ANAPAPIST

Wednesday, February 18, 2004

I am moving

Please make note that I am moving to moveable type. I will still be that cute sweet little anapapist that you have come to know and love. I will just be at this new address Please update me in your blog roll and address book. 

Wednesday, February 11, 2004

E=MC2 Or Heisenberg meets the Emergent movement;


I have been reading so much on the emergent stuff lately. The latest one was exceptional and got me thinking. There seems to be so much angst concerning the lack of cohesiveness and definition regarding the Emergent movement, if I may call it that. There is a much angst with regards to the post-modern definition or lack there of. I find this to be a non issue. If you would indulge me. Werner Heisenberg in 1927 wrote this, "The more precisely the positions determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa." This is commonly called the Uncertainty-Principle. Basically you can't know the position of an entity and also know its velocity. As it applies to defining emergent stuff it goes like this. The more one tries to pin a definition to this thing the more squirrelley it gets. This is the case not because it is indefinable but because it lack homogeneity. The emergent stuff is always contextual. Who am I to say that the Southern Baptists can't be emergent because they just change the order of music and add candles?

The other issue that keeps coming up is the thought that most emergent types hate the church or are reactionary. That may be true for some but not all and to restrict this broad movement to minutiae. What might be happening for some, not all, is a reaction. A reaction to the overindulgences of the "me" generation. It is a reaction against the church we have recieved. It is an attempt to generate a new paradigm for the new move that God is doing.

Would you indulge me one more time?

What if, and I got this thought stream from Stan Grenz, the move that is going on today was similar to the beginning stages of teh Protestant Reformation and its subsequent evolutions.

The Magesterial reformers were different, Zwingli, Calvin, and Luther had different issues, there was no uniformity but there was commonality.

"The sixteenth century protestants were in agreement that the medieval Roman Catholic tradition had corrupted the Christian faith and so made the reformation of the church necessary. Although they were united in what they were against, when it came to the task of setting forth a positive agenda they were fragmented. Consequently, they struggled without success to achieve a unified movement. In a similar manner, postmodern thinkers are united not by agreement about a particular constructive agenda but by their shared belief that the modern project is inadequate and their shared commitment to the task of developing new paradigms for intellectual pursuit."

Stan Grenz, Beyond Foundationalism.


Indulge me one more time please. The issue that has been raised that some emergent types is that they have no ties to history or a tradition. That just makes them good evangelicals. the emergnet types I know and interact with have a deep desire to know their history. Don't nullify the whole because some have a bug up their butt. The a-historical impulse just means that they are being true to the evangleical protestant impulse. 

Tuesday, February 10, 2004

The wrong questions?

One of the dangerous things about bouncing around from blog to blog is that you get acontextual snipets of thought. My firend James calls it pornographic I don't disagree. But one thing that I have seen is that I think the question are you Emerging or not is the wrong question. Can one be modern and emerging YES. Since there is no universal criteria to adjudicate a definition of postmodernism how can we say I am pomo or modern? The question or at least the starting place for my inquiry is not are you this or that but what undergirds your position. Let me explain, the epistemological issue is the question that needs to be addressed. For many people the issue is foundationalism or non-foundationalism. Our epistemic starting point is seemingly a non-issue. Our non-reflective position and a-critical nature drive the issue. There are several discussions going on go here for a good discussion but still perhaps not the right questions. Check out this site for another view point. Dave's post is called "is the emerging church a movement?" This post is quite good and raises some good points.

This is an excellent post called "emerging church and cognitive dissonance" by neurotribe this guy rocks.

There are several other things going on in the blogsphere. Some people are reading a book that is several years out of date and is not even a good book to read regarding Stan Grenz's thoughts on post modernism. Grenz writes this book with a foudationalist bent. A much better book is Beyond Foundationalism By Stan Grenz and John Franke. My hope is that once they are finished with a Primer by Grenz they will read this fine book to see how Grenz has changed. We must frame the issue differently and we will get different answers.

In "clarification" dated 1-24-04 alan creech illuminates several of the issues.

The problems that foundationalism gives us go unaddressed. It is my hope to start us down the road to ask different questions. 

Wednesday, February 04, 2004

Black History Month day two:


"The erstwhile sanction by the church of slavery, racial segregation, war, and economic exploitation is testimony to the fact that the church has hearkened more to the authority of the world than to the authority of God. Called to be the moral guardian of the community, the church at times has preserved that which is immoral and unethical. Called to combat social evils, it has remained silent behind stained glass windows. Called to lead men on the highway of brotherhood and to summon them to rise above the narrow confines of race and class, it has enunciated and practiced racial exclusiveness."


MLK Jr. The Strength to love 

Tuesday, February 03, 2004

In Honor of a Man I will meet someday

"....Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned with that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land. And I'm happy tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.


Martin Luther King jr. April 3, 1968, He was assassinated the next day.

It is Black History month. Learn all you can.

There is much that we as "emerging" leaders and youngsters could learn from this man. We have cut ourselves off form our heritage he embraced his. He knew his history we don't know who we are. Let us learn. 

In over my head

Most of the time I find myself in way to deep. This blog is the perfect example. I am not a gifted writer, in fact my grammar sucks. So I have been shamed into not writing for a few days. I have had to think about what I should do. I am by nature not a person of originality. I am more of a person who links things together. I make connections at deep levels and hopefully empower people to be better than me, which is not really that hard. One thing that has been evident to me over the last few days is that is that I have stuff to give. So to those who feel I don't say much and ramble I will be back again and again.


Lessons in Leadership.

It was 1984 I was stuggling with wrestling season. In the day I was one lean mean fighting bench warmer. I was never able to get the moves correct fast enough to win, so I never wrestled in a match, I wrestled for 11 years. I never won one match even in practice. His name was Kurt Pritts, he was my friend since kindergarten. He was one of those people for which athletics came easy. We were the same age, it was our junior year, and this was his second year of wrestling. I would show up early to practice and stay late. In the off seaon I would run cross county and lift weights 5 hours a day. It was always my year, yet never was. By this time, for all you good evangelicals, I had been a Christian for 5 years. I had read the gosple of Luke several times over by this time in my life. I had tried to embody although I had no idea what I was doing most of the time.

It is time to get back to wrestling and Kurt now. There was one thing I could do and that was "see" what had to be done although I was never "smart" enough to get it done myself. I would help the other guys be better. One day I was set to wrestle Kurt to see who would wrestle in the upcoming tournament. My other friend Gary told me not to show Kurt any moves. I thought well that was just stupid, of course I would help Kurt. Kurt beat me, with the very move I showed him and in fact helped him master. He took third in the tournament.


Now what does all this story have to do with leadership? And what does the narrative of someone not good enough to get off the bench have to do with being a leader.


It was never about me, I would like to tell you that I was some how profound in all of this I was not. I stumbled along and only in retrospect did I see that God was structuring my character in such a way that I find myself to this day willing to let someone else be better than me. To this day I see pastoral leadership as a gifting where I am called to empower someone else to take my "job". You see I am just not that good of a man, I am not fishing for encouragement here. I have a rather healthy self-esteem. I am always made better by those I surround myself with.
I see leadership as a cruciform pattern. The more like Jesus we become, the more people will misunderstand us and the better leaders we will be. My friend Gary never got why I helped Kurt, even after he beat me. It was already becoming part of who I was, how could I be anything else? I could have hoarded my talent and probably won but the team would not have been as strong. I could have imposed my will and coerced my way but in the end I would have lost more than a wrestling match. As honorary captain I could have had Kurt wrestle someone else and then wrestle me after he was really tired. But then what kind of leader would I have been?


And Jesus removed the his outer garment and wrapped it around his waist and then washed there feet. If leadership is about YOU then get out and go do something else.