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This week, EV is hosting a synchroblog on our upcoming Theological Conversation.  There have been some great posts that have come out of our theme of “Creating Liberated Spaces in a Postcolonial World,” so be sure to check the bottom of the post for links.  Rather than discuss the idea of postcolonialism, I want to talk instead about the idea of the Theological Conversation itself, and particularly why this year is a groundbreaking year for us.

The EV Theological Conversation is my hands-down favorite event of every year.  And that was true even before last year’s event with Jurgen Moltmann.   Eleven-ish years ago, a group of people sat around and said, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could foster some conversation between the academic world of our seminaries and the practical pastoral lives of our churches?”  And out of that thought, the EVTC was born.  The first year, we hosted Nancey Murphy from Fuller and Dallas Willard in three days of conversation- no papers, no lectures, just two theologians and a roomful of pastors and Jesus followers talking about the questions we most long to discuss.  I distinctly remember sitting in a chair, listening to the delightful volley of ideas and thoughts bouncing around the room, and thinking, “This is the best idea anyone has ever had.”

And I still feel that way.  The academy and the church are two deep loves of my life, and to see them brought together in a way that brings so much LIFE and vitality to both places is a fantastic thing to experience.  Pastors return to their communities with ideas so loudly buzzing in their heads they might expect honey to come forth.  Theologians return to their offices and ivory towers with a renewed focus on the immediacy of the needs of the people their work is intended to help.  This is what a mutually-sustaining conversation does.  I beamed last year (as you can well imagine) when Professor Moltmann remarked to me something like, “I very much like the questions and energy that I am experiencing from your Emergent people.  I see much hope here for the future of the Church.”  And we left hope-filled as well, because he took time to share with us not only his theology but his life over three casual days of conversation together.

The EVTC is remarkable every year, but this year it is remarkable for another reason.  It is the first year we are hosting theologians who are not only male or not only white, or both.  And we should not underestimate what a significant and refreshing shift this will be.  As delighted as I have been in years past to tell fellow participants that we are hosting Stanley Hauerwas and Miroslav Volf and Walter Brueggemann and yes, Jurgen Moltmann, I am beaming every time I tell people that we are hosting Musa Dube, the rock star New Testament feminist scholar from Botswana, and Richard Twiss of the Lakota/Sioux tribe and a church practitioner and thinker extraordinaire, and Colin Greene, UK theologian who navigates the postcolonial landscape with the aplomb of Fred Astaire on a dance floor.  This is going to be a fantastic conversation, having these three in a room together along with pastors and Jesus followers from across the US, talking about ways to be free together.

The conversation of how to create liberated spaces together- how to live in community with one another by sharing power the way God has called us to share power- this is a question that is as important now as ever it has been.  It is critical for all of us as we live in a world where globalization continues and polarization nips at its heels.  To have the liberated space to participate in three days of deep conversation about these matters with three fantastic conversational partners is quite a gift.  And that’s not even counting the legendary, post-conference, into-the-night-at-the-local-pub conversations with Emergent Village friends from around the nation.

I hope you’ll come.  I hope you’ll support this landmark year with the gift of your presence and with the wisdom of your voice.

You can find out registration info here.

Other synchroblog participants:

– Annie Bullock at Marginal Theology marginaltheology.wordpress.com

– Julie Clawson at onehandclapping julieclawson.com

– Nelson Costa (in Portuguese) at www.nelsoncostajr.com

– Natanael Disla (in Spanish) at karmatarsis.wordpress.com

– Carol Howard Merritt at TribalChurch.org tribalchurch.org

– Dave Ingland at www.daveingland.com

– Mihee Kim-Kort at first day walking miheekimkort.com

– Crystal Lewis at Jesus Was A Heretic, Too. jesuswasaheretictoo.blogspot.com

– Katie Mulligan at The Adventures of Tiny Church tinychurchnj.blogspot.com

– Ann Pittman at anncpittman.blogspot.com

Well hello there, fellow blogosphere friends!  I hope you had a lovely and relaxing summer.  I took a wonderful break from the virtual world and have spent the last week getting slowly back into the swing of things.  As today is Monday, what better way to kick off my blog again than with Moltmann Monday?! Here’s a quote to ponder, again from his most recent book “Sun of Righteousness, Arise!”:

“There is no way of first perceiving something except through astonishment.  Because even in the everyday world of experience, which is so much a matter of course, nothing repeats itself exactly, everything we encounter also has a unique character.  The readiness to marvel at the fact opens our senses, so that we can observe the unrepeatable in the recurring, the unlike in the like, and the dissimilar in the similar.  It is true that out of judgment we judge ‘everything that is’ according to precedents and general laws, but at the same time we know that every case is different.  Events remain contingent.  Consequently the origin of all knowing is to be sought not in recognition but astonishment.” -p.175

Last night at Journey we spent some time talking about seeing things from a holistic worldview; that is, not seeing the world by constantly trying to take things apart and siphoning them down into something we can label, but by focusing on how things are connected and how the brokenness of the world can be put back together.  This is a subtle art, to devise this way of seeing the world, and I wonder if doesn’t require a way of seeing the ordinary, cyclical nature of things as in some way “astonishing” as Moltmann argues.  There is something that feels really fatalistic if we presume that everything is in such a constant state that we can no longer imagine changing it.  When we try to focus on the blips that make even our most basic days unique, I’d presume that it helps us cultivate the kind of holistic “seeing” that is required of us as people of God.  If our task is to be the people who, with God’s help, are trying to restore wholeness back to the broken parts of the ourselves, our communities and our world, we can only rightly see those potentials by taking the time to notice the remarkably astonishing moments waiting all around us.

Just in time for Moltmann Monday, Emergent Village has just released the first podcast episode from last September’s EV Theological Conversation.  Head on over to iTunes and subscribe to the EV Podcast- it’s free!  In this first episode, Tony Jones and I talk with Professor Moltmann about his life story and how he began studying theology.   It’s a great chance for those of you who couldn’t make the conference, and an opportunity for those of us who were there to relive it!

And, while we’re on the subject, if you haven’t heard the exciting news, this fall’s Emergent Village Theological Conversation is going to be incredible.  We are hosting a stellar panel- Musa Dube, a New Testament feminist scholar from Botswana, Richard Twiss of the Lakota/Sioux tribe to provide a First Nations perspective, and Colin Greene of the UK, a scholar in postcolonial theology.  I’ll let you know when the registration page goes live.  You won’t want to miss it!

Pentecost is probably my favorite day of the year.  My Journey peeps joke that I say that when every single Christian holiday comes around, but seriously, Pentecost is my favorite.  I will not waste an hour of your time rambling as to why.  As it’s Monday, I thought I’d pass along a true Moltmannian metaphor that explains it well:  The Spirit of Life gives us ROOM.  Room to live, and to breathe, and to love, and to find meaning.  The Spirit is the very force of life that makes life worth living.

“When the heart expands, we can stretch our limbs and feel the new vitality everywhere, then life unfolds in us.  But it needs a living space in which it can develop.  Life in the Spirit is a life in the ‘broad place where there is no cramping’ (Job 36:16).  So in the new life we experience the Spirit as a ‘broad place’- as the free space for our freedom, as the living space for our lives, as the horizon inviting us to discover life.  ’The broad place’ is the most hidden and most silent presence of God’s Spirit in us and round about us.  But how else could ‘life in the Spirit’ be understood, if the Spirit were not the space ‘in’ which this life can grow and unfurl?  We explore the depths of this space through the trust of the heart.  We search out the length of this space through extravagant hope.  We discover the breadth of this space through the torrents of love which we receive and give.  God’s Spirit encompasses us from all sides and wherever we are (Psalm 139).  Christ’s Spirit is our immanent power to live- God’s Spirit is our transcendent space for living.”  -The Spirit of Life, p.178-179

Too often we have wrongfully believed that spiritual things are “otherworldly,” that they take us away from our physical present lives and move us into some cloudy atmosphere of abstraction.  The Spirit of God is not an abstraction.  She is not some force that distracts us from our “real lives” by transporting us into another more “spiritual” one.  The Spirit of God given to us at Pentecost is the force for life which makes us recognize where our feet are standing, and pay attention to what our eyes are seeing, and awaken to what our hearts are feeling.  And this feeling of being fully awakened to our present and rich reality very truly transforms us, because it gives us space to breathe so deeply that everything becomes possible.  Love becomes possible, and justice, and peace, and forgiveness.  We don’t feel cramped for space and choked for air, because we are surrounded by the Spirit of God that breathes upon us the very force of life.  When transformation happens in any and every way for us, it is because somewhere deep within us we have, even if only for a moment, believed this to be true, and felt it to be true, and acted knowing it is true.  And when we act from that place, the whole world can change.  When we act from that place, we claim that the whole world IS changing, even now, and we are called to be part of it.

On Sunday I was in Kansas City spending the day with the great people at Jacobs Well.  They had invited me to preach that day, unaware that the date  fell on Ascension, which has been something of an obsession of mine this past year.  Consequently, they got more than their fair share of Moltmann quotes, as this is a topic I’ve been in correspondence with him about in recent months.  You can hear the sermon here if you’re interested.  Thanks again to all the folks at JW for a wonderful and fun weekend!

It’s Monday and you know what that means- Moltmann Mondays!

In the first chapter of Moltmann’s latest book, he outlines 3 paradigms of leadership the church can follow.  The first is the hierarchical paradigm, in which there is one God, one Pope/Bishop, one Church.  He writes, “In the political world, one ruler on earth corresponds to the one God in heaven, and in similar correspondence to the one God in heaven is the one bishop and high priest of humanity.”  Moltmann finds difficulty in the way this de-emphasizes the unique role of each follower of Jesus.  “If the church is identified in a one-sided way with the hierarchy and its functions, then the task of ‘the laity’ can only be to say ‘Amen’ to the liturgical, dogmatic and moral instructions of the hierarchy.  This is in pure form a church for looking after people; it is not a self-confident church of God’s people” (p.21).

The second paradigm is the Christocentric paradigm.  Here Christ is the head of the Church rather than a human authority figure, and it is through him that unity is found and held.  The congregation members are brothers and sisters who proclaim Jesus in Word and Sacrament.  Theoretically, this creates a community of equals, because it acknowledges the priesthood of all believers.  The problem, he says, is that “the distinction between trained theologians and people without any theological training has taken the place of the priestly hierarchy” (p.23).  Theories don’t mean much when they don’t get worked out in actual practice.

The third paradigm is the Charismatic paradigm, by which he doesn’t mean denominationally charismatic, but rather a broad sense of being led and guided by the Holy Spirit.  He uses 1 Corinthians 12:4-6 as a description:  “There are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit.  There are varieties of service, but the same Lord.  There are varieties of powers, but it is the same God who inspires them all in every one.”  In churches that are working in this paradigm, “everyone is an expert in his or her own life and personal calling, and all are experts in their original gifts and powers on behalf of the community and its mission” (p.25).  By this Moltmann is hardly arguing for relativism.  Instead, he is advocating for churches who take seriously their individual and communal calling to be active followers of Jesus in the world.  There is not a class of religious experts that ought to do the work for the “other kind” of people.  We are all called to follow, and the church ought to be structured in such a way that encourages and empowers and sends each person to do what they are uniquely called to do to bring life into the world.

As a pastor who hopes to work in this charismatic paradigm, I can’t say I’ve figured out a structure yet that fully realizes this potential, but I hope in our own small ways we are fumbling forward and figuring out how to enliven each community member to practice living into their unique callings more and more each day.

If you haven’t heard, my favorite theologian (understatement of the year) has recently had a book published in English entitled Sun of Righteousness, Arise!  God’s Future for Humanity and the Earth.  This is one of his more pastoral works, which means it’s written not for theologians but for all of us who are trying to practically live out our faith.  It’s a great summary of much of his more dense works of theology, with some new material as well.  I am BEYOND excited.  So much so, in fact, that I have decided to begin a new little tradition on my blog called Moltmann Mondays.  Every Monday, I’ll pick an idea or paragraph or quote from Moltmann’s work and talk briefly about it.

To kick off, here are some sentences from the preface of Moltmann’s latest:

“When I think back, I discover with some surprise that I have always understood Christian theology as a unity, irrespective of the persons who have thought it and maintained it.  From Orthodoxy to the Pentecostal movement in Europe, Asia, Africa and America, all theologians belong to the whole of Christendom on earth and to the thousand-year-old communio theologorum.  In Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither Greek nor barbarian, neither master nor servant, and neither man nor woman.  All become one because the frontiers that divide them have been broken down.  And the same is true in Christian theology…Christian theology reaches out beyond denominational frontiers and cultural barriers.  Its discussions do not run parallel to confessional boundaries…I believe that the only future for a divided Christendom before God, and hence on earth too, is a common future.”

To understand Christian theology as a unity is easier said than done.  One of the reasons I was so attracted to Moltmann’s theology is because while most theologians I read were whittling ideas of God down into smaller and smaller bits (and therefore more and more splintered factions that required defending), Moltmann was stretching out wider and wider to bring more pieces in.  This makes intuitive sense to me, as one who recently described my appreciation in the emerging church conversation on what we call “big tent theology.”  We are not attempting to create a new faction, but rather attempting instead to widen our listening to include a more whole and holistic voice of Christian theology, spanning time, denominations, continents, and other perceived borders.  Good theology ought to move OUT and not IN.  (And if you haven’t heard me beat this drum enough, I believe the story of God in Scripture only works that way, too.)

Certainly, I also LOVE his recurring refusal to pay attention to boundaries drawn by humans in favor of the God who so loves breaking them. (See:  The Boundary-Breaking God)

And I also love his beautiful declaration that if we are to have a future at all, it is to be a shared future.  And this future must be held together by the One who alone is able to bring us into unity.  I wrote that “Any human dictator can control a homogenous society.  Only the living God can hold together a diverse global world in love.”  This is the difference between our desire to shrink God/people/the world into easily understandable and controlled splinter categories, and God’s desire to free up people/the world to flourish in creative ways outside of our controlling categories.  This is why we have a common future that must be grounded not in our own whittling and splintering work, but in the unifying work of God.  That’s as true for theology as it is every other work we do as humans living together in this world.  How can we gather rather than shatter?

Earlier this year I was able to connect with the great people over at Englewood Review of Books when they did a review of The Boundary-Breaking God.  In concert with Englewood Christian Church, every spring they put on a conference to engage in an issue practically relevant to Christian life, and this year’s theme is Life Together:  Being the People of God in the 21st Century.  Here’s the idea, from the event website:

“For many years now, the individualism of American culture has exerted great influence on the way we approach life, even in matters of faith. However, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, there are some churches that are regaining a sense of our calling to be communities of God’s people, who share life together in meaningful and redemptive ways. However, the forms that these churches take are often quite different. We have invited representatives from a wide variety of such churches to share stories from their life together and to lead us in a conversation about what it means to be communities of God’s people in the twenty-first century.”

The conference will be Friday June 11-Saturday June 12 in Indianapolis and registration is limited to 350 so book now.  Cost is $50 if you register before May 15, after which it is $65.  I’ll be joined by John Nugent, Professor of Old Testament at Great Lakes Christian College; Sally Schreiner Youngsquist, Pastor of Reba Place Fellowship Community; and Matt Tebbe, Pastor of Life on the Vine Community.  In addition, there will be workshop speakers including Will Samson and others.

It’s going to be a great conversation, and I’d love to see you there!

Last Thursday I had the opportunity to tour the town of Immokalee, Florida, where the overwhelming majority of our tomatoes in America are grown.  The farmworkers in Immokalee work unbelievably long days under grueling heat.   They usually wake up at 4:30 or 5:00am, head to a pick-up site where they hope they will be chosen for work that day, and then are charged $7/day to ride the bus to the fields.  They spend the next 8 hours hauling buckets of tomatoes from the field to the trailer.  And for every 32-lb. bucket of tomatoes they pick, they are paid 45 cents.

Forty-five cents.

To put that into perspective, if they were to make minimum daily wage, they would have to gather over two and a half TONS of tomatoes.  Usually, time or tomato supply doesn’t allow that to happen.  After they have finished picking for the day, they ride back on the bus, usually arriving home between 6-8pm.  These men work from 5am to 6pm, doing hard labor, to be paid quite literally nothing.

We drove around Immokalee and saw the trailers that serve as the farmworkers’ homes.  A regular trailer (not a double wide) usually holds 8-15 occupants who have mats laid out one after the other along the length of the trailer.  They are required to pay $55/week (A WEEK) for this.  And let me be clear- these are not nice trailers.  These are falling down, non-air-conditioned, rusting and rotting trailers.  I wouldn’t pay $55 to own one.  And do the math:  8 men at 55/week is $1760/month.  If there are 15 men, it’s $3300/month.  So if these men were in Dallas, rather than living in that trailer, for that kind of cash they could rent in a high rise like this for $1200/month, including a pool and a workout room and other amenities:

Instead, they are paying for this:

Two years ago just blocks from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers building where we were sitting, a man was arrested and charged with slavery after men escaped the truck trailer where they were held against their will for 18 months.  The men were taken to work in fields by day and padlocked in by night, forced to use one corner of the truck trailer as the bathroom.  There were no windows.  There have been 7 slavery prosecutions in Florida in the past 12 years, which is why people call Florida “ground zero for modern day slavery.”

So when you go to a restaurant, or a fast food place, or your grocery store, or your child’s school cafeteria, and you see a tomato, think of these men.  And feel angry enough and guilty enough to do something about it.  Demand that you will not eat tomatoes that come from farm growers who treat their workers like this.  So far, Taco Bell, McDonald’s, Burger King and Subway have agreed to buy tomatoes only from growers who adhere to a Code of Conduct.  Whole Foods Market, Bon Appetit and Aramark have also signed on.  If you eat or purchase tomatoes anywhere else, your voice is needed.  Find out how to help here.  If you’re a person who asks grace over your meals, shouldn’t you be a person who asks grace for those who have toiled for your meal?

Today I’m participating in a Synchroblog to discuss what is emerging in the Church.  You can find other great posts from a diverse group of voices by checking out the linked FB page.

“Life seeks systems so that more may flourish.  Life is in the business of creating more life.  An interesting way to observe this phenomenon is in a system’s creation of niches- specific areas or talents distributed with clear lines of ownership.  In business, we talk about niches as a competitive strategy.  We advise one another to find our unique contribution and move it into the world.  We talk about the need to beat out others for our space and the need to dominate in our market.  We see differentiation in nature and interpret it as the key to competitive advantage.  We look at the prevalence of narrow specializations and see it as the road to supremacy.

We couldn’t be more wrong.  Life creates niches not to dominate, but to support…They aren’t competing to destroy one another.  They are using their differences to find new ways of living together.”

-          Margaret J. Wheatley and Myron Keller-Rogers, in “A Simpler Way.”

When eleven-ish years ago a group of people decided to begin describing this conversation that had been happening about church and culture and philosophy and life as “Emergent,” it was a very intentional word choice.  The concept of emergence is widespread across many disciplines- art, architecture, philosophy, economics, and of course, science- and in each unique environment, it speaks of a new possibility that arises out of the fullness of all the old possibilities.  It is not, as I said in my post below, a totalizing word.  It is rather a word that seeks a reality that makes room for as many possibilities as one could imagine.  It even holds within it the old possibilities rather than pushing them away.

It has become messy when we have mistakenly placed a layer of competition atop our spiritual emergence, because then it has become bickering about authority and rightness and book deals and platforms and church politics and whose leader is best/coolest/said it first.  That happens when you are human.  And it particularly happens when you are an American human taught that the most competitive one always wins.  That’s why I deeply appreciate the wisdom of Wheatley and others who remind us that we have often assumed nature and life are competitive just because we are, and that in reality nature is a far more cooperative organism than we’ve likely given it credit.

In the broadest way possible, I believe what is emerging in the church is this very realization- the realization that the Realm of God and the world God has lovingly created is not about competition but about contribution.  It is the realization that those things that make us unique do not need to be leveraged against one another in battle for supremacy but rather accessed in service to one another for fullness of life.  It is the hope that we can find ways to create communities and organizations and life systems that allow a multiplicity of possibilities to spring forth in niche ways- and that we can then use these differences to find new ways of living together.  What is emerging is the desire for us to be the kind of people that work with one another rather than against one another, and that we can absolutely find ways of doing this without giving up our own identities.  It is the beautiful possibility that we can have our niche and a diverse supportive community, too.

On a personal level, it speaks to my deepest prayer, which most days goes something like this:  “Loving God, teach us to choose life rather than death, to value the power of collaboration over the pain of competition.  Give us the courage to lay down the cadre of weapons we’ve created to dominate each other, and courage still to take up the path of the One who leads us toward you and one another in love.  Amen.”