Jon Krakauer’s writing. Driving to and from Dallas in the past week, I listened to two of Krakauer’s books, Into Thin Air and Into the Wild.
The first is the author’s firsthand account of the 1996 Mount Everest Disaster in which 
eight climbers died in one day, and 15 in that season. The second is his investigation of the journeys and eventual starvation of Chris McCandless, also made into an eponymous movie.
Here’s what’s particularly moving about these two books: In each, the reader knows the outcome (tragic, unnecessary death), yet Krakauer tells the tales so compellingly that it doesn’t matter. And here’s why: Krakauer redeems these deaths by telling the stories of the individuals who died. That is, as a reader, I felt that I truly got to know these people. So his are not tragedies-for-tragedies’-sake. They are true character studies. They tell us something about what it means to be human.
His new book, just out, is Where Men Win Glory, and it recounts another unnecessary, but meaningful death, that of Pat Tillman. Early reviews of this book have been strong, so it’s going to be high on my reading list.
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