• Home
• Events
  • Google Calendar
  • Subscribe
• Cohorts
  • Find a Cohort
  • Contact Cohort Support
  • Cohort Blogs
• Groups
• About
  • FAQs
  • Values and Practices
  • Support
  • Leadership
  • Emergent Worldwide
  • Publishing Partners
• • weblog
  • podcast
  • press kit
  • donate
  • Feeds (RSS)

The Future of the Emergent Gathering

Posted May 2, 11:33 PM | 4 comments | by Editor | Link

By Troy Bronsink:

For seven years, many of us gathered each fall to hang out in Glorietta conference center and learn about this generative friendship thing-a-ma-job becoming Emergent Village. It was a lot of invent-as-you go. Many songs, churches, books, and non-profits were invented in this sort of generative environment. Gathering as Jesus followers in this way helped restore a lot of folks amidst seasons of loss, chaotic growth, and failed experiments. While it started as by-us-for-us low-fi, seat of your pants kinda thing, “the Gathering” evolved into its own foody-open-source-arts-yoga-camping aesthetic. And it became an annual pilgrimage for many as we fleshed out the fourth value of our Emerging Order: a commitment to each-other.

If you attended any of the last three years your experience may or may not have held up to this description. For one, Emergent Village was quickly making more and more new friends, consequently elevating those who had gathered before into de-facto experts and doers of a larger on-ramp event. Don’t get me wrong, the Gathering remained good, in-fact amazing, year after year and we who put the heavier lifting into it loved it. Yet the inspiring germ of an idea that Emergents would “build their own home-grown ways of committing to each other” was being eclipsed by this “annual signature program” requiring budgets, pre-event planing meetings, and evaluation—the very habits and institutional ruts that the event was designed to supplement.

I’ve heard that every seven years the cells in our bodies replace themselves. I’m learning that organizations and events go through similar life cycles. The group who were the de-facto organizers of the gathering began to suspect this a year and a half ago and, while we did a lot to change that for the 2007 gathering, we realized afterwards, seven years in, that it was time for this to go the way of the covered wagon. We’re hoping that this “gathering” germ might better go viral if we promote the value and give way the event. And so you’ve seen all sorts of local events pop up. Hopefully even more.

The National EV Gathering might rise again next year as a reinvented event with new leadership and new structures—let us know if you want to be one of the inventors. And in the mean time, do-it-yourself. Cohorts, put up wikis and find ways to be together. You don’t need to have a conference with published speakers to shape and change Emergent, in fact, it is quite the opposite. Get out of your church conferences and blogs and into each other’s fridges and back yards and national preserves and museums and inner-cities. Gather, mix, invent.

At the beginning of each gathering Mark or Laci or Damien would stand in the carpet covered gym in Glorietta and say, “This is yours to shape, Emergent belongs to you.” Year after year we re-learn what that means, thanks to those who take that charge seriously. For this year, the gathering germ is completely at large and open-source. It belongs to Emergent Villagers to re-shape. Keep each other posted, and we’ll let folks know what exciting ways of gathering we are engineering in our own contexts and regions.

Bookmark this article using Remarkable!