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I had the opportunity to meet with a delightful group of Fuller grads from the early 1990s. About fifteen in number, these men and women serve as PCUSA pastors and once each year they get back together. I was invited to come and chat with them about my research interests. We had a great back and forth and the two hours went by really quickly — lots of laughter throughout. I spoke on the nine patterns of emerging churches. We talked about how the emerging practices are flowing into the denominational systems as a renewal movement. We talked a bit about the move of the church into new forms of social media. A rich time…

Today I’ll be liveblogging The Future of Global Theology event at Fuller Theological Seminary. It coincides with the public launch of the Dictionary of Global Theology edited by William A. Dyrness and Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, with Simon Chan and Juan Martínez serving as associate editors. It will begin at 11:00am PST and conclude at 2:30pm.

Please join us — feel free to ask questions as the proceedings go along…

UPDATE:

My deepest apologies — the room where the event was held had NO internet — wired or wireless. Wow. I had absolutely no idea of this beforehand. Again, I’m sorry and frankly embarrassed about how this transpired. If I can get a hold of some transcripts — my notes were sketchy because I was looking endlessly for web access – I’ll post them.

Perhaps the question I receive most from church leaders is how to connect the insights of emerging churches to the challenges facing denominational churches. Most of the US stories in our book Emerging Churches deal with new church plants and so existing denominational leaders desire examples closer to their own tradition. When we had the opportunity to host an issue of Fuller Seminary’s theological journal, Theology News and Notes, we decided to address that very question. We titled the issue “Emerging Churches within Denominational Structures,” and we focused primarily on US churches. Spanning nine articles and twenty-seven pages, the current issue features nine leaders who create alternative expressions of faith within traditional church structures. These change agents embody transformation while working within their particular faith tradition. Here are the titles of the articles:

Eddie Gibbs and I wrote The Morphing of the Church;
Walt Kallestad, Lutheran pastor, Community Church of Joy, wrote Redefining Success, Moving from Entertainment to Worship;
Ryan Bell, pastor, Hollywood Seventh Day Adventist, wrote From the Margins: Engaging Missional LIfe in the Seventh-Day-Adventist Church;
Nadia Bolz-Weber, mission developer of a Lutheran church plant in Denver, “House for all Sinners and Saints”, wrote Confessions of a Sarcastic Lutheran;
Troy Bronsink, PCUSA pastor and community organizer in inner-city Atlanta, wrote Of Dying Breeds and Swelling Hopes: A Mainline Emergent in the Reformed Tradition;
Eugene Cho, pastor of Quest, Seattle, wrote Quest and Its Relationship with the Evangelical Covenant Church;
Phil Jackson, pastor of The House in Chicago, wrote A Reciprocal Connection: The Surprising Convergence of Hip-Hop and the ECC;
David Fitch, pastor of “Life on the Vine”, in outlying Chicago, wrote On Being an Emerging Christian in the Christian and Missionary Alliance;
Liz Rios, founder for Center for Emerging Female Leaership, and Luis Alvarez, pastor in the AG, wrote Will a New Church Emerge? Las Raices in the Assemblies of God.

You can read all the articles online. Or you could email Fuller and they would happy to send you a snail mail version free. We believe these articles demonstrate that great creativity and vitality are possible (but not inevitable) within enduring traditions.

My mission in American Culture class got a good start this week. We will be taking a look at the American elections and explore options for Christian engagement within political cultures. Like my other class, we’ll be using a wetpaint wiki for the homepage and netvibes for the updates. We will also be posting to a political blog — it doesn’t have much on it now, but as a class we will be posting on it from now until the first week of December. Our hope is to culturally exegete American political culture.

I made the mistake of watching pedagogical rock star Michael Wesch’s video a couple weeks back. It got me thinking about transforming one of my fall classes more fully into Web 2.0. I began tinkering with my Church in Mission course (with help) — it is a course I teach once a year to 60 MA students at Fuller Seminary. After talking with friends, I decided to create a couple of new things in the course this year, both in terms of web platform and content.

Web Platform:
Instead of a blog for the home page, students will access the class on a wetpaint wiki. This allows them to add to and change class resources easily. Students may upload course notes for each lecture up to the wiki (and therefore collaborate on the class notes). Students will also use netvibes to track their twitter feeds, wiki changes, diigo bookmarks, and youtube videos for class communication and research. Student group projects will include creating and maintaining a wiki and a youtube video.

On the content side:
I’ve changed the course to connect the disciplines of ecclesiology, missiology, postcolonial studies, and race/ethnic studies. In the class, student groups will reflect on the historical and contemporary church experience for particular ethnic groups in the US or overseas (along denominational or regional lines), and create group wikis and youtube videos that explore how the following postcolonial themes manifest in that particular tradition: diaspora, identity, race, cultural difference, hybridity, gender, sexuality, feminism, postmodernism, nationalism, globalization, and empire. Students will collect and analyze the stories of these communities and explore how we might be the “sent” people of God in the midst of these powers.

The class starts next week and runs for ten weeks — I’ll give an update as the quarter progresses. I made changes to my other fall class — I’ll write that up in the next few days.

This last spring, I had the opportunity to speak at the Association of Theological Schools “SPAN” conference for administrators. They asked me to speak about the changes in the American/British church scene that I wrote about in the book “Emerging Churches”, a book I co-wrote with Fuller professor Eddie Gibbs.

My talk addressed the need for seminaries to be transformed if they are to continue to serve the needs of churches in the Twenty-first century. As I spoke, I realized that Fuller has already made many of these changes and is well suited to partner with emerging churches in the future.

For me, the conversation on the emerging church and Fuller started in a little conference room located in Glasser Hall, one of the older converted homes on the Fuller campus, back in thee mid-nineties. About five to ten of us would have a “brown-bag” lunch weekly. Some were Masters students, such as myself, and Barry Taylor, some were doctoral students, and some were professors: Wilbert Shenk and Eddie Gibbs. The conversation always strayed to conversations about how the church must adapt in the coming few years.

Wilbert Shenk, the instigator of the meeting, suggested the subversive idea, brought over from England and Lesslie Newbigin in the early nineties, that the West functioned as a mission field: that the church ought to see its surrounding cultures in the same way as good missionaries do. Eddie Gibbs brought his deep understanding of everyday church life to the meetings; Eddie had recently penned “In Name Only”, the classic text on nominality, and was working on a subsequent book, “Churchnext”.

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Last November I was asked the question, what would it take to move an evangelical seminary in the direction of missional church thinking and practice? Writing with my friend Mark Lau Branson, we offered some first thoughts towards an answer. This paper was one of five distributed at the Allelon Missional Schools Project in Dallas, serving the discussions as a conversation starter.

Technorati Tags: Allelon, Mark Lau Branson, missional church, seminary

In February, I participated in the launch of the Allelon Missional Seminary Project, a three-day conversation on transitioning seminaries to a missional paradigm. Twenty-four seminaries participated by sending a team of five people respectively. During the three days, Alan Roxburgh, Pat Keifert, and Craig Van Gelder (among others) invited us to re-imagine our seminaries for life after Christendom. Time was spent in large group lectures, small focus groups, and in-house seminary discussions.

It was quite an ambitious agenda, given the differing starting points of the seminaries. Some seminaries were over two hundred years old, a few were less than five years old. Some were very well versed in the missional conversation over the last ten years, and some didn’t understand the missional conversation at all. There were a fairly diverse set of schools included in the conversation including liberal, evangelical, conservative, Catholic, and Anabaptist traditions.

Five writers were tapped to present discussion papers to get the conversation going. Each of the writers were to write from their particular tradition: one Nazarene, one Evangelical, one Mainline, and one Mennonite. I co-wrote the evangelical paper, and I will share that on the blog tomorrow.

Technorati Tags: Allelon, Leadership, missional church

Earlier this month I had the pleasure of co-teaching Doctor of Ministry class with Doug Pagitt at Fuller Seminary (I’m taking the picture, Doug is in the center). It was a 40-hour one-week course (!) with a late evening thrown in (you have to have a movie night, right?). We had eight pastors for the week and really covered lots of ground together. The great thing about such a small class is you get the time to go on the rabbit-trails, tell all the (back) stories.

The content of the course revolved around three poles — the kingdom of God, the church, and contemporary global culture. Although we taught separately about each of these topics, it seems every conversation included all three, each filled with personal anecdotes from Doug and I and the eight students. Each ‘lecture’ worked out as more of a roundtable discussion than anything else. Of course, Doug’s stories were filled with references to Solomon’s Porch, and mine to my emerging churches research.

Simply what needed to be re-imagined was the church’s role in a changed world. Church, at its best, points to the reign of God. The current challenge for the church is to explore diverse global contexts (from within), look for where the kingdom is (and isn’t), point to it, get behind it, and embody it as the body of Christ. Yes, continue to be a contrast people, but from a place very much within the culture, usually in unexpected ways…

Technorati Tags: Doug Pagitt, Fuller Theological Seminary, kingdom of God

Piggy-backing on my last post on Continuing Jesus’ Mission into the World, I wanted to further describe the final project I gave to my students this quarter. Again, I wanted to be as concrete as possible, both in the description of the project and in their rootedness in the practices of Jesus. So, after studying the kingdom of God in the life of Jesus, we named those specific practices that Jesus performed as he was non-conformed within the culture.

Here is the list of Jesus’ practices we worked from in class:

– acts of liberation, healing activities, working for justice (econ, racial, gender), solidarity with those care for the poor, inclusion of the marginalized, redrawing social boundaries

– communicating the good news of the kingdom, mediators of grace, forgiveness, mercy, telling stories of another reality

– acts of hospitality, generosity, joy

– love of enemies, no enemy but Satan, peacemaking

– egalitarian community, egalitarian, non-coercive leadership, voice for all

– announcing/denouncing, engaging, seeking

Soooo, given these activities of Jesus, what does it mean to continue Jesus’ work in the world? Here is the students assignment:

1) Describe a context (be it a church system, a neighborhood, a refugee camp, Starbucks) in terms of kingdom language (above). Give examples, what is like the kingdom, and what is not…Describe where you see the kingdom and where you see the opposite — is there freedom or oppression, a voice for the marginalized, or is the system itself marginalizing? Look for the kingdom but note where you see the opposite.

2) Describe what kingdom mission might look like in your context. Dream what the kingdom would look like in this context. What  does liberation look like here — where everyone gets a place at the table? Remember there is no sacred/secular split, so the church system is just as much a candidate for redemption as the Fortune 500 corporation.

3) What does the community of believers need to do to foster kingdom expressions in the context? Given the context, given some of your dreams, what must be fostered to move in that direction? Remember, the means to the given end must be consistent with the kingdom — no coercive leadership, everyone given a voice, dialogue, etc.

I see this as one possible step forward in moving a given social system, be it a relationship, a network, an organization, a neighborhood towards the reign of God. This week I’ll be reading 74 students’ efforts in moving in that direction. What I have read so far has excited me and keeps me going as a teacher

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Technorati Tags: Fuller Theological Seminary, Jesus, kingdom of God, mission