Transmission

Tony Jones’ Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier March 2, 2008

The word is out. If you want a primer on the “emerging” church, read Tony Jones’ The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier. It’s a great overview for posterity and for people today who are wondering what this phenomenon is all about.

Tony is the national coordinator of Emergent Village and has been part of evolution of the “new kind of Christian” conversation for more than a decade. In person, he’s an engaging, passionate, self-proclaimed provocateur – and The New Christians conveys his unique voice. Its super readable and maps out vast expanses of this new frontier, including cultural context, theological markers, and case studies of real-life characters and locales.

I personally found the book quite resonant. There were paragraphs that echoed sentiments I’d written about in seminary and undergraduate religion classes (e.g. Weber and the commodification of religion, the notion that we all interpret the Bible). There were parts that recalled conversations I’ve had and sections that described places I’ve visited (e.g. Church of the Apostles in Seattle, Solomon’s Porch in Minneapolis).

If I wanted a family member or friend to understand why I’m part of this movement, I would recommend this book as a roadmap. For those I’ve never met, I commend it too.

Finally, on Tony’s travels through this new frontier, it seems he brought along a sieve and sifted gold nuggets out of flowing streams and muddy riverbanks. He calls these little nuggets his “dispatches” and all twenty are precious. Here are my fave five:

Dispatch 1: Emergents find little importance in the discrete differences between the various flavors of Christianity. Instead, they practice a generous orthodoxy that appreciates the contributions of all Christian movements.

Dispatch 12: Emergents embrace the whole Bible, the glory and the pathos.

Dispatch 16: Emergents believe that church should function more like an open-source network and less like a hierarchy or bureaucracy.

Dispatch 17: Emergents start new churches to save their own faith, not necessarily as an outreach strategy.

Dispatch 20: Emergents believe that church should be just as beautiful and messy as life.

Creation Series #4 June 15, 2007

I recently came into possession of an advance copy of The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible. It’s by A.J. Jacobs, a secular Jew, who spends an entire year trying to obey every commandment in the Bible. It’s startlingly entertaining and thought-provoking; Jacobs doesn’t set out to trash religion and, although he remains an agnostic at the end, he ends up being quite changed by the experience. It’s a worthwhile read.

At one point in his travels, he visited the newly opened Creation Museum. I’m including his reflections:

I told my friend Ivan - a good Catholic - that I was considering visiting a creationist museum and he let out a loud groan. “Those people give Christianity a bad name.”

I understand what he’s saying. It’s the way many Jews feel when we see a billboard announcing Rabbi Menachem Schneerson as the Messiah. Or the way many gay men feel when they see a Rip Taylor tossing a handful of confetti. It’s kind of embarrassing. Like Ivan, I’ve always taken evolution to be a cold, hard truth. As indisputable as the fact that the sun is hot or that Charles Darwin married his first cousin (the latter of which I learned in the encyclopedia and can’t get out of my head).

But creationism is Biblical literalism at its purist, so I need to check it out. I researched various creationist hotspots - both Jewish and Christian - and found a handful of possibilities. But nothing came close to Answers in Genesis. This is the $25 million, soon-to-open Kentucky-based museum - the Louvre for those who believe God made Adam less than 6000 years go from dust - started by an Australian evangelical named Ken Ham.

AiG is still under contstruction, which is fine by me. There’s something appropriate about seeing the creation of a creationist museum. So I flew down to Cincinnati, a few miles from the site.

A half hour later, I pull up to the museum - a low building with thick yellow columns perched on a gentle Kentucky hill. In the parking lot, I spot a bumper sticker of a Jesus fish gobbling up a Darwin fish.

I’m greeted by the publicist Mark Looy, a gray-haired man with a gentle, schoolteacher voice who guides me to a door that lets us into the lobby. It is, in a word, awesome.

The place is still deep in construction. Hard hats everywhere, the smell of sawdust, the whine of drills. But even in its unfished state, you can tell this is going to send the media into a Michael-Jackson-rial-like frenzy.

The first thing I see is a life-sized diorama of an Edenic scene. There’s a waterfall, a stream, and weeping-willow trees. An animatronic caramel-skinned cavegirl giggles and cocks her head to look straight at me, which is odd and impressive and disturbing all at once. She’s playing awfully close to a fierce-looking, razor-toothed dinosaur. Don’t worry, Mark tells me. In the beginning, humans and dinosaurs lived together in harmony. The scary incisors are for coconuts and fruit, just like pandas’ teeth.

When AiG opens, they expect thousands of visitors. And they’ll probably get them - polls say that as many as 50% of Americans believe in creationism. Not intelligent design. We’re talking strict, the-earth-is-less-than 10,000 years old creationism. (The creationists I met scoffed at Intelligent Design, which says the world was designed by a superior being, but not necessarily in seven literal days. The creationists think of it as some sort of nebulous theological mumbo jumbo).

Mark introduces me to Ken, the founder of AiG. Ken is wiry and energetic 56-year-old with a red Van Dykish beard. He quizzes me about my last book, the one about reading the encyclopedia, and I end up telling him about my ill-fated appearance on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. I was stumped by the question “What is an erythrocyte?”

“It’s a red blood cell,” says Ken.

He’s right. I’m thrown off-guard. A creationist who trumps me in science knowledge - that’s unexpected and unsettling.

(more…)

The Prostitute Preacher March 28, 2007

I’m currently doing research into a somewhat forgotten 12th century sect called the Waldensians, who are quickly becoming my favorite heresy (ask me to compare them with the Franciscans sometime). Basically, these guys were anathematized and excommunicated for believing and teaching that a) to follow Jesus means radical solidarity with the poor, b) lay people should be empowered to preach and to serve without asking permission of the institutional church, and c) women should be allowed to preach and hear confessions alongside men. That was pretty much all they stood for. They weren’t even separatists; they wanted to stay in full communion with the church and even at the height of their power they still went to their local parish priests for Eucharists, baptisms, masses, etc.

I found one fascinating account in “The Prostitute-Preacher: Patterns of Polemic against Medieval Waldensian Women Preachers” by Beverly Maybe Keinzle. She recounts a story of two women who were reprimanded by their local bishop for preaching in the French city of Clermont. According to Geoffroy of Auxerre, by preaching, these women were acting with such impropriety that they could only be likened to prostitutes. After explaining at length why women should be silent and be satisfied to ask questions of their husbands in private, he busts out this gem:

Who has brought Jezebel back to life, a young woman after 1,000 years, so that she may run through the streets and squares like a prostitute preacher?

Now the Jezebel to whom he’s referring is not the villain of Shakespearean proportions from 1 Kings; this Jezebel was an early church leader in Thyatira - a prophetess, in fact. The author of the book of Revelation has a pretty big bone to pick with her, although it’s not clear whether that’s because she’s “calling herself a prophet,” because she’s “teaching,” or because she is “beguiling servants to practice fornication.” Whatever the case, when I compare the depiction of Thyatira against the modern-day churches which have so misappropriated the book of Revelation, I think I’d rather be in Thyatira.

Geoffroy ends his tirade by suggesting that these women should become more like the silent Mary, mother of Jesus, “who bore many things in her heart but uttered few with her lips.” Blech. Nothing against St Mary but personally, I’d love to see the sex worker community adopt Jezebel as an icon the same way that black feminists have adopted Hagar.