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Emerging Church Conference - Day 2

Posted Mar 25, 07:41 AM | 0 comments | by Editor | Link

By Jonathan Brink

Day2 was a day of grass roots inspiration. Where Tickle, McLaren, and Rohr talked much of history, theology, and contemplation on Day 1, the second day was a day of people who were exploring that faith in the trenches. And this combination of both thought and practice is what has made this conference so inspiring.

Alexie Torres-Fleming has no degrees, is not a pastor, is a women, and is an Puerto Rican. That’s four strikes in many circles. Yet her voice resounded because she was, for lack of better words, doing it. She chose to live among the poor and the oppressed and BE the hands of feet of Jesus. She chose to be love to her neighbor right where he/she was at. What was refreshing was her honesty about how hard it has been to live into the footsteps of Jesus. She chose to move from fan to follower, even at great cost.

Some of the quotes that stood out to me:

“We like our poor to look and act a certain way.” “You cannot redeem what you do not assume. Are we willing to assume the mantle of poverty, pain, simplicity, and their struggles?” “We could not “charity” our way out of (the problem).” “I had been taught to be a fan of Jesus.”

Torres-Fleming was followed by a panel between McLaren, Tickle and Torres-Fleming. They talked about the culture that creates participation and what harms it. Tickle had the quote of this session when she said,

“There’s nothing scarier than charity without love.” — Phyllis Tickle

The afternoon was spent being energized by Shane’s deep willingness to love until it hurts. Shane is an icon for what it means to be Jesus to the poor. He’s just doing it. He offered a list of twelve inspiring messages to the church. The full list can be found in the tweet stream. Flagstaffrev did a great job of capturing them. The ones that stood out to me were:

“common life: life is shared.” “need to create space where people love and be loved.” “we need to see ourselves as resurrection people.” “loving is hard work and will cost us something.”

It’s hard to walk away from Shane with one of two impressions: I could never do that, or how can I do that. Our table was definitely the latter. We were inspired to engage love. And when he was over we turned to a table talk session. The session in some ways became a vent session for the tables frustrations with the culture we have lived in, that seemed counter to what Shane was living and speaking of. The act of loving spun out into the use of money. Some of the quotes that came out include:

“We’re told to shut up and give your money.” “What would a relational tithe look like in my community? Actually doing it.” “In this bad economy, we’re seeing a 20% drop in giving.” “We’re waking up to the idea that we can give directly to our neighbor.” “We don’t need the tax right off. Being love is enough.” “We’re reaching a point where our discontent can no longer be squashed.”

It was at this point that my brain began to fry. I had reached my saturation point. There was a break before dinner and we ended up out on the grass where we met with so many great people at the conference. It was nice just hanging with people who were all engaging the emergence journey. The most common questions Jeromy and I heard were, “how do we navigate this emergence process? I still think that question needs to be answered.

I do want to say one last thing. One of the hosts of the event asked the group to do a “please identify yourself” moment. Each of us stood when he called our group. We first did location, then age, then denominational background. This allowed us to really see that this conversation is changing, growing, and emerging into the broader groups I spoke of yesterday. The largest groups in the house was Catholics with about a 50/50 split between men and women.

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