Fuller Seminary’s Burner Blog sat down with Q founder, Gabe Lyons, and asked him why a 3-day conference needs to cost $675. Personally, I find Gabe’s answer less than convincing:
Gabe Lyons
The best speakers and the most interesting venues are not cheap. The admission to Q events usually runs a steep $675. It’s not $3-7k for TED Talks admission, but it’s a lot for cash-strapped churches.
A sitting area at the Crosby Street Hotel in SoHo.
“Well, we try to run our organization in a sustainable way,” Lyons explains. He notes that there are ways to make an event less expensive—hosting in a church for free, for example. “We could do that in Northern Virginia, and save $75,000, but instead we choose to host it right at the center of it DC on Constitution Avenue at the Andrew Mellon auditorium. We think the medium is the message in a lot of ways.”
“We think [lower registration costs] would likely take away from the intentionality of everybody there–relationships we want to see cultivated. Our goal is not to grow something to be really big, our goal is just to talk about serious topics and to get people together who are working on these topics and want education on it and collaboration with other leaders.” He goes on to explain that Q presentations are usually released afterwards for those that weren’t able to attend.
This post is part of a Patheos symposium on the Future of Seminary Education. You can see all of my posts in this symposium here.
There’s lots of good stuff being written in the Patheos symposium on seminaries. Most of the good stuff, IMHO, is being written by folks who are not in leadership in seminaries. The posts by seminary leaders are, I think, pretty timid. Here’s some of the latest, best stuff, with some commentary by me:
But too many seminarians step out of seminary and straight into a brick wall. When they arrive in a local congregation, they experience nearly the opposite of their positive seminary experience.
My Take: I think Brian has a point, but I think he’s letting seminaries off the hook too easily. Seminaries have exacerbated this problem. Congregations push around their pastors because too many seminary-trained pastors are not good leaders. The reason that the church is oftentimes a retrograde organization is because leaders are wanting. That’s a seminary problem.
This post is part of a Patheos symposium on the Future of Seminary Education. You can see all of my posts in this symposium here.
Late last week, Tim Dalrymple published a doozy of a post, complaining that his classmates at Princeton Theological Seminary were indiscriminately jumping the sack with one another. He then goes on to make generalizations about Christians more liberal than he, based on his anecdotal experience at Princeton.
Princeton wasn’t my favorite place in the world, to be sure. But in my two years on campus, I never knew of an instance where a student had casual sex with another student. Not to say it didn’t happen, just to say that it wasn’t flagrant in the sense that Tim writes. So, my anecdotal experience negates and therefore nullifies Tim’s.
Does that render Tim’s points moot? Insofar as he bases his conclusions on this anecdotal evidence, yes it does.
However, Tim argues that liberal Christians and conservative Christians have different mores regarding sexuality. That seems a thesis worth investigating.
Earlier this week, while teaching a Doctor of Ministry course at Fuller Theological Seminary with Lauren Winner, my class joined with a class taught by Dallas Willard and Keith Matthews for an evening discussion. One of their students asked me, “What’s the difference between ’emergent’ and ‘missional’?” He continued, “When I’m asked by my congregation, I tell them that missional is primarily a theological corrective to the church, and emergent is primarily an ecclesiological corrective. Is that right?”
I was slightly taken aback by his own description because, to be honest, I’ve heard just the opposite. Evangelicals haven’t turned on proponents of emergent church like Doug Pagitt, Brian McLaren, and me because of our ecclesiological innovations.* It’s not the couches and the non-hierarchical forms of church to which they object. It’s our theology.
I told him this, and I went on to opine that the terms have become so theologically fraught that they are damn near meaningless. Five years ago, evangelicals were gaga over emergent. Then, as our theological explorations continued, evangelicals quickly turned on us.
I used the example of Biblical Seminary in Hatfield, PA. Biblical at first embraced emergent thinking and emergent leaders, using both Tim Keel and Brian McLaren as special consultants. Then a small group of alumni went on the attack, and David Dunbar and Biblical Seminary retreated. Now they are “missional,” mentions of Brian McLaren have been scrubbed from the site, and John Franke is leaving the faculty.
My question: Is “missional” a safer term than “emergent”? Should it be?
Theoblogy
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In