A Node in the Web of the Emerging Church

Thank You from Brian McLaren

Posted Dec 18, 01:05 PM | 0 comments | by Editor | Link

By Brian McLaren, re-posted from the Emergent/C email newsletter:

Dear Friends of Emergent Village,

Many of you responded to our first year-end appeal for funds, and we are grateful. I just wanted to follow up with a second and final “ask” by sharing with you some of what Emergent Village has meant to me.

Hundreds of vignettes come to mind, but I’ll just share two.

First, I think of a woman named Alexie Torres-Fleming. A group of Emergent folks had gathered in New York to, among other things, get a private tour of MTV studios and talk to somebody important there about young adults and spirituality. But Rudy Carrasco, one of the first leaders in Emergent, made sure that we got some time on the side with a friend of his, Alexie, a Catholic activist who lived and worked in the Bronx.

A lot of people have caricatured Emergent as a bunch of young white males with goatees who are into candles and expensive coffee, but I remember knowing from early on that the real action was in people like Alexie, working with a vision for integral mission in one of the poorest, most dangerous, most polluted and unhealthy ZIP codes in America. Listening to her, I knew that what was emerging wasn’t simply a new way of having church services but a new way of understanding what the gospel is, and how it works in our broken and needy world.

I also recall my first significant interaction with Tony Jones. We were at a gathering in Denver, and I had been part of a panel of some sort. Tony made a comment, to which I responded, “Wow, Tony, I couldn’t disagree with you more,” or something like that. After the session we talked some more, and it turned out that we didn’t actually disagree, but were using different language to talk about different problems.

That interaction demonstrates something I’ve grown to love in Tony, and in the Emergent community: the ability to see disagreement as a stimulus not for mutual damnification (a made-up word that maybe should catch on?) and distancing, but rather for conversation, mutual understanding, and mutual learning. Sometimes we bump up against each other; sometimes we disagree. But if we learn new habits of responding to one another—not papering over our differences on the one hand and not damnifying each other on the other—generative friendships can emerge from difference. Thousands of people have experienced this with Tony and with the Emergent community in general, and I hope thousands more will in the future.

Emergent has brought amazing and unexpected people together. A reformed theologian meets a new monastic. A Midwestern church leader gets connected with a missional community in Kenya or Burundi or Costa Rica. A Southern Baptist church planter from Georgia meets a lesbian Episcopal priest from the Northeast. A tattooed and pierced pastor working among street kids meets a finely-appointed dean of a cathedral. Liberals meet conservatives, Catholics meet Protestants, Mennonites meet Presbyterians, and on it goes.

Thanks for your commitment to helping these connections keep happening. The ripples are spreading, and we all get to be part of it.

Plotting goodness,
Brian McLaren

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Brian D. McLaren is an author, speaker, pastor, and networker among innovative Christian leaders, thinkers, and activists.