The Wild Goose Festival: The Talks

June 28, 2011 By 16 Comments

WGF logo

This is another in a series of reports on Wild Goose, which happened last weekend.

In general, I thought that the quality of talks at the Goose was incredibly high.  Like, as high as the old Emergent/YS Conventions and Christianity21, which to this point have been the events of our tribe that have had the best quality and quantity of talks and discussions.

I was a speaker host, so I spent much of Friday and Saturday running around, introducing speakers, and hearing bits and pieces of talks.  I missed some that I really wanted to hear.  But I caught some that I hadn’t expected to.  Here’s what I saw and heard in talks: [Read more...]

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The Origins of the Wild Goose Festival

June 23, 2011 By 2 Comments

WGF logoToday will see the birth of a gathering that has been gestating for many years.  The Wild Goose Festival in Shakori Hills, NC begins at 6pm EDT tonight, and I’ll be in the crowd, cheering on those who midwifed it, among them Mike King and Gareth Higgins.  In Mike’s post yesterday, he wrote, “Seven years in the making,” and he’s right.

In 2005, the group who had inaugurated and planned the Emergent/YS Conventions in 2003, 2004, and 2005 decided to bring that gathering to an end.  It had run in connection with the National Pastors Convention. Here’s the backstory: at the 2005 Emergent/YS Convention in Nashville, Doug Pagitt and I had breakfast with Lyn Cryderman of Zondervan.  He told us that Zondervan wasn’t interested in publishing the Emergent/YS line of books anymore.  Our response was basically this: if you don’t want to publish our books, why do you want to produce our event? (Zondervan owned the National Pastors Convention — they have since shut it down and sold the rights to YouthWorks.)

The following fall, a posse of us gathered in New Mexico at Glorieta Conference Center; this was an annual event, organic in nature, and meant to counterbalance the more corporate feel of the convention.  Around that time, Doug Pagitt convened a meeting that would begin what comes to fruition today:

[Read more...]

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Adding Nuance to the Sojourners Kerfuffle

May 12, 2011 By 11 Comments

Some of my friends have weighed in the on the Sojo-BelieveOutLoud controversy, as have some commenters on yesterday’s post.  Nadia Bolz-Weber comes out of blog-hibernation to write,

Are the poor more important than GLBTQ folks?  Is it ok to throw the rights of one group under the bus so that another group’s rights might be upheld? I wish there were really clear back and white answers here but the fact is that we live in a much more ambiguous world than that.  As a Lutheran I confess to living in the tension of being simultaneously sinner and saint and living in a world filed with the paradox of such.

Brian McLaren, writes as an LGBTQ Ally and a former board chair of Sojo.  Sojo is, he writes, a coalition-building organization, and as such it has to walk a tightrope:

If I were to boil down messy contemporary reality to an equation, here’s what it would be:

- You can’t lead a coalition of progressive Christians without being an outspoken leader on LGBTQ issues.
- You can’t lead a coalition that includes mainstream Evangelical and conservative Catholic Christians if you are an outspoken leader on LGBTQ issues.

That leaves Sojo in a precarious position, and it seems to leave Jim Wallis with a choice to make: Does Sojo want to build a mainline-progressive coalition or an evangelical coalition.  I don’t think he can do both.  Sadly, that’s the reality of the church in America these days.

[Read more...]

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What Jim Wallis Might Be Missing

May 10, 2011 By 62 Comments

So, it seems that Jim Wallis* has gotten into a bit of a kerfuffle for rejecting a magazine ad from Believe Out Loud, a pan-denominational campaign to increase the number of congregations that are welcoming** to LGBT folks.  The best rundown of the controversy with all the important links can be found at Religion Dispatches.

As RD posted and others have made clear, Wallis has avoided addressing LGBT issues for years.  And that’s because Wallis knows, as he states in his apologia, that LGBT issues in the church constitute a “wedge issue.”

But more to the point, affirmation of gays in any way in the church in America these days is a shibboleth, as I have written previously.  That is, if you affirm that homosexual persons who are in any way sexually active can have a role of leadership in the church or should be afforded to right to marry and awarded all of the privileges accorded thereto, then you are, de facto, kicked out of evangelicalism.  Suddenly, 60% of the Christian market in America is, for all intents and purposes, closed to you.  No more fundraising therein, and no more book sales thereto.

Jim Wallis knows this.  Jay Bakker and I and other straight allies of GLBT persons know this first-hand.  Rich Cizik knows this.  And any number of other Christian leaders on the scene today have watched the examples of those of us who publicly ally ourselves with GLBT issues in the church, and it has scared them off from publicly stating what they privately believe, which is that gays should be included in the church.

To those who pastor churches, I understand your hesitation to speak publicly in affirmation of gay ordination and gay marriage.  You have congregations to pastor, and you may feel that your commitment to the unity of the flock trumps your personal convictions on a particular and controversial matter.  But to Jim Wallis, I have this to say:

[Read more...]

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Jim Wallis Appearance Stirs Wisconsin Controversy

June 30, 2010 By 78 Comments

Jim Wallis

Here’s some breaking news from the Sheybogan Press.  It seems that Q90-FM, a Christian music station in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, has pulled its sponsorship from Lifefest, a Christian music festival in the area.  Why?  Because Jim Wallis is one of the speakers at the event.

The Q90 board explains,

In their statement, the Q90 board of directors, leadership and staff said they became concerned with the beliefs and teachings of Wallis. Specifically, they said they believe the social justice message and agenda Wallis promotes is “a seed of secular humanism, seeking an unholy alliance between the church and government.”

Damn that Wallis, sowing seeds of justice!  (So, I guess this means that Q90-FM won’t sponsor the Wild Goose Festival next year?)

A local pastor puts it more pointedly,

“It’s easy to say we don’t have to agree with his politics or his theology, except that by promoting him as a speaker, that’s exactly what we’re doing,” [Pastor Kathi] Rose said. “We’re giving him credibility in all other areas of his politics and his theology, which in many ways is very, very antithetical to the gospel of Jesus Christ in the essentials.”

Hasn’t anyone told Pastor Kathi that Kathi’s aren’t allowed to be pastors?!?  Ken Silva, you’d better call this Pastrix out on your blog immediately!

(Many thanks to my aunt and uncle, fully sane, reasonable, and loving people who live near Sheboygan, for sending me the article.)

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McLaren Weighs in on Emergent's Whiteness

April 21, 2010 By 12 Comments

Brian McLaren, whom I tongue-in-cheekedly referred to as the White Crayon in Chief last week, has stepped into the fray over all of the Sojo posts (and my own) regarding Sojourners Magazine’s latest cover article:

In my view, reports of the conversation’s demise are greatly exaggerated. In some cases, they represent wishful thinking; in other cases, a limited frame of reference. From my perspective, Chapter 1 of the conversation may be ending, but there are many new and even better episodes to come. Or better put, what we call “the emergent conversation” may in fact be chapter 3 or 7 or 123 of a much longer storyline. That larger story is nowhere close to being over, and in fact, I don’t think its most important work has even begun.

The real future, as I see it, isn’t an intramural conversation among Evangelicals (as many think), or even among Western Christians (as others think), but rather an expanding conversation among progressive evangelicals, missional mainline Protestants, progressive Catholics, and postcolonial Christians from around the world. Its future may or may not still use words like emergent, emerging, etc., but the cat is out of the bag. Deep questions are being raised, and when that happens, you can take two predictions to the bank, one of them being that you can’t get the questions back in the bag, and the second being that some people will try.

via on emergent – Brian McLaren

Now, let me say something a bit McLarenesque, and something that didn’t come through as loudly as it should have in my previous posts: I am thankful for Soong-Chan Rah and Lisa Sharon Harper and Gabriel Salguero and Calvin Chen. They are asking important questions of me and everyone else in the EC, and I am listening.

And I look forward to all of us getting to know one another better.

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George Wood Plans to Be Civil, but Only to Evangelicals

April 15, 2010 By 54 Comments

George O. Wood

Readers of my blog will remember that George O. Wood, General Superintendent of the Assemblies of God pressured the Society for Pentecostal Studies to disinvite me from their March, 2010 meeting in Minneapolis.  They didn’t cow.

Well, it seems that Wood recently signed the Covenant for Civility: Come Let Us Reason Together, a statement initiated by Sojourners in the wake of Glen Beck’s ranting about “hammering” Jim Wallis.  But now Wood has recanted, and is asking that his name be removed from the statement.

It seems, according to a statement of an Assemblies of God spokesperson, that when Wood signed the statement at a recent meeting of the National Association of Evangelicals, he thought that the phrase, “the unity we have in the body of Christ” referred exclusively to evangelicals.  When he found out that “the body of Christ” also includes “people who are supportive of gay marriage and abortion rights,” well, that was just too large of a tent for him.

[Read more...]

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Emergent's White Problem

April 11, 2010 By 65 Comments

For those who are just joining the conversation, here’s a brief:

  • Soong-Chan Rah wrote about the emergent church in his book — a characterization to which I and others objected.
  • He has now written an article on the subject for Sojourners Magazine.
  • I said I didn’t like the cover image and title — I still don’t.
  • I made some assumptions in the original post about Rah’s article which I have since amended and have apologized to Rah.
  • Some commenters have made suggestions as to how the EC can battle its diversity problem.
  • I responded that those suggestions don’t really fit what the EC is.  I was afraid that my second post would come off as defensive, and I’ve been told I was right.

So, I write this post both chastened and wanting to make a constructive contribution to this problem.  Surely it’s true that the EC is too white — as are so many collections of people in our culture.  We need to combat this, and I both have tried to in the past and will try in the future.  To that end, I offer these suggestions:

[Read more...]

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Responding to Charges of Racism

April 9, 2010 By 30 Comments

Portrait of the Author as a Not-So-Young-Man

I appreciate all of the thoughtful responses to yesterday’s post, “Is Sojourners for Straights Only?”  While few commenters dealt with the actual question of the post (What about Sojo addressing GLBT rights as a justice issue?), many chimed in to agree that yes, indeed, the emerging church movement is not diverse enough for their tastes.  I use the phrase “their tastes” purposefully, because it does not seem like there would come a time when the EC — or any collection of people, for that matter — are diverse enough.  That’s both because the demographics of our society (and your community) are always in flux, and because there’s no one person who gets to judge when a group is diverse enough.  Diversity, you might say, is in the eye of the beholder.

The problem with defending oneself or one’s organization or group of friends from charges of racism (or lack of racial sensitivity or lack of racial diversity — whatever you want to call it, it’s basically shorthand for racism) is that when you defend yourself, you sound, well, defensive.  So if I were to write about how hard we’ve tried to recruit authors of color to our book lines, it will sound disingenuous.  But what if I write about the diversity in the by-lines of the books An Emergent Manifesto of Hope and The Justice Project? Or about the diversity in the present leadership of Emergent Village?

[Read more...]

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Is Sojourners for Straights Only?

April 6, 2010 By 78 Comments

That’s the first thing I thought of when I saw an advertisement for the new issues of Sojourners Magazine:

Actually, the first thing I thought was, Is this really the time for us to be criticizing other Christians who are on the same team as us? Really, with everything that’s going on in the world, a critique of the emerging church is worthy of a cover article?

[Read more...]

Filed Under: christianity in america, emergent church, glbt Tagged With: , 78 Comments