::: post-protestant thoughts :::

Tuesday, December 07, 2004

::: BIGGER emergent events :::

my heart just got flooded ... by the latest post by bill bean at his new site I might add . . . (if you don’t read bill regularly you should he is blog worthy!) the conversation is around the nature of the latest ways the emergent movement is expressing itself . . . increasingly larger venues and more frequently . . . and sadly more involvement by publishers and authors not just folks gathering . . . the combination of the original post and the follow ups so deeply 'pinged' my heart that I needed to develop my thoughts here because of the inevitable length ...

for me it seems that much of this increasing publicity around big emergent events is around our motivations for fame and money ... all to often my feelings were sort of secretly held that in the modern church BIGGER all to often just equates to spiritual pride . . . to accompany that my feelings were often that the ‘sense of urgency’ often communicated by ‘professional clergy’ around evangelism initiatives were merely covert attempts at monument building for those individuals personally and their reputations within the larger organizations they represent . . . in business we un-apologetically call that climbing the corporate latter and market share . . . and in this increasing scenario of larger and more frequent emergent conferences i don’t honestly see a lot of dissimilar features . . . sadly.

I am concerned that it is at the most rudimentary levels . . . this movement is being unnecessarily influenced by book publishers, distributors and media types . . . big events are more profitable for them and not necessarily what best for the ‘body of Christ’ . . . my feeling is that this is to far removed from the heart and beginnings of this whole ‘following Jesus thing’ . . . we (or more specifically, i) need to be often reminded that this all started as a simple conversation among a few friends and a few relatives around a lake ... its focus was not on theology (as much as I love that), it was not a focus on structure, accounting algorithms, premises or conclusions . . . nor do I believe it intended to be a focus on tax status and vast wealth and organized property accumulation . . .

amazingly I can’t also help but notice that many of the ‘original bloggers’ that have appreciated significant exposure with these publishers have oddly enough become increasing more conspicuous in their noticeable blogging absence . . . many only periodically blog now if at all . . . some have published their blogs and unfortunately are now busy feeding these ‘nationally recognized’ big events . . . to me that is sad

that honestly confuses me . . . that creates in my mind the same kinds of complications that buildings and parking lots do for the institutional church . . . and the trajectory that this is creating is dangerous in my opinion . . . much of this ‘big event’ approach is not being propelled by the grass roots emergent members themselves . . . but instead by the publishers . . . the media producers … the folks that see the emerging church as the ‘next big thing’ . . . and that next big thing has the potential to become a revenue source … a new target market or demographic . . . they're just trying to re-package the same old version of protestantism … but only cooler, and perhaps pierced or with a tatoo. bid deal.

peace :::

# posted by david : 12/07/2004 04:02:00 AM