Loving Understanding

I love, love, love this post over at the Emergent Village blog. It is a really great articulation of why we see so much misunderstanding and presumption when there are dialogues between those who would call themselves emergent christians and those who would call themselves more traditional protestant or evangelical christians. The the discussion going on in the comments has the feel of good friends honestly sharing over a good meal. The love shown beyond the understanding and misunderstanding is incredible. Those involved show a true desire to understand and appreciate each other. Brothers and sisters, I salute you.

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Baby Picture!

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Tomato!

Our garden is coming to life all at once. Above is our first tiny tomato rapidly bulging from its blossom. Our tomato plants are looking very promising actually.

The zucchini and the pumpkin are blossoming with big, ugly orange flowers and our raspberry bushes are budding with little green berries. We have already harvested a few tasty green onions that flavoured Amy’s fantastic bulgogi and our garlic is growing wonderfully. We also have some hopeful asparagus sprouts that I’m hoping I will be able to give away to gardening friends once they are a bit farther along. I planted too many of them for the space they take up.

I can’t wait to pluck that tomato! Does anyone know how long they take to grow to ripe from this stage?

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Why this is not a Movement

“[The Emerging Church] was a wide set of phenomena, too wide to be called a movement. . . . Those who have been characterized as [Emergent] did not come from the same place, and they were not going to the same place. They had in common only one or two practices that put them in the same place in the eyes of critics within the establishment. There is no point in saying that one of these groups was legitimately [Emergent] and another was not, because we have no other criterion with which to define the legitimacy of [one's Emergence].”

John Howard Yoder, Christian Attitudes to War, Peace, and Revolution, [speaking on Anabaptism]
// Remixed by David Wierzbicki

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Our Local Prophets

Richard Rohr said this in my inbox today:

“Walter Brueggemann says the job of the prophet is to free people from their numbness. That is also the task of the church. It is to wake people up, to bring them to consciousness, and not just to comfort them in their unconscious state. I am afraid a lot of soft piety and too quick religious comfort does precisely that. The giveaway is when one finds no attitude of service, volunteerism, or compassion for the outsider emerging from one’s attendance at church services.

“True prophetic religion allows us to hold, suffer, and also enjoy all that God holds, suffers, and enjoys – which is everything – the good and the bad of our histories.”

Adapted from Bias from the Bottom

I’m very troubled by the singular focus on pastoral leadership of the local church which (usually) by nature seeks to exclude the prophetic and the poetic. Prophecy is prickly and it makes people angry – specially those whose job it is to comfort and make things smooth. The pastor’s tendency to comfort, while obviously being something of which we need more, also serves to silence the voices of the prophets because they tend to undo this pastoral work. Prophets are often very much so not pastoral and therefore viewed as nothing more than shit-disturbers.

Imagine the incredible things that could happen if the pastor and the prophet could maintain their relationship with this tension.

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More on Evernote

Following up from yesterday – Evernote has just made a massive improvement to the online display and use of the shared notebook feature.

Check out all the details here

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Evernote: Social Study

I’ve recently started to collect some quotes from my recent reading in Evernote. If you haven’t started using Evernote yet I fully recommend it. It’s incredibly versatile and has usefulness to the moon if you are a student. I’ve used it for taking and organizing class notes as well as keeping track of quotes and thoughts as I read.

I decided to make my “Quotes” notebook public and link it over there –>

I might possibly open up my Class Notes and other notebooks as well. It seems like a great way to make my thoughts available for the community without depending on my remembering to post and upload things.

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Still Alive and Dreaming

Long time no post.

I still so love this song.

That’s all for now.

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Unhealthy Conversation

Nick kick-started some really great conversations today.

And randomized iTunes took me (probably by the leading of the Spirit or something) to part of a conversation between a couple of the “big bad wolves” of what is wrong with Emergent Village according to some folks. Doug Pagitt was relating an experience he had at an Emergent Cohort meeting to Tony Jones.

Speaking about his frustrations with some of the conversation at the cohort, Doug said, “nobody benefited from it because we ended up talking about “Emergent” as an entity rather than being these people who are part of the Emergent relationship, having conversations about things that matter. We ended up talking about Emergent and so it was like a bad version of relationship counseling where instead of letting your relationship be the dynamic in which you talk about life together and live life together, you focus all your energies of that life on defining and analyzing the relationship.”

Nailed. It.

And while that sort of self-reflection and wrestling (I hesitate to call it true deconstruction) is necessary, I think the fact that it leaves us in a temporary limbo of eating our own feet is why it makes me so agitated.

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Christine Sine on Gardening and God

Christine Sine has written a wonderful post on gardening and spirituality over at the Emergent Village Blog.

In our own backyard garden I just planted about 20 tiny stalks of asparagus that have grown from seed over the last three weeks. Also the onions and garlic have begun to break through the soil. It is remarkable to see all this fresh growth from what once seemed so cold and dead. Restoration and recreation is happening. We just need eyes to see!

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