May 1, 2008 at 3:09 pm
· Filed under Uncategorized and tagged: church, emerging, future, money
The blog chat keeps growing. Thankfully, Aaron Klinefelter is keeping track of all the conversations brewing here.
This conversation is getting too big to summarize…which is exciting. But it also means that it is easy for it to dissipate and blow away. So, I’m wondering…where does it go from here? Does it need to go anywhere? Does it mean we’re all going to start a network of likeminded friends called “ecclesial village” and each have sidebar images that say “friends of ecclesial village” and start working towards publishing deals (wink wink)?
If we’re really wondering about the benefit of expensive seminary training, does that mean that our communities are going to start trying to be teaching communities where we help the next generation explore ministry in post-Christendom? Create internships that could supplement formal training? Are we going to start our own “underground” seminary that is so “underground” that nobody knows its there and nobody realizes its a seminary (wink wink)?
I’m being playfully serious here. We’re at that place (some of us have been at this place for a while, some are just arriving, and some of us are somewhere in-between) where we are all looking to the future. We are aware of the possibilities but we’re also feeling the weight of it pressing down upon us.
In these times of transition, really cool things happen. But at these times of transition it is just as likely that misguided attempts at cool things can happen. So, where do we go from here?
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ak wrote @ May 2, 2008 at 6:09 am
For a conversation too big to summarize you summarized (or at least captured the essence of it) well!
I agree… this thing is going somewhere. How to be localized about the globalized transition is what I’m pondering at the moment. So, transitions are happening in the state of the church across the country - what implications does that have for how we live our faith locally? Probably the question should be stated the other way - how do our local attempts of faith have global implications? But somehow it gets us back to the same point of creative tension that I think you are referring.
[...] a future post but for now I simply wanted to add some food for thought. Check out the other posts Mark has linked to in his post in order to get a perspective on what has already been talked [...]
I think I wake up every single morning and ask myself that exact question — where do we go from here?
Sometimes the question is too overwhelming and so I just decide that I’m going to pour myself a bowl of cereal and watch Sportscenter, and then go to work, and think about it later.
But that kind of procrastination never really works.
We are in the midst of this exact conversation where I work — which happens to be a diocesan office of the Episcopal Church. Transformation like the one we are experiencing creates so much heat. We can’t see the end so we don’t know where we’re going. So we just grapple along in the dark.
The hard part is all the blaming and shaming that can go on as we figure out how to allocate resources
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