A Node in the Web of the Emerging Church

Emergent in Germany

Posted Nov 19, 11:59 AM | 0 comments | by Editor | Link

By Daniel Ehniss:

There is a young movement here in Germany which carries the name »Emergent Deutschland«. After some years of informal networking of people who were asking questions on how to follow God in the way of Jesus in our culture, three friends decided to ask some of the people they knew if they were interested in establishing some form of network where these questions could be thought and talked about in a more open way. Relationships had been growing on a personal level either through meeting or the Internet, and we wanted to open the dialogue up to people we didn’t know at that time. As a result of that, about 10 people met in early 2007 to talk about possibilities of an open network for people seeking new ways of following God in our time.

The first time this network arrived on the surface was in late 2007 when we organized two day-conferences with Brian McLaren and Jason Clark in Marburg and Hamburg. The official start of the open network called Emergent Deutschland took place on our first Emergent Forum on the first weekend of the Advent. On that weekend we had some inputs from Brian and Jason, hosted some workshops by people from the network and had time for open space. A lot of people attended the first forum and connected to something which was a movement that was realized by more and more people here in Germany, and the emergent conversation started to shift from an informal movement to a movement with faces, a place to meet, and people to connect with.

One of our goals for the first forum was to create a space for people to connect and interact on topics they wanted to go deeper. The so-called initiatives ranged from church planters, emergent communes to social justice, a group concerned with equality of women and men, and a group for theological dialogue. Beside these initiatives who grouped around topics, some local initiatives began. In this last year, a lot of interaction on different levels throughout this network took place, and the initiatives gained momentum. As a result of this, the upcoming Forum will focus on the dialogue taking place in the emergent movement. We will meet from November 28 to 30 in a historic church building in Erlangen.

This year’s forum will start Friday night (November 28) with moderated dialogue on dinner tables where we want to open up space to share stories and talk about questions and insights. On Saturday (November 29), there will be two short inputs about contextualisation and equality, which will be surrounded by dialogue at the tables. The afternoon is for workshops and open space which will result in an open night with sharing the thoughts of the afternoon. On Sunday (November 30), we will share what happenend in the initatives and will talk about the formal structures of the network. We will blog about the forum on our blog (which Google Reader can now translate for you from German into English). If you are reading this and are interested in attending the forum, you are warmly welcomed, and we would love for you to sign in on our website.

Daniel Ehniss is a father, theologian, webdesigner, and coffeelover who lives in Karlsruhe and is part of the emergent movement in Germany.