Community and Being

What comes to mind when one typically thinks of converging for an “emergent conversation”? I think the first most applicable term would be blitzkrieg.  Typically the ones I have been involved with usually consisted of the consumption of large quantities of caffeine in a short amount of time. We sit talk and disperse.  So this weekend was a unique and deeply spiritual experience for me on a number of levels. A couple of things stand out to me as uniquely encouraging.

The first would be the way that the day was structured. We had deep conversations throughout the day, however we purposefully gave ourselves time to stop, reflect and ingest the food we had been given. I think so often the American consumerist culture is so inculcated into our very nature that it is a very difficult task to stop and just be. I sat in the middle of the woods under a tree and just meditated on Psalm 46:10 which says “Be still and know that I am God.” This meant for me that I was called to stop doing and start being. This was something that I desperately needed so much more than I understood.

I was part of the group that talked about Peter Rollins new book “How Not to speak of God”. We talked about a number of things but mainly our conversation centered around the ineffability of God. Saturated in so much the American church is this understanding of God that we think we can put him in a box. We tried to hash out what it means for us as followers of Jesus Christ and lovers of the trinity to maintain the awesome mystery that we have been entrusted with and to refrain from the temptation of creating God in our image. What was amazing and deeply encouraging was that at the end of the day we hadn’t answered the questions in black and white sense. Instead we had an enriching experience of being engaged with the mystery of God and we had allowed it to begin to transform us.

We got to see a glimpse of the future. A time where people cross man made religious barriers and begin to focus on what unites us within the kingdom of God. I think for us we understand that inherent within the emergent conversation is a vision that has the unity of believers without uniformity. We came together and remembered our Lord and Savior in a truly communal way.