Third Way? One Little White Man in a Sea of Black People… Emergent 2010

The car was packed. Last meeting over. Last stop at the ladies room…. and that is when it seemed the fun began!

I’m the wrong person to give a good complete picture of this past weekend in Essen, since I spent a significant amount of time in only 3 rooms, but I guess my perspective is also a perspective, so here it is.

The smell of the kerosine burners wafting in from the buffet in the adjacent room accompanied the obvious Black and White themed room decoration with living room lamps and soft candle light wresting a cozy atmosphere from the otherwise unattractive, all purpose room big enough to hold the (plus/minus) 130 of us. A rough start with the visual and sound technics, which seemed intent to buck us off our time plan, had to be subdued by the incredible team from the Weigle Haus before we were able to jump into our theme for the evening with a fun ice breaker, that got people talking to each other. This was followed by a personal introduction from me, which was meant to highlight the problematic of the dualistic, “either/or”, “black and white” thinking that presupposes a need to look for a “Third Way.” (I’ll post that in German with the pictures I showed). The official part of the evening ended with a beautiful meditation and sung call and response prayer (gregorian style).

What everyone else did after that was lost on me, since I was again engulfed with the final preparations for the theme room which Esther Deletree and I spent many, many hours creating. A better title for our room, than the one given to us, would have been “Exclusion and Embrace: a way forward for individuals and communities to negotiate their boundaries (values, ethics, needs, wants) with each other and avoid the unfruitful and stifling polarities of victimization and violence.” As it was, there was some confusion! We had a slow trickle come through our very elaborate installation throughout most of the day, which only picked up in the evenings after the other workshops were done. However, those that did invest some time in our presentation, found it to be well worth it, and we plan to put it to good use in the near future.

The lounge area was filled with mostly young people!!! Lots of young, white guys with something in their hand with which to twitter, and when any given one was asked, most likely would admit to being in seminary. The few that I met were very “sympatisch” or “likable.” Lots more young women this year than in previous ones… (yeah!) also studying theology some of them. Most people were there for the first time. Few were die hards, like us, who had been to all four Forums. And it seemed like the big question on everyone’s mind was “how can we change things? How can we do things differently?

Saturday evening found us all together again for a great wrap up. First Sandra Bils, had us all laughing as she told of attempts to explain “Emerging Church” to her colleagues who wanted to know what this new “Emergency room” is. In this humorous way, Sandra was able to touch on the somewhat “elitist” nature and insider language often used at these forums, and helped us all to laugh a little about ourselves. Then came my favorite thing from the whole forum: An artist had been invited, who had had no previous connection to Emergent, to experience the entire weekend and then make comic sketches and present a review. The sketches can be seen here, which, along with his honest commentary, again made for a hilarious, somewhat ironic laugh at ourselves. Directly following this was a photo montage by Judith Goppelsröder, whose unique way of seeing things was a feast for the eyes and provided me with a peak in the rooms I hadn’t gotten to see at all. I’m hoping all of her pictures will come online soon.

I can’t say much to the “meat” of the weekend, since I didn’t get to visit any of the rooms except for ours. The titles of the workshop rooms can be found on the Emergent webpage.

As we were packing and loading, cleaning and putting things back in order, another group was slowly starting to gather and pick up momentum until by the time we were just about ready to get in the car and set our navigation systems, they had burst into song and dance. An African church service uses the Weigle-Haus facilities, and tho there was a regular trickle of finely dressed African people still making their way into the building, the vibrant worship service was already in full swing. We couldn’t help ourselves, and stood sheepishly in the doorway, letting the music course through our limbs and persuade them to convulse in time to the music. I wanted to stay. I wanted to dance with these beautiful people. I wanted to meet each one of them, hear their stories, and just soak them in. I became acutely aware of a deep thirst and hunger to be in their presence and thrust myself in this black sea, but we had a long drive ahead and three children waiting for us to finally come home. And then I saw a funny sight… a couple of rows from the front of the room, there was a small, white, middle aged German man in his Sunday best suit, also moving “expressively” to the music. He was so out of time and looked so out of place, that it was quite amusing to watch him. But I was filled with admiration for him, and had to think of David dancing before the ark… making a fool of himself for the lord, with no thought of his own honor.

This man was doing what we at Emergent Forum had yet failed to do, and that is to cross over cultural boundaries. As different as each person was from another, and as from as many places on the map of Germany we had hailed from, it was still a pretty homogeneous group, with narrowly defined aesthetic appreciations, and a rather narrowly defined cultural niche. We have not yet truly, in this frame at least, “opened ourselves to the distant other” as Volf would put it, and the ache I felt as I drove away from Essen was of a child artist who has been given a box of crayons with only a few varying shades of just one color to play with, and the disappointing suspicion, that a truly “Third Way” still lies far beyond us.

pictures by Judith Goppelsröder

Ireland: Who Said That?

They are everywhere. All around me. Every where I go, restaurants, along the roads, airports, trains and train stations, stores, bathrooms, cafes, taxis, B&B and buses. And they are all English! Blessed, beautiful English. Blessed, beautiful English WORDS. (Absence really does make the heart grow fonder.) And the best ones have an Irish accent!!

I can’t help but notice that the Irish seem to celebrate their writers and give homage to the written word. Little rhymes or quotes from literature kept winking at me from unlikely places. Above the seats on trains, at train stations, on the doors to restaurants. Some made me wonder if Dr. Seuss was Irish: “The seats are not for feet.” Or “Going to the game? Take the train!” But mostly the quotes caught me off guard and were in places I didn’t expect with no apparent context. Wrapped around a kiosk in Drogehda I read:

“You’ll never see the man again, who sat across from you,

better to look away.”*

and in the train:

“There was really nothing else to say

it was an awkward silence

I read the back of someone’s paper

I stared out the window.*

At first I thought it was just in Dublin, to attract tourists to the Writers Museum (exhibits @ Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, Yeats, and Brendan Behan), the James Joyce Museum or the birthplace of George Bernard Shaw. But even as I left Dublin, I kept noticing these little epigraphs. As if Ireland was calling out, “have you read the works of our sons yet?” Upon hearing that C.S. Lewis, who was Irish, has been one of the most significant authors to me personally, an endearing Irish couple, during one of the breaks at the conference in Belfast, emphatically recommended that I read the Irish poet John O’Donoghue (which I intend to do, once I’ve finished the ten other books I’m in the middle of!). There are many more Irish writers that will join that list.

The Re-Emergent conference afforded another onslaught of words:

From Phyllis Tickle, a living religious encyclopedia, who used no notes and whose words went from her brain, through her larynx, and gushed out of her mouth at a freakish speed, I heard more than just the live rendition of her book, The Great Emergence. Words to put things into perspective, place ourselves in history and paint the grand scheme of things. Some disturbing words, some mind-boggling ones:

“There are over 39,600 distinguishable denominations (not religions, but Christian denominations!).”

“We still have to answer the question, “What is a human being?”

“A big part of this new spirituality is happening in virtual space...with about 70 million people whose only religious experience is on the net in one of the 800 virtual churches.”

and bingo: “If you reduce God to a proposition that you can articulate, you just lost God!”

Samir Selmonovic’s words drew water, when he illustrated Miroslav Wolf’s stages of Embrace (Exclusion and Embrace) through a story of the exclusion and embrace from his own Muslim family, after his spiritual journey led him to follow Christ. That story can be found in his book, It’s Really All About God. Some of his words that stuck:

“When I left Islam to become a Jesus follower, I had many adjustments to make.. I started to become bitter, because the “Christians” made no adjustments from their culture to become Jesus followers.”

“The Emperor might be naked, but he has a very nice body...”

“Bible study is like a marriage: sometimes you are angry at the text, sometimes you don’t want to talk to it for a while, sometimes you make up again.”

Dave Tomlinson had an English accent when he said, “If you don’t have doubt, you don’t have faith; you have certainty and fundamentalism.”

Beki Bateson, who I’ve quoted the most since I’ve been back:

“The kingdom of God is where Faith, Art and Justice intersect.”

As Christ followers, we should be “creating just spaces.”

“How do we move from injustice to justice? Exactly where we stand!”

“Art can help people imagine an alternative future and inspire them to actively move toward it.”

Kester Brewen’s words would also make a good lecture for the tv series “Lost.”

“the world is exploding in strangeness and it is causing us stress!”

conflict is “the failure to properly engage the other...”

...”God is much stranger than that.”

“...penetrated by the marvelous....”

“You are not a gadget”

That evening at the Black Box, IKON wove words together around the theme of choice... recited homespun words, gave us words to say in unison:

“We have been caught between

one thing and another

We have had to choose

between sister doubt

and her uncertain brother.”

And then the words exploded with melody and rhythm and voltage, when first Vince Anderson and then Foy Vance took the stage. Foy Vance’s words were funny, melancholic, perceptive, personal and Irish. Being transported by his phenomenal music, they were often deeply affecting. By the end of his concert, he, like a pied piper, had corralled us all into the much smaller foyer singing these words over and over again as one big unpracticed choir,

“When I need to get home, you’re my guiding light, you’re my guiding light.”

The next day after the closing session and some time eating and conversing at Common Grounds cafe, I had the unexpected opportunity to hear words from the first and only female Justice on Britain’s supreme court, The Lady Hale of Richmond at the MacDermott lecture in the Great Hall at Queen’s University. Her words were about the pursuit of justice and the complexity of applying the law in discrimination cases.

“I’m here to talk about the neglected virtue: Equality.”

“At the current pace, it will take 75 years to close the gender pay gap.”

“...the Human Rights model is better than Anti-discrimination laws...”

As rich and delicious, moving and challenging, informative and thought provoking all of these words were, the words that left a truly indelible impression on me were spoken outside of the context of the Re-Emergent conference altogether. The words that, though I never wrote them down, keep grabbing my attention, purring their way into my stream of thought, like a cat who wants to be stroked, were spoken in what at first seemed to be a parenthetical adventure, a detour from the charted route. Words born out of a truly Irish experience, which I would like to tell you about in my next blog entry.

*(Can anyone tell me who the above quotes are from?)

A Sneetch Breach?

During the final session of the Re-Emergent conference in Belfast last week, an attending Sociologist from America tossed out a question that had arisen out of the conversations he had been having with different ones of us. It was a question of motive, or rather propulsion: Were those of us who are setting sail for new shores, experimenting with new forms, daring the rapids of a new theology, and willing to take only the most portable and flexible of “tents and gear” with us... were we being “pushed out or called out” of the community of believers we once belonged to? Are we following an Abrahamic call into a new country? Or are we fleeing for our lives, dwelling in caves and among the heathen, as when David fled from Saul? Are we Emergents stomping off in a huff, because they didn’t play our song at the party? Or do we really hear the call of the wild to venture into the unknown terrain of the next great era? I must have caught the question as it went out into the room, because I took it with me to the Dublin Airport in the wee hours on Friday: “Am I a starless Sneetch who got thrown out of the Frankfurter party?”

With enough coffee in my system I am able to turn my attention toward this question in the hour or so I have before I board my flight back to Germany. My answer is clear as a bell: both /and & neither/ nor! What is at work in me, a calling to or vision for what could be, is clashing with the construct of church as it has existed throughout the modern era. I am not being pushed out of a system that I actually want to be a part of, a sneetch moping along the beech and jumping at the first chance to let McMonkey McBean paste a star on my belly. Rather, I simply could not ignore the signs and sounds of a faulty transmission. The cogs of the gears of church are not meshing smoothly along, but are jamming up making a painfully loud and irritating grating noise.

When I was about 13 I flew down to Miami during spring break to meet my dad who had sailed down to Florida on our Dutch sloop. He was there with his momentary motorcycle chick girlfriend and the three of us drove back to DC with her BMW bike and his 1969 blue VW bus (you know, the one with the oval windows at the top along the sides?). I got to switch up between the two. The bus made it until Richmond, Virginia and then the clutch gave out. A credit to VW, we drove the whole last two hours without it! All was well as long as we were on the highway, but every time we had to down shift, things got ugly. A grating gearshift is easily one of the most irksome sounds there are, right up there with fingernails on the chalkboard and my children’s incessant use of the “M” word!

Cars have clutches for a reason, and if it’s not working you are going to destroy your transmission by continuing to shift without it. Even I know that! Phyllis Tickle observes in The Great Emergence, that the grinding is not simply a friction between cultures, or faith traditions or even generations, but that it belongs in an even broader context. Tickle contends that we are in a transitional period of the kind that come around every 500 years, and skipping back through time, she lands on each one of these great transitions, like boulders sticking out of the river of history, to summarize how each has sent that river off in a new direction. The cogs that are now grinding out such a cacophony are of the modern era transitioning into the next era, in many places without a clutch, and this shift is being called, “The Great Emergence.”

There are some, like the charming Danish pastors I got to spend time with, who see this coming, embrace it and are trying to ease their traditional, Modern-era congregations through it by wisely and sensitively engaging the clutch as they attempt to shift to a higher gear. But many of us were neither in the drivers seat of our previous congregations, nor was there someone there who shared these sensibilities. I think some of us, who have opted out of the modern church construct altogether, jumped ship, so to speak, because we found ourselves in a setting (local congregation, denomination, para-church organization, Academia) where there was no clutch, or we ourselves were not in a position to engage it. At first we did take it personally, and indeed such a shift gives rise to much personal conflict and friction, of which we have certainly had our share. But discovering testimonies world wide of others who were experiencing or observing the same grinding of gears, helped us to put our experience into a larger context. Also the observation that alone in our small town of a quarter million people, we know of scores of congregations that are struggling with leadership, vision, control and trust issues leaving many, many disillusioned and wounded.

So, have we been pushed out or called out of the congregations in which we once worked and worshiped and wept? Yes. We have. And... No. We haven’t. We have chosen to pull off to the side of the road and have a look under the hood. We are trying to distinguish or name the interference, describe the clogs on the gear of the new era, and see if we can get the vehicle operating again without completely ruining the transmission. Many of us recognize that we are a part of this new era, but still want to engage with the best part of our faith tradition, all the while remaining as flexible, light weight and transient as possible.

Elephant Baby

I just beat the elephant in being the land animal with the longest time of being pregos. Yup, my three years (plus) of gestation out does their wimpy 22 months hands down, and yesterday my colorful 14 p. 3 hr. cuddly baby finally saw the light of day. We’ve had a name for a few weeks now, and if you’ve kept up, you’ve gotten the “birth announcements” in advance of the big day and know that we our calling our latest offspring “Brunch-n-More, for body and soul."

Fourteen of us ages three to 43 gathered in rooms we are renting from the CVJM at 10 am yesterday for a continental breakfast, good conversation and a messy adaptation of musical chairs. Everyone got to mix his/her own unique color of choice (no two people could have the same color) and choose a painting utensil (bottle brush, paint brushes, basting brushes etc.). We each started off at a blank Din A3 page and after putting our name on it, had about 5 minutes to begin a picture while music was playing in the background. Each time the music stopped, we rotated to the next picture and painted for a couple of minutes. We did this until we each made our way around to all of the pictures.

As you can see, the pictures are bright, colorful and unique. What one might not see at first glance, however, is what the pictures and indeed the process tells us about our social interactions, the fact of life that we are not an island, not solely responsible or “in-charge” of what ends up on the canvas of our life, and that, whether we want to be or not, we are sometimes major, sometimes minor contributing artists on the canvas of other people’s lives. This was frustrating for Charis, soon to be 12 yrs, who started off with a pretty concrete idea of what she wanted her painting to look like. When little Constantine came and painted a big blue blob on top of her little pop art people, she felt that her picture was ruined. For me it was no new revelation that Charis would have the hardest time of everyone “letting go” of control and finding beauty in something outside of her own narrowly defined objectives.

It was interesting to see that some chose loud colors which they used plenty of, some quieter, warmer colors, which they used more sparingly. Some responded more to what they were presented with in the painting already, choosing to “fix,” enhance, react to, continue something that was already going on, while other’s contribution was an object or pattern carried out through each painting. I believe this says a lot about who we are and how we interact with others.

It was also no surprise to see that the smaller/younger the children were, the less concrete their contributions were and the more “space” they took up on the page, the more likely they were to ignore whatever else was going on, and seemed intent on just getting as much of their color out there as possible. And I have had my years of my “painting” being dominated by the blue blobs!! It takes a real artist to work with those, find the balance of letting the blue blobs fill up space, and helping them to notice the beauty of the other colors and that those other colors need some space too without suffocating the artistic exuberance of the blue blobbers. That takes a lot of creativity and Grace, a lot of grace.

I just finished Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott, which I was in the thick of Sunday afternoon after we got home from Brunch-n-More. I have to quote one of the many cool things she says in trying to describe her understanding of Grace. She writes, “Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.” Thank you Ms. Lamott for that bit of color, that brush stroke which describes so well what I’m hoping Brunch-n-More might be. People coming out of isolation, learning to “paint” with each other, give each other enough space to be, but not too much space to monopolize and become mono-color. I guess we do the best we can and hope that when the music stops, we will all get to take a very bright, colorful and unique painting home with us.