On being an artist

I don't usually think of myself as an artist. With effort, I can be an OK writer, but in general I think my gifts lie outside what most people tend to think of as artistic endeavors.

However, sometimes I think I'm capable of elevating hypocrisy to the level of a rare masterpiece. I've been known to create works of symmetrical, even recursive hypocrisy. It's very beautiful, if you have the eye to appreciate it.

Absolutely true story: This past Saturday, 1 March. These thoughts go through my head:

"Hmm. There's a pretty good chance, I hear, that a reporter from the Washington Post is going to be at church tomorrow morning. And I'm scheduled to be up front, leading content [sort of like a sermon, only (in my case) with a whole lot more um's and ah's] and celebrating the Eucharist.

"I don't think I should shave.

"I don't want her to think that I'm concerned about appearances."

Holy shit

I feel like I really ought to reference this, a) because it's horrifying, and b) to balance the tongue-lashing I gave the Episcopal Church (TEC) and its Presiding Bishop a couple of posts back. Please read this article from Episcopal Cafe about Peter Akinola, the African Anglican archbishop who's been encouraging, enabling, and overseeing a lot of the conservative breakaways from TEC, particularly in Northern Virginia. Obviously more facts need to come out about this, but it seems there's some serious reason to believe (based on Akinola's own statements) that he's been supporting malignantly evil anti-Muslim violence in his native Nigeria. I hope the breakaway folks are paying attention, and praying hard about whether they really want to throw in with this man.

And I hope the rest of the Communion is paying attention too. Just because he's got big numbers of followers does not mean that this asshole is the future of the Anglican Communion, and allowing him to influence worldwide Anglican policy the way he apparently does seems to indicate that Anglican Communion leadership is one mother of an oxymoron.

Whoa

Warning: Smug snarkiness alert. I should probably put this disclaimer on most of my posts lately.

Beloved Employer raised my eyebrows with this review of the new, er, "charity" reality game show, Oprah's Big Give.

Who knew Ms. Winfrey was white? (HT: Bricklad)

God knows I'm white too, and I'm certain I fall into the same traps, but I am a fan of getting to know and listening to the folks one is trying to help. I hope I try to practice that.

Church property: let go with love

The Rev. George Clifford is my new hero. With amazing grace, gentleness, care, and (IMHO) prophetic weight, he lays out in detail exactly what I think about the current property disputes between the Episcopal Church and those congregations and dioceses that are currently leaving it for other branched of the Anglican Communion. It's brilliant. If this stuff interests you at all, please read it. An excerpt:

Quite simply, Christianity is about grace and love. For we who seek to follow Jesus, grace should take precedence over law. TEC operates through democratic processes. When a majority of a parish (or a diocese) votes to leave TEC, those who leave should recognize that the property belongs to TEC and, if they wish to have the property, offer to purchase it at fair market value. However, if those who wish to leave insist on keeping the property, grace demands that we accept that selfish decision rather than holding to the letter of the law. Although TEC may likely prevail in the courts, it will have further alienated the disaffected, turned its focus away from the gospel imperative, and wasted precious resources on an issue that is ultimately of little importance for God's business.

This choice may seem unfair to the minority who wish to remain with TEC but is gracious towards the larger number that decided to leave as well as to those whom God's love will touch because of TEC’s focus and resources invested in mission rather than legal actions. For example, the Diocese of Virginia has probably expended more than $1 million in lawsuits to retain the property of a number of parishes that recently voted to leave. The Diocese recently obtained a $2 million line of credit to further finance those suits. Although $30 million to $40 million of property is at stake, for those $3 million, and the countless hours of time the suits will require from bishops, priests, and laity, the Diocese of Virginia could fund several new missions to meet the needs of those who wish to remain and others. Successfully retaining large buildings for small congregations by winning the suits will burden those congregations with excessive overhead and probably instill a maintenance rather than missionary orientation.

Love between consenting adults does not seek to manipulate by using incentives or disincentives. Love wants what is best for the other, a choice that only the other can make. In human relationships, the unrequited lover who genuinely loves will sadly but freely permit his/her beloved to choose another. The same standard should apply to the community of God's people known as TEC.

This is in stark contrast to a recent statement by TEC Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, regarding congregations that leave TEC:

"In a sense it's related to the old ecclesiastical behavior toward child abuse [when priests looked the other way]. Bad behavior must be confronted."

I admire ++Katharine very much (honestly, I really do), and it take a lot to offend me, but this statement is manipulative bullshit, and it pisses me off very much. At the least, it betrays a deeply disturbing misplacement of priorities (which Rev. Clifford addresses much more gently and eloquently above than I usually do.) At worst, equating folks leaving a particular hierarchical authority structure for a different one within the Body of Christ (however unlovingly they choose to do so) with ecclesiastical child abuse cheapens the reality of the suffering countless children have experienced at the hands of church leaders. Get over yourself, and get over your institution's need to maintain and defend itself by controlling people, ++Katharine. Taking care of those who have been "left behind" when the congregations or other bodies they were a part of left TEC is a very important priority. Punishing those who left in order to maintain control is misguided and harmful to the gospel.

Which relates to the one statement in Rev. Clifford's excellent post which I would quibble with:

Individuals, parishes, and dioceses that choose to leave TEC further fracture the Church’s already badly broken unity. Departures spiritually weaken TEC, leaving us bereft of the unique gifts and contributions that those who depart bring to the Church. After all, people, not physical plants or financial funds, are the Church’s most important resource.

This is, of course, true - but I would stress that it's TEC that suffers from the bare fact of these departures, not the Church. The Church is still One, and does not become less so because some people have moved to a different community structure within the Body. The loss of love between Christians that results from these breakaways - that's what harms the unity of the Church. If the aim is to promote the unity of the Church, Christians should concentrate on preserving and encouraging love between them - not preserving and defending current institutional affiliations. Which is Rev. Clifford's whole point, of course. I've made this point
before myself.

So thank you, Rev. Clifford, for speaking a vital message with infinitely more eloquence and grace that this rude armchair griper could ever hope to muster. It's a pity (and a tragedy for the mission of God in the US) that your gentle insider's eloquence will no doubt fall every bit as much on deaf ears as my rude outsider's bitching.

Cut from the Dive Team

Well, Tina's and my first attempt at (sub)urban gleaning (which is also known by some other names with fewer high-fallutin' Biblical connotations) can only be described with one word: FAIL.

This is a practice which is becoming increasingly popular among the scruffy, remarkably shameless "screw alls y'all principalities and powers of consumer cultural captivity" Christian circles that our friends and we run in. (Well, as you'll see, Tina and I don't exactly run - it's more like stumbling along behind, just within sight of the pack. But anyway.) The idea is that we rescue perfectly good, unwanted food from its landfill destiny, thereby creating space in our food budgets, which in turn enables us to spend more money and time loving God and neighbor. That's the theory, anyway.

Well, despite expert coaching from our wise and experienced mentor, things didn't exactly go as planned. Our first target - the dumpsters behind a certain crunchy-granola-type grocery store - didn't seem to have much to offer upon brief inspection, and we didn't have time for more than that, what with being gently chased away by store employees.

So we went back to our mentor's house and returned in his car, because we could see that the dumpsters behind the bread-oriented restaurant next door were overflowing. Despite parking around the corner and stealthily sneaking up on said dumpsters, I returned to mentor's car with: two bags of actual garbage. No yummy, not-quite-day-old bread straight off the shelves for us - just trashed, used paper coffee cups and food plates. All the bags looked the same, and I was scared of getting yelled at again, so I grabbed two and ran. Yay me! Good thing it's garbage night.

We spun around behind two or three other such locations on the way back, looking for easy gleaning, but no luck.

If you're coming to our house on Sunday for the post-church Lenten meal, though, do not fear - we have ample fare from previous runs by our mentor and other experienced divers, so you'll not be deprived of your chance to eat genuine gleaned castoffs of the bankrupt consumer culture. Mmm-mmm. Them's fine eatin'. :-D

Still more new wine

Another gem from Len:

More on new wine and leadership

I was going to wrap more words around this, because this post BLEW...ME...AWAY, but I'm not finding the time, so I'm just gonna link to it. Len Hjalmarson's post (quoting Eddie Gibbs) on "The Evolution of Hierarchy" crystallizes beautifully (for me, anyway) a lot of the thoughts I've been having on the postmodern shift in church leadership. If you read this blog at least in part because you think I sometimes have sometimes have something interesting to say on church leadership, please, please read Len's post. It's magnificent.

An excerpt:

There is paradigmatic shift occurring. Hierarchy limits options because it limits connectivity, and we live in an connected world. Information that has to flow from the top down through rigidly defined chains has limited effect. Information that is randomly distributed and readily available creates collaboration. These more open structures are by nature empowering and generate change that works from the bottom up as well as from the top down. And change and transformation and inclusion are implicit in body life.

Boundaries in traditional settings are used to determine who is in and who is out. In new communities boundaries are not protective walls but are porous and become meeting places. In living systems boundaries are where information is exchanged and new relationships take form. Boundaries .. edges.. are the places of emergence and the frontier for engagement.

Also very interesting: Tracy Simmons' post (quoting David Fitzpatrick) on plural leadership. Awesome.

Famous friends

Two of my good friends were quoted in the Post within the last four days. Susan even got her picture run (in a nice article about preparing for your own demise). The pictures in the other article were all of Mike's much larger aluminum doppalganger, who, sadly, has been relocated to a glorified shopping mall (or so I heard).

It's good to have famous friends. Makes name-dropping easier.

Good on ya's, ya feckin' glory hounds! ;-)

New wine - rethinking church leadership

I was excited to hear about this "Anglimergent" gathering. It sounds like it was a good meeting - though it also sounds like 18 people got together and delivered speeches to each other (Phyllis Tickle did her "Great Emergence" talk which I've heard a lot about and would love to actually hear some day, and Fred Burnham did a talk on network theory, etc.), which seems slightly bizarre from an emergent point of view - but not so strange from an Anglican point of view, so there you are. :-) And it seems like they also had informal multi-voice conversations in between, which (I'm guessing) made up the bulk of their time together.

The most promising thing in Steve Knight's summary (linked above), from my perspective, was that they were discussing Burnham's ideas on network theory and "alternative polity structures", because IMHO polity (i.e., church leadership structure) is far and away Anglicanism's (and the mainline in general's) hugest, most immovable obstacle to "emergence". "Sure, we can deconstruct and be experimental when it comes to worship, discipleship, mission, etc. But hierarchical authority and prescribed clergy roles shall never be compromised!"

This somewhat dovetails with the other thing I saw this week on the Emergent Village blog that hugely interested me (actually cross-posted from the Emerging Women blog) - Kathy Escobar's excellent post on church leadership and co-pastoring.

As I said in a comment on Kathy's blog, I would go even further and suggest that the role of “pastor” as currently constructed - solo or shared - has taken a single leadership-oriented spiritual gift among many (four others are listed in Ephesians 4:11, and still more are mentioned elsewhere in scripture) and blown it up into a role where certain Jesus-followers are expected to be professional leaders, possessed of all leadership-oriented gifts, and in the lead role in almost any endeavor a Christian community undertakes - while everybody else is expected to defer to them.

I’m convinced that all of us are spiritually gifted, and all of us have gifts and passions that might enable us to lead, equip, inspire, teach, serve, and/or pastorally care for others, given the right context and the lack of an expectation that it’s somebody else’s job. Or maybe it’s just the community that I’m a part of - where just about everybody ends up in a “leadership” role at one time or another, whether it’s coordinating or creating a Sunday morning worship service, a “service-worship” project blessing our wider communities, a party, a retreat, a pastoral care effort, a technology innovation, an art project, or whatever.

But it’s arguable that I’m just quibbling over semantics - any human enterprise that’s going to move in anything other than a random fashion probably needs somebody(ies) designated to coordinate and facilitate that movement, and Christian communities are no exception. The small community/church I’m a part of tends to shy away from the term “pastor” but has a leadership team of three, and we’ve worked this way since our founding pastor left in 2002, about a year after the church began.

I love working in community this way, for all the reasons Kathy mentions and more. But I also tend to agree with some of the speculation in comments on her blog about community size - we’ve often suggested that if our community ever began to approach 100 core members, we’d probably split into two closely connected communities. Quite honestly, I’m not sure that I think communities above a size where anonymity becomes possible are a very good idea, nor can I think of very good reasons why we’d need them - if the strong peer networks of communities that are beginning to form (and which, perhaps, Fred Burnham was hinting about at the Anglimergent gathering) continue picking up steam. But that’s another topic! :-)

Thankful and hopeful

For anybody who saw my last blog post about my Dad's brain tumor, but hasn't been following our new family blog for updates on his progress, I wanted to do a quick update.

Tina and I are back home in Northern Virginia after spending about a week in Charlotte with Dad and Mom, my brother Sean and his fiancee Anna, our Aunt Joan, and (for part of the week) our Uncle Edd and Aunt Linda. Tuesday and much of Wednesday were spent at the Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte, where our expectation was that Dad would be undergoing brain surgery to try to remove as much of the tumor as possible. The risks of this surgery were scary: Dad might lose his ability to speak, or large chunks of memory, or mobility, etc. Literally just before the surgery (during pre-op), we found out that the plan had changed: Dad's surgery was to be just a biopsy, followed by a program of radiation and low-impact (i.e., low-side-effect) chemotherapy to shrink the tumor. The steroids he's been on for two weeks have been pretty effective in treating the relatively minor symptoms he's experiencing now, so we have a lot of hope that the radiation/chemo program will be even more effective in fighting this thing. Dad was home again Wednesday afternoon, full of energy and appetite. :-)

So mostly we're coming away from this long, difficult week with a deep sense of relief and gratitude that Dad didn't suffer any of the major risks of the originally-planned surgery, and we're settling in for the long haul both hopeful and thankful, as hard as the road ahead is bound to be. Many, many thanks for your ongoing prayers, dear friends.

Praying for my Dad and my family

Hi folks,

I just spammed a whole bunch of friends with an email about this, but if you read my blog and might pray for my family right now, we'd be grateful for your prayers. We found out on Wednesday that my Dad has what his doc described as a "really big" brain tumor. The whole family (Dad and Mom, my brother Sean and his fiancee Anna, and Tina and I) have spent the weekend together - it's been a good weekend with lots of laughs and Croghanesque good food! - and tomorrow at 12:15 we're all going to Dad's first appointment with a neurologist who seems to be the very best in North Carolina for this kind of thing. We're hoping to come back from tomorrow's appointment with some idea of a treatment plan, but we don't know for sure what we'll learn. In any case, I wanted to share the URL for a blog I set up, where my Mom (and/or any of us) will post updates on Dad's progress. When we know more, it'll be on the blog!

http://thecroghans.blogspot.com/

Thanks for your love, caring, support, and prayers.

Peace, love,
Mike and Tina and our family

Rowan Williams on the Emerging Church

I like ++Rowan a lot, and I think his observations on strengths and weaknesses in emerging church contexts (the first video below) are spot-on. And it seems that the Church of England is doing some very cool things with its "Fresh Expressions" initiative (which Archbishop Williams speaks about in the second video below).

Note to the Episcopal Church: Wake up! Pay attention! Get a clue! This is infinitely more important than fighting schism! TEC will be much healthier and stronger in a decade or two if it includes, blesses, and supports younger and postmodern people, than it will if it succeeds in preventing folks who want to leave from leaving but misses the boat on "fresh expressions" of church. Among other things, folks who are leaving for AMiA and CANA are not leaving the Church (!!), and we are still all part of the same Body. If we continue to ignore folks who want to serve God and neighbor - and who would do so - would become followers of Jesus - in an emerging way of being church but would not do so in a traditional Anglican context - we are falling down on the Great Commission and seriously failing in a core matter of obedience to our Lord. Srsly.

Anyway, here's the Archbishop (HT: Emergent Village Weblog):

Rendering unto Caesar

Who knew VA was an open primary state? (Probably everybody but me.) For some reason, I've always assumed that I had to be registered as a member of one of the major parties to vote in that party's primary in Virginia. Au contraire. So as far as I can tell, this means that registering for a particular party in VA constitutes giving up freedom to vote in the primary of my choice (i.e., whichever contest has me more concerned about the outcome), with no advantage to balance that loss. Therefore, I intend to change my registration to "independent" right away. Thankfully, this doesn't make a difference for next Tuesday's VA primary, because the race that I would choose to vote in is the one for the party with which I'm registered. But next time, I'll be free to vote however I choose.

I also need to give credit to Tony Jones for getting me thinking about this issue. He goes so far as to argue that affiliating with a particular party is equivalent to giving to Caesar way more than is Caesar's, and getting "in bed" with Caesar in a way that Jesus wouldn't - and that states that require one to affiliate in order to vote in primaries are being anti-Christian in that regard. So yay for the Commonwealth for not being anti-Christian. (But for the record, I'm not doing this just because I'm a part of a 10-point Jonesist emerging church.) ;-)

UPDATE: Huh, turns out I'm even dumber than I thought I was. There is simply no question about party affiliation on the Viriginia voter registration form. I just assumed my affiliation carried over somehow from New York and Maryland, which both have closed primaries. But no! Apparently I'm already independent, 'cause Virginia just doesn't give a crap about this. Yay, Virginia!

Super / Fat / Shrove Tuesday

Quite a Tuesday, isn't it?

Re: teh Super: My hope is not in Caesar, but government is what it is, and I'd rather have someone hopeful and inspiring and relatively authentic in the top US Caesar job than the other kind. So alls y'all Super Tuesday voters: vote Obama! (Or, if you're voting on the GOP side, vote McCain!)

Re: teh Fat: No parties planned, though it is one of those days when it's kinda exciting to work for a major media company, so maybe things will get a bit fat around here as we wait for the results to roll in.

Re: teh Shrove: I likes me some pancakes. Probably won't have any, though. Lent begins tomorrow, and I have reason to believe it's going to be a time of trial for my family and me. My Dad is suddenly and inexplicably and alarmingly ill, with symptoms that indicate something brain- and/or nervous-system-related. If you pray, and you don't mind putting in a good word for my Dad and Mom and my family, I'd be grateful.

Peace, friends.

Foretaste

It's been said that the Church is meant to be a foretaste of the kingdom of God.

In a manner that I imagine to be vaguely analogous, today is like a foretaste of spring in Northern Virginia.

Sadly, I'm afraid that the Church is rarely so lovely.

Thankfully, God doesn't depend on the Church to create loveliness.

I'm going back outside.

~~~

P.S., Our worship gathering this morning, indoors though it was, was quite lovely, though. Didn't want to imply otherwise. :-)

Hey

Hey. Gallycat is back in earnest. Pass it on.

Shout out to Republican Party voters

Y'all are totally making my election year, and greatly elevating my opinion of registered members of the Grand Ol' Party (at least those in states that have held primaries/caucuses so far). Thank you, thank you, thank you for making the one GOP Presidential candidate whose election wouldn't completely horrify me the front-runner. Please, please, please keep it up. On the Democratic side, Obama is my horse, though I could certainly live with Clinton. But on the GOP side, if McCain's momentum continues, I'll be grateful to not be in the position of dreading November, since I'd feel like I could live with either outcome. I disagree with McCain on the vast majority of issues, and I think he's eroded his integrity a bit in recent years by toeing the party line for political reasons more than he used to, but overall I think he's a man of integrity and conviction and more of a leader than a politician. And I don't believe he's an idiot, a tool, a wacko, an evil-doer, or a kleptocrat. So, yay! Go GOP, and go McCain! (At least until the primaries are over.)

(On a personal note, this post marks my first month with 10 or more posts since September of 2006, which was a time when my life turned upside-down a bit. [OK, more than a bit.] I wonder if this means my life is turning rightside-up again? Naah - I'm pretty sure it just means I have too much time on my hands at the moment.) :-)

Blogcast of the Common Table

OK, so I can't not post about this. :-) If perchance anybody who reads this blog from afar has ever wondered, "So what do they do at this little coffee-house church called Common Table?", my best advice is to come and visit and stay for at least a month, 'cause no single gathering is going to give you anything like a good answer to that question. My second-best advice is to come and visit at least once. My third-best (and last-ditch) advice is is to check out our (quite nifty, IMHO) web site. But while that will give you some idea of what we think about and how we relate to the wide, wild world, until recently there wasn't a whole lot there that would tell you what it's like when we gather for worship services and service-worship, our two most frequent forms of coming together IRL (in real life) to serve and love God, our neighbors, and each other.

But now, thanks mostly to the tireless creative genius of the mighty iPete, we have a rockin' blogcast site with elements to help you experience (a little bit, anyway) our current worship series, on "Space". So far, we've got posts on our first three worship services in the series: Physical Space (the [human] is in the space), Relational Space (the [healing] is in the space), and Temporal Space (the [funk] is in the space), plus one for this past Saturday's joyous service-worship, in which we made space in the lives of some friends of ours who are parents of young kids, giving them an afternoon to themselves while we transformed the inside of Jack and Pete's house into a (well-regulated) party zone for 11 kids, aged 7 months to 8 years.

There are also podcasts of the worship services, and if you keep on scrolling down, you'll find content from last year's Easter season series ("Blooms"). It's all good stuff, and although it's only a taste of our gatherings, a taste is far better than nothing, and I think it's pretty cool.

For Helen and her clergy friends

UPDATE: I want to apologize to Ann and anybody else who felt unwelcomed by my middle-of-the-night mild frustration reflected in my words in this post (which I've edited a little). One thing to note as I ask for forgiveness: the timestamp on a blogger post shows when the post was begun; I actually finished this around 3am. I promise I wouldn't have taken the time to assemble all this info in the middle of the night if I didn't care deeply about welcoming folks from my Anglican tribe into the emerging church conversation, and I honestly am deeply sorry to have made folks feel the opposite of welcome. There's nothing wrong with studying "emerging church", reading books by folks like McLaren and co., and discussing it with other folks who share an interest, but aren't directly connected with the conversation. I did that for years before I stumbled upon a community of emerging church folk five minutes from my home. But I stand by my challenge that you will not really begin to get it until you make direct contact with this web of friendships. "Emerging church" is this web of friendships, plus a whole, holistic worldview shift that is shared (in one form or another) by the folks in these friendships. It's not just a new style of worship or a new type of ministry.

Again, I hope anybody whom I've made feel unwelcome will forgive me and, if you're interested in what you've heard or read about the emerging church, will reach out and make contact. You should expect to feel welcomed - I fell down in that regard - but you should also expect to be challenged.

~~~~~

So my friend Helen (aka Gallycat, aka Helcat - the woman has more online personas than Pete) was at the Annual Council for the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia today, and she posted the following request on her blog:

There were a whole bunch of clergy attending the emerging church discussion group and I think out of the people there I had the most experience in it. Mike, you're so much more well versed in it as a whole--would you be willing to post a comment with links that the clergy I then pointed to my blog could access for more understanding?

As an aside - what's up with that? So there was an emerging church discussion group at Council, but nobody there who is doing church in an emerging church context? I'm glad it was a topic of interest, though, and I'm glad the subject was being approached in an open discussion format. For future reference, I have a lot of friends who would be happy to show up and talk with Episcopal clergyfolk (or layfolk) about emerging church stuff. I'll link to some of them below. Most of us wouldn't be looking for a speaking fee or anything - it's just a matter of being friendly and learning from each other, which are things that emerging church folk, generally speaking, dig - and most of us would prefer an open discussion / sharing / Q&A to being on either end of a lecture. We do have friends who make a lot of their living from speaking engagements - folks like Tony Jones and Doug Pagitt and Sally Morgenthaler - so if you'd like to import one of the big names, I'm certain they'd be pleased as punch to come and do that thing they do. But most of us local folks would just be interested in friendship and mutual sharing of our stories and challenges in the Church. Anyway....

So my first recommendation for any clergy (or others) seeking more understanding of the emerging church movement/conversation/whatever: please don't expect to find it on the other end of these links. Unless, that is, your next move after doing this research is to actually reach out to somebody (or bodies) in the movement and establish some kind of relationship with them. It could be in person (invite somebody to your church, or visit theirs, or invite them out for coffee or a pint), online (read a blog and comment, or send an email, or make some Facebook friends), but the first thing you need to know about the "emerging church" is that it's nothing more or less than a web of relationships. There is no unifying organizational structure, no unity of doctrine or practice or affiliation that binds this movement together. The thing that does unite us is relationships - friendships. I unhesitatingly guarantee that you will not begin to understand the emerging church unless you enter into that network of relationships, at least a little bit.

With that in mind, let me provide some links for those interested in connecting with the emerging church, with an emphasis on folks local to the Diocese of Virginia.

First, some of larger-scale networks/movements:

• Emergent Village is a nationwide network of "generative friendships" - the biggest and most formal network of the emerging church in the US. But to qualify "biggest and most formal" - I believe it has exactly one paid staff member (Tony Jones, the national coordinator), a tiny budget, and no formal structure, apart from a network of small cohorts across the country. It's a big, flat web of friends, and it the main thing it generates is new connections and friendships; but also conventions, theological conversations, gatherings, and many published books. A lot of people who are part of the EC movement are connected to EV, but a great many aren't - it's not compulsory or anything. ;-) Some prominent Episcopalians like Diana Butler Bass and Phyllis Tickle are very much involved with EV.
• Anglimergent is an online community of folks who are both Anglican and part of the emerging church conversation. You must check it out. It was created by Karen Ward, totally awesome abbess and vicar of Church of the Apostles, a totally awesome Episcopal and Lutheran church and neo-monastic community in Seattle. If you are an Episcopalian who is interested in the emerging church, and you don't know Karen, you need to correct that oversight immediately.
  
• The Ooze is mostly an online community/network, though it periodically manifests itself in the real world in the form of Soularize conferences. It was launched by Spencer Burke.
• Allelon is a partnership with some pretty amazing people at its core: check it out.
• Missional Church, aka Mission-Shaped Church, is a movement related to emerging church that focuses on the missio Dei or mission of God in the world as the defining purpose for the church. It's an outlook that can be embraced by traditional churches much more readily than "emerging church" can.
  
• "New Monasticism" is a movement of Christians living in intentional community. It's a cousin of the emerging church movement, with lots of overlap.
• Finally, Pete will kill me if I don't link you to this article on emergence, as a general phenomenon of which emerging church is a particular manifestation. It's indispensable for understanding the philosophical/scientific background for the phenomenon. The other major philosophical root of emerging church is the deconstructionist postmodern philosophy associated with such 20th-century giants as Jacques Derrida. If you're interested in interpreting that philosophy for the 21st-century church, I can recommend no-one more highly than Jack Caputo and Pete Rollins.
  

Next, some local manifestations. For folks in Northern Virginia, I recommend making contact with any of the following communities:

• The community I'm a part of, the Church of the Common Table, meets for worship three Sundays per month at Jammin' Java (a coffeehouse / music venue) in Vienna. The fourth weekend, instead of a worship service, we gather for "service-worship", in which the entire church is invited to participate in a project that aims to serve and bless folks from our wider community. We're non-denominational (or, alternately, trans- or omni-denominational), but we have Anglican DNA (we were founded by a former Episcopal priest who later left to return to the priesthood) and we use the BCP in worship.
• Convergence is an emerging church community with deep roots in music and arts, which gathers for worship in Alexandria.
• Church in Bethesda is an emerging congregation in...you guessed it. They're over the border in Maryland, of course, but you might want to check them out.
• Also in Maryland is the College Park Church Plant, pastored by our friend Jason Mack.
  
• The DC Area Community of Communities is a local network of neo-monastic group houses. Some of them, including Culpeper House (where some good friends of mine live) are in Virginia; others are in DC.
• The local-to-DC-and-NoVA manifestation of Emergent Village is the DC Emergent Cohort. We'd love for you to drop by one of our gatherings!
  

For those further south in the state:

• Revolution is a community in Fredericksburg. My friend Scott Erwin is one of its leaders.
• This site collects three other Emergent cohorts for Virginia: one in the southeastern part of the state, one in central VA, and one in the southwest. I don't know many of the folks in those cohorts personally, but I don't doubt that they're genuine emerging church folk (whatever that means).

OK, that's about all I've got in me for tonight. If I've forgotten stuff that I should be pointing folks at (and I'm sure I have) please feel free to add additional links in the comments. Also, there's tons of good stuff in the left sidebar to this blog, if you feel like exploring, and I'd be more than happy to answer any questions you may have. God bless, and if there's just one thing I could say (again) to you, it's this: don't just read; make contact!

Peace,
Mike

Foreclosure

There are a lot of these in my neighborhood. I see them when Tina and I walk the dog, and it makes me sad. We just moved here last year, and it hasn't happened to any of our neighbors that we've gotten to know - and by the time the sign goes up, it's too late to find out what's happened to the folks who used to be our neighbors. But I'm worried that not all of them are landing on their feet. A lot of our neighbors are recent immigrants who are struggling to make a life in this country. I'm sure it must have felt enormous to them to be able to buy a house - I know what it felt like for us, and we were born right here in the USA with silver spoons in our mouths. Too bad the companies loaning these folks their mortgages were greedy and unscrupulous, and now that huge sense of accomplishment, for at least some of our neighbors, has turned into a sense of loss and fear for the future. And everybody loses, as the economic ripple effect of this greed spreads outward from the folks who have lost their homes (and similar factors) to every sector of this interdependent world economy.

I don't have any solutions to offer. Greed is here to stay, I expect. I guess I just pray that if there are things I can do to help, I won't miss them in my naval-gazing.