Emergent Stuff...

Last night we read a chapter from Brian McLaren's More Ready Than You Realize. McLaren is a leader in the emergent church, a nondenominational church movement that is looking at transforming the ways we do church. They recognize that there are many around us that have not grown up in the church and aren't acquainted with traditional religion, or even turned off by it. Reaching out to these 'seekers', those who don't know about or don't like church in the traditional sense but are open to spirituality in their lives, is the focus of the emergent movement and guides what they do.

The chapter we read in particular talked about how people need to belong to a church group before they can be required to believe anything. We read stories of people who were invited to volleyball games or contemplative prayer services set to music. By being accepted and participating in the group, they were slowly lead to belief in Christ.

Some of you expressed interest in learning more about the whole emergent thing, so here are a couple of resources on the web:

http://www.emergentvillage.com - This site is kind of the official forum for the emergent church. There are blogs, podcasts, and other discussion forums for what is going on with the emergent church.
http://www.brianmclaren.net - This is Brian McLaren's website. It includes some articles by him and other information.
http://jacobswellchurch.org/ - Jacob's Well is a big emergent church here in KC that meets in Westport.

If you all are interested in reading more perhaps we can do some more stuff by McLaren or other authors as a book study in Sunday School or Wed. Night.

The point of all this is how can we adapt our group to meet the challenges of reaching out to our community. We had some good discussion on this Wednesday night, but I invite you all to write your own post or comment on this one with your ideas. How can Journey encourage belonging and spiritual conversation in an open environment?

I also opened with a story on NPR about a church meeting in an LA dance club. If you are interested in hearing that story, the link is here http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14501673.