The work I find most rewarding nowadays is helping communities of goodwill find courageous responses to challenges relating across differences in identity. So when asked to become a regular contributor to Emerging Voices (to come home, as it were, to this space now hosted by Patheos that started as the Emergent Village blog where I used to converse and co-convene years ago), almost immediately it came to me to use the opportunity to explore the theme of “courageous responses”. It... Read more
I will be writing about authentic welcome in the church for a while. Welcome is a spiritual discipline that asks us to look into new futures, but also to enact some deeply held and deeply respected values. What does it mean to be welcoming? Exactly what is at stake? There is a thread in Scripture of offering welcome to a stranger, only later to discover that it was an angel or Jesus himself. Abraham ran to meet three strangers in... Read more
I love being part of the emergent movement. I love the space to think, learn, and grow, in ways that help bring faith to life. That space, one created in authenticity, and one that tries to live in authenticity, is something that I found liberating and engaging. As I started dipping my toe in the emergent stream, the world opened up. The Bible became more real. The exposure to older traditions than my own opened the door to new experiences... Read more
Great crowds came to him, bringing the lame, the blind, the crippled, the mute and many others, and laid them at his feet; and he healed them. — Matthew 15:30 (NIV) Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings. – Steps Two and Seven of the 12 steps Several weeks ago I attended a charismatic worship service. As the musicians played, expertly modulating the spiritual energy in the... Read more
For the past fifteen years the “Emerging Church” has been a source of refuge for a large contingent of disenfranchised Christians. Many of whom are evangelicals who found themselves questioning important aspects of their faith and found little to no support from their local churches. When I first encountered the Emerging Church roughly ten years ago, I believed most of the caricatures I heard regarding this “heretical” movement. And, like most, the reason I believed these distortions was because I... Read more
Growing up in the Epicenter of all known culture in Georgia, West Georgia, Douglasville to be exact- I learned a lot about the world. I learned a lot about taxidermy, camouflage, and the King James Version of the Bible. My mama told me that Jesus loved the little children, red and yellow black and white. We sang the song in my small Sunday school classroom. Although, racial slurs came from every direction outside of the church. It seemed that the... Read more
Let the full moon guide me. Not many of my christian friends feel comfortable with me trying to explain how I started praying to the full moon when I was nine. I was in catholic school in Colombia and the teachings of God I received were very far from this practice. Yet, I felt my whole being change every month and could not keep my eyes from gazing at the sky in my bed until I fell asleep. It was... Read more
The fashionable place of fundamentalism in history has found a place in the here and now. Why do we all find our knees eventually bending in the pantheon of fundamentalism? The pantheon refers to all kinds of different types of fundamentalism which we are going to dissect in this article. But, why is fundamentalism so attractive? Why are we, who are part of the human project (we’re not human yet) so enthralled by fundamentalism? What intrigues us? The sense of... Read more
holy adjective\ˈhō-lē\: exalted or worthy of complete devotion as one perfect in goodness and righteousness I don’t feel that I’m going too far outside the realm of reasonable generalizations in saying that most people of faith probably associate their respective conceptions of the Divine with a word similar to the one defined above. At least, in my experience, having attended a Christian college and two seminaries, plus a significant number of houses of worship and faith communities, this word certainly seems... Read more
Mike Stavlund is a husband, a father, a writer, an emergence practitioner, and an adjunct faculty member teaching on emergence Christianity at Wesley Seminary in Washington, DC. He tries to practice what he preaches at a church called Common Table. He sometimes writes poetic odes to flat church. 1. the trick with visiting the zoo is not staying too long linger longer and the unique behavior unfolding before your eyes turns out to be perseveration repeated ad infinitum ... Read more
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