none of us is as dumb as all of us<\/a>.\u00a0 But, this is a tangent.\u00a0 Back to the main point.)<\/p>\nThough it is not my story, I know of many people who identify with the emergent movement who have had bad experiences with the church in the past concerning this issue.\u00a0 I have met and worked with people who were \u201cmuscled out\u201d because they began to speak up and ask questions that others did not have answers to or were not comfortable with, or that they were unaware of certain unspoken rules of what you were allowed to say, or question, or who was allowed to do the saying or questioning.\u00a0 Usually the path of least resistance is to silence the lone divergent voice than to engage it and risk dissention or change or loss of leadership or embarrassment etc.\u00a0 It seems that compliance and engagement often have an inverse relationship.<\/p>\n
(I do not want to be a curmudgeon.\u00a0 I know there are places where conversation is embraced and these descriptions are not representative of everything outside Emergent.\u00a0 I\u2019m trying to be gracious, while I compliment my own steam at the same time, which may require a delicate balance. \u00a0\ud83d\ude42 )<\/p>\n
Back to multivocality.<\/p>\n
The more voices we can have in the conversation, the better.\u00a0 Diversity is a beautiful thing and assuredly, it is a gift from God.\u00a0 Diversity of thought.\u00a0 Diversity of race and gender.\u00a0 Diversity of culture and practice.\u00a0 All of these allow for greater understanding.\u00a0\u00a0 And certainly we in the West have had long periods where the only accepted voices were those of white males (like me).\u00a0 In fact, the worst periods of our human existence come from times where only a certain kind of people are allowed to speak (slavery, holocaust, ad nauseam).<\/p>\n
In conclusion, we all have blind spots.\u00a0 That should be easy enough to see, shouldn\u2019t it?\u00a0 And the thing is, I\u2019m better at seeing your blind spots than you are, and you are better at seeing my blind spots than I am.\u00a0 That is the beauty of having many voices involved in the conversation.\u00a0 And while I continue to sound like a ridiculous \u201chomer,\u201d that is the beauty of this blog (and all blogs, for that matter).<\/p>\n
PS I am merely scratching the surface of this robust topic.\u00a0 For more on the multivocality of the Emergent movement, the church, and of our culture, see Church in the Inventive Age and Preaching Re-Imagined<\/a>, both by Doug Pagitt, and The New Christians<\/a> by Tony Jones.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As an addendum to last weeks post on the conversational element of Emergent, I want to assert my belief that when it comes to voices in the conversation, more is better. In one of our Twin Cities Emergent Cohort meetings several years ago I remember Tony Jones saying that the fear of many concerning open […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":383,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61],"tags":[22,18,1095,17,1092],"class_list":["post-136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","tag-church","tag-cohort","tag-community","tag-conversation","tag-emerging-church"],"yoast_head":"\n
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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/3.bp.blogspot.com\/-nZSzMov00UM\/TsCHb75l8uI\/AAAAAAAAAvI\/LebvP3xN2jw\/s1600\/ManyVoicesOneChurch.jpg\" "\\"Many")
<\/p>\n