While taking a break from packing books and stuff yesterday I was noodling around when I ended up at the Wikipedia article on the Emerging Church. It led to my poking around a bit further. And, my goodness!
This is a Christianity worth the price of admission. Passionate and engaged but, talk about putting first things first. Now, they’re a diverse crowd, thinking many different things, but some perspectives shared by at least some, if not all of them have particularly caught my imagination. Not interested in enforcing doubtful moral codes, not, apparently, particularly interested in hell (is this the newest face of Universalism? More on this as I go on…), passionately engaged in both private and public ways with what will make this world a better place; and all the while following what appears to be a hermeneutic of doubt.
And, on top of that, they seem to believe in spiritual practices – including, it would appear, practices of presence…
I’m inclined to believe we really are at the edge of a new spiritual paradigm. A rather grand claim, I admit. (And I’ve never been enthusiastic about others who’ve made such assertions, I must also admit…) But, my goodness, I look at the shaping of the emerging Western (or my preferred label: liberal) Buddhism, Reconstructionist Judaism (they are absolutely delicious) and here with the Emerging (Christian) Church — and I think there really is hope for this poor suffering world.
To put a strawberry on top of it all, I think we’re seeing similar currents emerging, as it were, within Unitarian Universalism. Which is ideally situated, as I see it, to become one of the institutional homes for a larger emerging spirituality that wants very little institutional superstructure, but, I also believe, will need some. I hope we UUs pay attention to this and think long and hard about it…
Exciting times.
No doubt…
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