We had a strong turnout of folks from wide-ranging backgrounds, and we spent our time together going around and offering our individual stories of faith & church. Our hope is that these transparent introductions provide a context for our talks going forward. We look forward to meeting more folks as they are able to join us and contribute to the conversation & action.
Some highlights from yesterday's gathering:
- We took a few moments to acknowledge some of the commonly-held criticisms of the emerging movement:
- That the conversations can often be destructively critical of the institutional church.
- That the conversations are just that: talk (lacking literal action).
- Building on the above observation, after everybody had offered their stories yesterday, it was interesting to note the similar connections that everyone of us had/has to a mainline church. I thought this was important to recognize the role that our pasts play into where we currently are spiritually, and that this acknowledgment will guide our time together with humility & patience.
Awesome. So we're off and runnin'. We look forward to seeing everybody again at the next gathering (March date to be announced soon). If you haven't already, pick-up (or borrow) the Shane Claiborne book. We'll be talking through the first four chapters at our time together next month. And, if you have some thoughts you'd like to share between now and then, let's get you setup as an author on this blog!
Namaste.
