Transmission

signs of Emergence:
A Vision for Church That Is Organic / Networked / Decentralized / Bottom-up / Communal / Flexible
{Always Evolving}

I’m just about to start Part 2, but wanted to share some snippets from the first 100+ pages while they’re freshly percolating in my imagination…

With our eyes suckling from cathode-ray nipples feeding us a skimmed diet of soap opera and home improvements, we have lost the ability and mental space to simply talk and share thoughts and receive wisdom… Part of the prophetic role of the Emergent Church will be to encourage society to recover its memory and have a healthy balance between past, present, and future:

Christ has died,
Christ is risen,
Christ will come again. (108)

Our problem today: the space for imagination to expand and take shape is inversely proportional to the speed at which we live. Yet if we stop and wait, and close our eyes to the “buy now, take me now” images, and rest our weary retinas, we will begin to remember, new worlds will form, new exits will become apparent. (57)

Christ’s incarnation in a specific time and a specific place demands of us, the body of Christ, that we too undergo incarnation and are born somewhere specific, committing to it and putting roots down. We cannot be reborn in first-century Palestine; we need to be incarnate to the place where we are and the place that needs us most. We must learn how to incarnate the church in the city. (73)

This is the extraordinarily consistent truth about our cities, our brains, our ecosystems, and, I am suggesting, our churches: somewhere between these two poles of anarchy and rigidity - a spectrum with death at each end - there exists a place where a system begins to live, to self-organize, to become more than a sum of its parts, to develop a character, a culture, a soul, if you will- as if some breath has entered it and commanded it to live. (82)

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