speaking out for one another

By Patrick Green
LifeBridge Church/ YASO
Lockport, IL, USA

LifeBridge Church was started in November of 2008 looking like most church plants with some nice missional language thrown into the website, literature, and sermons. Our growth started very healthy for a plant. We had middle aged couples with kids coming, we had great music, we had tithes that more than covered our bills and we were, in return, giving a good consumer experience. But the messages showed my heart and the heart of some other people in our community who knew that there was more and knew we could be more. In February of 2009, everything started to change, we just did not know it yet.

The location we rent for Sunday worship is owned by a UCC church, and they use it on Friday nights for something called Open Door Teen Coffeehouse. I’ve been a volunteer chaperone there for a few years now. The Coffeehouse is a safe place for teens to have fun on a Friday night, featuring things like karaoke or dance or open mic. I began to wonder if the teens would be interested in something more…something beyond fun and something with teeth. Something that unlike the Coffeehouse, did not have an entry fee or rules on clothing or speech. Something where we fed them without charging them.

I asked a few of the kids and one night we got together and came up with a name: YASO (Young Adults Speak Out). It would be at the same space on a Saturday. One night at the coffeehouse we passed out the flyers and told them all we knew was there would be free pizza and soda and we would figure out together what it would be. Some of the kids politely looked at it and tucked it in a pocket or a garbage pail. One teen in tripp pants with piercings got excited about it and started telling his friends that they should go and “trust the old guy cuz he seems all right”.

The first night I showed with two young volunteers, five pizzas, and a cooler full of soda. 12 people showed up at that first night and we discussed what this would be. Long story short, here’s what we came up with: We have food and soda together until the time feels right. When the time feels right we gather in a circle and pick a topic…something that we cannot talk about in school or church or at home. We will share our thoughts on the topic and what is said in YASO must stay in YASO. After we have exhausted the conversation in the circle, we all just hang out for an hour. There is a prayer station for anyone who likes to pray, people to talk one on one with for anyone who needs that, and time to just hang out for anyone who wants that.

12 people became 20. 20 became 30. 30 became 42. The topics ranged from eating disorders, drug abuse, addiction, abuse, rape, sexuality, cutting, and so forth. Some have actually sought help for depression, bulimia, addictions, etc. Everyone has shared each others hurts and wounds, enemies in school have found common ground in YASO, and much more.

Every Easter weekend, the Bible College I used to attend holds a large youth convention near Chicago called Ascension Convention. I knew the YASO folks would not be able to afford such an event, and I doubted they would be interested in the content of the gathering, but a chance to speak out…well we would all enjoy that. For the 2009 conference, we bought a booth in the hope that we would get other youth groups to see the value in what we did and maybe try to emulate some of what we do.

At the booth we had blank sheets of parchment and pens for people to write anonymous stories. Through the course of the day we did not have too many people at our booth. In one of the slower moments when the hall was almost empty a few of our group started playing with a stuffed bunny someone had brought. It was a strange amalgam of keep away and volleyball. Other youth from other tribes joined in. From there, they began to go into “Ride That Pony”. It is a dance our group does for fun. It is hard to explain, but essentially two people are in the center dancing and they shimmy up next to someone they would like to know better and then that person enters the circle…lather, rinse, repeat. We had over seventy people from churches all over the tri state area dancing with 11 of our pierced, tatted, tripp pants wearing bunch.

Suddenly, our booth took off. Parchment was grabbed and dozens of stories were written. Stories of pain, abuse, fear, anxiety, and uncertainty. Things people could not tell parents or pastors…and in some cases things done to them by parents and pastors found expression and release bleeding through the ink onto the parchment. Some people watched from the outside and worried. Every time there were teens misbehaving, I was the first adult notified because it must have been “my crew”. What did we do at the end of the day? We shared stories, life, and love. Merely by being themselves, they took over a room and made an impact.

Here we were, no hierarchy, no rules, no tracts. A pizza party meets group therapy meets fight club. A family. Messy, lovely, and spiritual.

That night was the tipping point. The energy changed as they realized their voice could have an impact. As YASO they would impact and change the life of our local State Representative, they would wash cars to help a friend afford a funeral for a loved one, and quite a few other wonderful things both grand and simple. More YASO people started becoming a part of the LifeBridge community. The auditorium seating evolved into a circle, the sermon is transitioning to a discussion, worship is becoming communal and experiential as we try to find our expression beyond a few songs in the CLI library.

The space we meet in is slowly transforming into something spiritual and holy with everyone starting to contribute something to our decor and landscape. After our gatherings, anyone who wants to meets at a juice bar and discuss as a community the good and the bad of this week and start to plan the next gathering and share other community matters and needs. Not that numbers matter, but LifeBridge is about two dozen and YASO is a little larger. We as a community want to speak out for the marginalized, the hurting, the lost, the confused… ya know, each other.

Find out more about LifeBridge Church at their website.

Read more about Patrick’s story at his blog.

Editor’s note: Last week, the facilities for the ministry featured in this story were vandalized a day after the group received an insulting and threatening email. Among other things, clothing that had been set aside for the homeless and for some of the YASO members was bleach-sprayed. The YASO young adults have reacted by wearing this clothing as a sign that they will not be intimidated. Please pray that there are no further attacks on these young people or this ministry.

Meet the Village Council

“Institutionalization… is the collective equivalent of embodying –we know we’ve learned something when it becomes a part of how we do things.” From Presence by Otto Scharmer

To paraphrase Scharmer, cherishing a network of conversations with the same holistic seriousness that you do the cells of your body means intuitively forming structures.

If you trace the history of Emergent Village, it is similar to your church, or a family, or even an online open source project. At first there are just a few people, and those who know each other are within two degrees of separation. As the network grew, Emergent Village formed into a 501©(3) (non-profit) with a board of directors, who shortly thereafter decided to hire a National Coordinator to manage EV. After 3 years, the Board decided based on feedback to return to open source coordination. Within a year of eliminating the National Coordinator position, the board didn’t know many of the practitioners, the participants in Emergent Village didn’t see simple ways to coordinate, and the only recognizable coordinated efforts were the website plus some various book/speaking tours.

So in May ’09 a bunch of people who had an investment in the future of EV decided to reshape the board of directors into a “council of practitioners”, the Emergent Village Council. At this point, the purpose of the EVC is basically to accomplish the following things:

1)To coordinate the efforts of multiple teams: In some ways, the main job of the EVC is simply to lay out on the table everything happening in various working groups and ask, “What is syncing up? What is jamming up? Who can use help here or there? What is this team thinking of that we can get on the front burner of this other team?”

2)The second reason for the counsel is even more pragmatic. Like any other board of directors, the EVC is tasked with the job of finding out where the bills go, paying taxes, amending bi-laws, planning succession, etc.

EV’s needs and directions have changed a lot over the years, and we’ve inherited commitments made in the past, such as agreeing to help promote books by authors that Emergent sought out and introduced to publishers. However, we also are looking to refresh, streamline, or remove ourselves from expiring/irrelevant commitments in order to free us up to support the “Village Green”.

Emergent Village exists for something much larger than the 501©(3), and so this organizing structure serves the whole, and not the other way around. We are still an order committed to “four practices”, and as always, your help, prayers, and feedback are always appreciated!

destructive theology

by Drew Tatusko

As I watched the swirl Pat Robertson recently created in the wake of the horrific images of death and destruction in Haiti, I could not help but recall how others have used the tea leaves of destruction to divine the will of God and God’s self-revelation. It is a refashioned image of the God of the plagues and of Sodom and Gomorrah; the same God of judgment in Revelation who uses nature and people to destroy things in order to re-assert Lordship over everything.

Clearly, this kind of claim has precedent. We may remember all too well how Robertson and Jerry Falwell blamed pro-choice policies and homosexuality for the events of 9/11. More recently, John Piper divined that a freak tornado in Minnesota was the result of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s pro-homosexual position taken this past summer at their General Assembly. Robertson, Falwell and Piper don’t represent the fringe… they have reached and reach millions of people on a regular basis through massive media outlets.

This sort of post-hoc interpretation of reality is also strongly present in political ideologies that now ask The Faithful to “Pray for Obama” using Psalm 108:9 as the lectio divina; “May his days be few; may another seize his position.” It was also present in Wiley Drake’s 15 minutes in the spotlight last year when he called for imprecatory prayer that God would strike down members of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and also publicly prayed that God would strike down Rick Warren for giving a prayer at Barack Obama’s inauguration.

This line of thinking fails to answer the demand of placing God’s judgment in the context of God’s mercy in a post-Resurrection world. It is entirely rooted in a logical fallacy focusing only on specific narratives of judgment without engaging the judgment of mercy in Jesus Christ. It is a powerfully clear theological mistake, but it continues to lead to destructive and harmful results in our public discourse. When one person screams loudly enough, it forces the agenda and controls the focus of what we as a society choose to engage. There is, however, an even more subtle destructive undertow to this point of view.

Robertson’s claim is that Haiti has been under a curse since a slave rebellion against the French in 1791 where voodoo rituals were performed to secure Haiti’s freedom. He makes the comment that the Dominican Republic, on the same island, is prosperous and healthy by virtue of their resort culture while Haiti is in “desperate poverty.” Robertson’s mis-interpretation of poverty aside, the claim is that God rewards material prosperity and health to those who follow a set of rules and allows those to suffer who do not to follow the same rules. If we reverse this cause and effect relationship using the same post-hoc (il)logic above – the suffering are condemned of God and the prosperous are favored. If you are suffering, poor, abused, struggling, lost a job, lost a family member, lost a home, get a really bad disease, etc. it is not a leap and actually working within the same framework to say that those who suffer, those who are afflicted, are not favored by God.

This sort of theological world-view has simply awful consequences for how Christians who observe it will follow the witness of Jesus who did and preached exactly the opposite. In Christ, God is revealed as one who reaches out to the lost and the suffering and finds favor among them first. A redemption-free Christianity that fails to see the world through this example becomes an institution existing solely to observe rituals that prop up the vanity and valor of the powerful. This is a different gospel… one that the writer of 1 John might call “antichrist.”

Christ’s example calls us to compassion and to helping in practical ways. There are many organizations that are doing good work to help people and not for the purposes of closing deals to expand their business. Consider supporting Haiti Partners. Kent Annan, with whom I went to seminary, wrote the book Following Jesus Through the Eye of the Needle: Living Fully, Loving Dangerously the proceeds of which support the organization.

Andrew Tatusko is an academic administrator and grant activity director at Mount Aloysius College in Cresson, PA. He earned the M.Div. and Th.M. degrees from Princeton Theological Seminary where he also was awarded the Fellowship in Practical Theology. He is working on a PhD. dissertation in the study of Higher Education from Seton Hall University focusing on secularization and religiously affiliated higher education. He is also a semi-professional drummer and percussionist who has performed all over Pennsylvania, New York City, and New Jersey. He lives in Duncansville, PA. Andrew blogs at http://notes-from-offcenter.com.

Church is here

By Joy Schroeder
Emerging Desert Cohort
Mesa, AZ

My deal is that I am a 40-something ‘recovering’ charismatic evangelical. I grew up in the church and spent 23 years completely sold out specifically to the Mega church experience and LOVED every minute of it, eventually finding myself in leadership roles etc. Because of a few very ugly experiences with the ‘powers that be’ I started to have questions about leadership, how money seems to be misappropriated in the church in general, the role of women, the inability for the church to truly promote reconciliation, the place of gays in the church…biblical inerrancy…etc., etc., etc. I even began to have a sincere crisis of faith.

My husband and I left that church with all of that stuff banging around in our heads hoping to find another church home…only to realize that most communities of faith in our area were the same. We hooked up with a ‘new’ multisite video venue church plant in our area because it was very small…and seemed to have potential to be more intimate and missional. What we found, however, was that the theology was perhaps more conservative. We ended up in constant tension and frustrated until we were asked by our pastor to “prayerfully consider finding another church home”.

What was left of my faith at that point was pretty much crushed.

Fortunately, we stumbled upon the Emerging Desert Cohort that had only been meeting for about 2 months at that time. The cohort was started by two twenty something guys who were high school buddies…who both found themselves at odds with the traditional options for church. We tried it with great trepidation (I was terrified)...lugging all of our anger, confusion, disillusionment, pain and constant questions. We were received and cared for. We were affirmed and supported. We were loved…and valued. The cohort began experiencing some significant growth about the time we started attending…so we began hosting in our home over a year and a half ago…and we continue to have 30-40 adults and children weekly. We collectively strive to embody Kingdom living, together sharing meals and sacraments, stories and struggles. There’s no real format, no hierarchy, no corporate singing or children’s ministry. All we really have is our commitment to each other and a deep desire to pursue Jesus and his Gospel.

Questions come up frequently in casual conversations with friends or acquaintances who are curious about where I’ve been, why I don’t “go to church anymore” or why we’re not available for Sunday afternoon visits. It’s a weird kind of tension for me. I’ve had many awkward conversations, stumbling over my words and rambling practically incoherently as I try to explain. I usually end up saying something like, “We’re kind of a messy collection of questioners and quitters…but…it’s really not as bad as it probably sounds…and hey, by the way, we always have great home-brewed beer.” This isn’t really an exaggeration. Our beer is really good.

I’m sure it’s a no-brainer, especially to those who have successfully conquered the hang-up of “what church is or isn’t” and have readily adopted a more simplistic description. For me, it’s like I have a tiny little evangelical-mega-church-loving ‘Jiminy Cricket’ in my sub-conscience who continues to point out all the reasons why the community of faith I am invested in “isn’t really church”.

A few weeks back, several families in Emerging Desert converged in Flagstaff, Arizona for a weekend retreat, an event I had been anticipating for several weeks. Hanging out with people I love, all under one roof for two nights, our days and evenings revolving around great food and drink as well as the uninterrupted company of each other – it promised to become one of the most meaningful experiences of my year!

Friday afternoon, several unavoidable scheduling conflicts prevented our family from leaving our home on time. I had volunteered to provide dinner for everyone that evening and like most Type A personalities, my tardiness was freaking me out. When we finally arrived, 45 minutes later than I had planned, I apologized sheepishly to anyone and everyone while imagining the worst to be unfolding behind the doors of the enormous vacation home. Visions of grumblings about late dinner and half-starved children wailing like banshees invaded my mind.

Emma, the precocious five-year-old daughter of one of the other families, noticed us coming through the door with overflowing armloads of food to share, and joyfully exclaimed:
“Look, Mom! Church is here!”

Her untroubled words were powerful to me in that moment, in that space and surrounded by those particular people. Her conviction was solid, unlike mine. I’ve spent the past season of my life wrestling with my faith – asking complex questions of it, twisting it and holding it up to the light, demanding perfection and definition at every turn. This moment was beautiful and pure, almost instantly allowing me to let go of my need for rules, titles and walls. Why had I not been able to see that the most meaningful expressions of faith are sometimes the most simple? Church, to Emma, was someone who brings food to the hungry. Church is spending time with friends in an unhurried way. And church involves listening to the wisdom in each other, even (especially?) the voice of a young child.

This article was adapted in part from an article published at Communitas Collective in November 2009.

Follow the life of the Emerging Desert Cohort at their blog.

Follow Joy’s journey at her blog.

Can Truth Be Plural? A response to "Manifold Witness" by John Franke

It’s not often that you run into a book that explores a deep tension within the church in such a succinct way, that you say, “I wish I had written that.” But John Franke has done just that.

Franke recently released, “Manifold Witness, The Plurality Of Truth” by Abingdon Press, a book that wrestles with the nature of truth and its apparent contradiction of plurality. How can truth be plural? Franke offers what is arguably one of the better responses to the common tension in the church as it grapples the shifting landscape towards postmodern culture.

Franke’s central thesis is,

“the expression of biblical and orthodox Christian faith is inherently and irreducibly pluralist.” (p.7)

At first glance, this kind of statement can be seen as a defense for cultural relativism. In other words, it seems like Franke is arguing for the idea that truth is relative. And if you close the book there, you’ll be missing out on a deeply informed argument away from this very idea.

Franke directly deals with what pluralism is not. It is not an “anything goes, cultural relativism.” There is one truth. But as Franke argues, everything is processed through the lens of interpretation. We cannot ignore the medium that processes the message. As broken human beings we have to begin with the idea that we cannot see the entirety of truth. Franke even states,

“I will seek to provide a theological account of truth that highlights its plurality and thus gives rise to the diversity of Christian expressions of faith without lapsing into an ‘anything goes’ sort of mentality.” (p.8)

Franke explores the obvious, but often completely hidden, reality that regardless of what we think or feel, most of the world doesn’t believe what we do. Humanity is an expression of billions of different viewpoints. This is best expressed even within two central realities of both the church and Scripture. The Church (universal) is represented by thousands of different expressions in denominations. Scripture itself is represented by a myriad of different writers and even four different Gospels. He then lays out an argument that truth is plural in that God consistently reveals truth through multiple channels. This multiplicity begins to lay the foundation for what Franke means by plurality.

“Canonical Scripture is itself a diverse collection of witnesses or, put another way, a manifold witness to the revelation of divine truth.” (p.85)

This manifold witness is in essence the idea that God chooses to reveal truth through multiple channels. The fullest image of God is found in the plural witness of His children.

Franke delves into the tension between the more traditional and emerging churches without seeming heavy handed in his analysis. This tension is later explored in the idea of living out plurality by acknowledging the “Other” as a central basis of truth. Love is the recognition of the full image of God in the world. But contrary to history, it’s not a White Eurocentric assumption. It’s multi-racial and multi-cultural. It’s male and female. Truth doesn’t look like us. It looks like all of us. Truth then is fully expressed in the willingness to sit in the tension of that reality.

In many ways, Franke’s exploration into the “Other”, especially the Testimony of The Black Theology, is worth the small price of the book alone. He speaks against the idea that anyone can corner truth using a single viewpoint. This tension will bristle some and please others.

After reading Manifold Witness, I couldn’t help but ponder why God chose to reveal truth in a plural way. And I couldn’t help but wonder if God understood that the burden of truth was just too great for one person. Only Jesus could handle it, yet even Jesus was just a piece of the puzzle. It made me think that God chose to include each one of us as part of that revelation. Each one of us reveals the image of God to the other. In other words, the fullest reflection of God is found in the plural.

Jonathan Brink is Managing Director of Thrive Ministries, a missional discipleship agency. He lives in California with his wife and three kids.

Stories from the Village Green #2

Leaving the Institution to Reach a City
By Jeff Elkins

Our tribe doesn’t really have a name. We call ourselves “The Thingy,” but more as a joke.

We were all leaders in a great church in downtown Baltimore (I was the executive pastor, the others led various ministries). We loved it there, but were frustrated with our inability to make a real kingdom impact through the institution (the church).

Baltimore is a dark place. Generational poverty, drugs, and various other injustices are like cancer growing throughout the city. Our hearts are broken for our city and we want to see Jesus restore it to Him.

The more we talked together the more we realized that being part of the institution was actually hurting our ability to participate in God’s move in the city. We were focused so much on growing the institution, we had no energy to focus on building true relationships and loving people like Jesus. So we asked the church we were a part of to send us out as a church plant (sort of).

We started in January 2009 with a white board and the Gospel. Good place to start, right? We turned to the life of Christ and asked, “If we were living like Him, what would people say about us? How what would define our lives?” Off the bat it was clear that we needed to be people defined by our love of God and our love of others (practicing righteousness and justice in OT lingo). However, ”love God and love people” maybe the most over used phrase in Christianity today. What in the world does it mean? As we hammered through stories in the Gospels we semi-accidently stumbled upon six characteristics of Christ we thought should define us. Our community is centered on living these out in the world.

So, every time we get together we read the following…

“We will share Jesus with others by loving God and loving people through lives defined by…

Humility – understanding our need for God, we will be defined by our transparent, sincere brokenness.
Forgiveness – with an attitude of brokenness, considering others to be better than ourselves, we will seek to offer forgiveness, restoring others to right relationship with God and one another.
Service – longing to see people restored, we will love them with reckless and messy abandon.
Worship – as we encounter God through loving others, we will proclaim Jesus as Lord with uninhibited authenticity.
Wonder – in reverent stillness we will appreciate God’s glory without fear.
Surrender – knowing that Jesus is God and we are not, we will daily humble ourselves, deny our selfish ambition, and seek the Spirit’s guidance.”

…and then we ask each other where we have succeeded and where we have failed.

The group officially launched in March. We now meet weekly to hold one another accountable to practice the core principles and read scripture. Monthly we do some kind of community outreach.

One of our goals is to rethink how we are doing evangelism. All of us have come from attractional systems of church (I hope my terminology makes sense) so for us evangelism was all about building a rocking awesome worship service and inviting people to it. In a rejection of that we have tried not to name what we do, we don’t have a web site, and we routinely change our meeting location. The idea is that evangelism happens in one-on-one relationships and therefore we will only grow as a group if we are in the community doing our job. It is a seriously messed up system…but we are really messed up people.

Read more “Stories from the Thingy” at the Elkins’ blog here, and a example of their relational ministry here.

loving your neighbor as yourself

“Messy Sunday” and the least of these in La Jolla

by Jared Enyart:

Two years ago my wife and I made a commitment to stop going to church and to start being the church. We clung to “love God with all of [y]our heart, ... and love [y]our neighbor[s] as [y]ourselves.” After getting to know some incredible neighbors (the incredible Muslim family for one) we hadn’t met because we were so preoccupied going to this and that (“church”) event, what surprised us was some of our most open and receptive neighbors were the homeless neighbors living in the canyon 200 yards away from us. We began intentionally taking time to learn their names, stories, and love them; convinced that this was where Jesus would be working (interacting with those on the margins of society, who won’t “fit” in our homogeneous churches) if he were here today.

We decided to be more intentional and asked if they’d like to gather consistently each week (as opposed to randomly here and there) for fellowship and food. They resoundingly and delightedly affirmed. What initially was to be coffee and donuts was immediately “kicked up a notch” (by my wife) with a camp stove and multiple courses. Non-Christian friends have been inspired and frequently expand our circle each week. Currently we break bread (eat breakfast), enjoy fellowship (share about our weeks: needs, answers to prayers, struggles), pray together, and read Scripture together.

We recently attempted to name our gathering “Messy Sunday” (thus we came up with twitter.com/messysunday) after a popular dessert (the messy sundae) at a local pizzeria. We liked the adjective “messy” because it brilliantly captured our group. Our relationships are often messy, the issues facing the homeless population are messy, etc. I often describe a weekly gathering to a friend involved in another area of ministry — for example a regular who strolled up inebriated and was teaching my 3-year-old to throw sand at kids in the playground — and they often respond, “It sounds messy.” And it is. Life is. I think it’s far too easy to “go to church” and experience this put together performance that is polished and feels good and is entertaining, yet [can often] leaves one lacking for a genuine interaction with the fellowship of Jesus and God’s heart of justice for the least of these.

We are affiliated with the Ecclesia Collective here in San Diego (www.ecclesiacollective.org) which we describe as an eclectic grassroots expression of the Kingdom of God in the greater San Diego area.

Read a testimonial about the Enyarts work: “Thank you God for helping the Enyarts make us feel human again”

Follow them on twitter at @messysunday

A Call for Voices

You have a story to tell. It’s probably a local story, the kind best told among friends over coffee on a winter day. Maybe it’s your community’s perspective, an unanticipated incandescence that brought your tribe some new Kingdom resolve. Stories of shared life and vocation, of counterintuitive faith stories grafted together with tales of the mundane or with glimpses of beauty. These are the stories that define you and your community.

The social object theory states that worthwhile social interactions tend to center around an object, described by social media theorist Jyri Engeström as “the reason people connect with each particular other and not something else.” Web technologist Iain McDonald describes the social object as “the centerpiece in a dialogue between two or more people.”

To the same degree that your Kingdom-stories are meaningful social objects on a local level, they can also be potentially profound to this, your family of friends and would-be-friends called Emergent Village. It’s no surprise that this village is also connected by—and centered around—the stories of the collective. What is surprising is how few stories filter up and lend their voices on the national and international scale.

The Village is sustained by new stories, by new storytellers. Emergent|C hopes to bring your stories to the wider Village each month. Consider this your invitation to tell, retell, question, prod, report, critique, interpret or celebrate. For more information or to tell your story, contact Amy Moffitt at amymoffitt42@gmail.com.

You have a story to tell.