by Brother Maynard | Nov 24, 2009 | Emerging Church, Winnipeg
I spent last evening with an exceptional group of folks having some great conversation. Among the nine of us, it was billed as a debrief session for The Great Emergence conference with Phyllis Tickle a few weeks back. The four of us panelists/workshop leaders (Jamie Howison, Jamie Arpin-Ricci, Lesley Harrison, and yours truly) met together with the organizers (Christine Longhurst, Kara Mandryk, and Michael Boyce along with spouses Rachel Twigg Boyce and John Longhurst) to discuss the event just passed. I have to say it was some great conversation, both when it was on and off-topic.
The conference itself was quite good, and video is now online for the plenary sessions. (The Q&A is unavailable and the panel discussion was not recorded.) The organizers have also posted links to other reviews and resources from the conference, including an annotated bibliography. Rather than downloading the videos, you can view them online below. Read more…
by Brother Maynard | Nov 3, 2009 | Emerging Church, Theology, Winnipeg
This past weekend was the The Great Emergence one-day seminar in Winnipeg with Phyllis Tickle, sponsored by FaithForum (and others). Clearly, the event centered around Ms. Tickle’s book, The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why. A few of us (Jamie Howison, Jamie Arpin-Ricci, Lesley Harrison, and yours truly) were invited to participate in a panel discussion and present a workshop, leaving two plenary sessions for Ms. Tickle, the last of which included a good Q&A session.
Friday evening before the event, the organizers — Christine Longhurst, Kara Mandryk, and Michael Boyce — invited us to join them with Phyllis Tickle for dinner, and we landed in a little Laotian place well-recommended by Jamie Howison. We found Ms. Tickle to be warm, witty, and approachable, which was reinforced during her plenary sessions, in which she was not only intelligent and widely conversant with her topic, but also downright funny at times. And she’s got a delightful accent. Read more…
by Brother Maynard | Jun 12, 2009 | Church, Culture, Ecclesiology, Thought Fodder
I think I mentioned an event coming up here this October featuring Phyllis Tickle speaking on her book The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why. I’m one of several people who have been asked to present a workshop and sit on a discussion panel over the course of the one-day conference. At the moment, October 31st seems such a long way off, but I’ve been asked for a topic and a brief description of the workshop I will present.
You mean I have to plan ahead? Oh, of course — I knew that. I fired back saying I’d do something on “Navigating Times of Change” to offer a description of some of the characteristics of liminal space and its effect on leaders and churches. I need to flesh that out a bit further, which will take some digging and reflection to know what’s important to present and what to cut. I think I’ve selected a good topic though, so that gives me a good start. Read more…
by Brother Maynard | May 6, 2009 | Blogging, I Ramble
Because I enjoy Sara’s posts, even if she’s no longer putting them on Missional Tribe… because it’s about the voice first, and hers should be heard. But that’s incidental.
It won’t take an overly astute blog-reader to notice I’ve done something in the past month that I haven’t done in my last 4½ years of blogging here… I have –gasp– skipped posting some days. In a way that’s been good for me, since I had been feeling pressure to keep the streak going unbroken. 4½ years is good enough though… I really have nothing to prove in that regard — though it does beat my old record (in the technology sector) by a year, so with the break, that’s like 8 years of daily posting. No wonder I needed a break this past month. Now I don’t feel the pressure to post something no matter what each day, though I do feel I should have said more over the past month. There was a major Emergent-ing conference that everyone blogged about that I wanted to make some comment upon, and there was a gender-related kerfuffle recently that I almost said something about. Too bad I didn’t, but on the other hand, maybe that’s a good thing. I only tend to get myself in trouble. Read more…
by Brother Maynard | Mar 13, 2009 | Books, Emerging Church, I Ramble, Missional
Monday morning after logging my menu selection and discussing Bosnia with my waitress, I began to dig into Reggie McNeal’s Missional Renaissance: Changing the Scorecard for the Church. I’ve not had much time with it this week, so I’ve only ingested the introduction and chapter one… but I found myself jotting down an inordinate number of notes and quotes for so brief a sample, and yesterday when I tweeted “Those who miss the missional renaissance will find themselves rendered irrelevant to the movement of God in the world. — Reggie McNeal” it proved to be good retweet material. (Paraphrased from p.17 for the sake of a 140-character limit.) Read more…
by Brother Maynard | Mar 3, 2009 | Books, Emerging Church
A more long-range benefit of the Reformation’s placing ultimate authority in Scripture was that, when coupled with the principle of the priesthood of all believers, sola scriptura required absolute and universal literacy if it were going to work. The Protestant imperative toward every believer’s being able to read Holy Writ for him- or herself excited the drive toward literacy that in turn accelerated the drive toward rationalism and from there to Enlightenment and from there straight into the science and technology and literature and governments that characterize our lives today. There were, of course, some disadvantages.
The most obvious problem of universal literacy is that if one teaches five people to read and then asks them each to read the same document, there will be at least three different interpretations of what the five of them have read. While we may laugh and say that divisiveness was Protestantism’s greatest gift to Christianity, ours is a somber joke. Read more…
by Brother Maynard | Feb 19, 2009 | Aside
“The work of God may be pure, but its earthly application, as often as not, isn’t.” — Phyllis Tickle, Great Emergence, p.57
by Brother Maynard | Feb 16, 2009 | Emerging Church
When Christians despair of the upheavals and re-formations that have been the history of our faith–when the faithful resist, as so many do just now, the presence of another time of reconfiguration with its inevitable pain–we all would do well to remember that, not only are we in the hinge of a five-hundred-year period, but we are also the direct product of one. We need, as well, to gauge our pain against the patterns and gains of each of the previous hinge times through which we have already passed. It is especially important to remember that no standing form of organized Christian faith has ever been destroyed by one of our semi-millennial eruptions. Instead, each simply has lost hegemony or pride of place to the new and not-yet-organized form that was birthing.
Recent Comments