Emergent Brethren

Brian McLaren is on a nation-wide tour this year and next promoting and talking about his new book, Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crisis, and a Revolution of Hope. Here in the Pacific Southwest District, we are organizing a group to hear him when he speaks in San Diego next March.

One thought has been on my mind the past few days. . . there are lots of people who drop-in on this site and some who write on the site. Would you be interested if I set-up one page on this site that would focus on blogging on a particular book?

Martin mentioned that he’s reading the above mentioned book. I need to read the book. Others in the PSWD will be reading the book for Brian’s appearance in San Diego. It might be interesting if we read the book together and posted comments on a new page for this site. If it would be helpful, I could set-up a reading schedule, so that we would be more likely to post comments on the same book section. Or, we could just post comments without any organization.

What do you think? If a few of you post comments to this post and like the idea, I’ll be happy to set it up!

Blessings,
Jeff Glass

Here is a link to an interesting conversation Len Sweet had about emerging church http://www.georgefox.edu/journalonline/archives/fall05/emerging.html

Its late on Thursday night, but I was really inspired and had fun at the opening session of “Off the Map Live” in Seattle. The details of the conference can be found at www.off-the-map.org. I was attracted to the conference for a few reasons: 1) I’m always attracted to an event that has Brian McLaren speaking. 2) Russ Matteson has said great things about Diana Butler-Bass. She’s here too. 3) Jim Henderson (Off the Map founder) has a great sense of humor and a very disarming way of pointing-out some of the things that need changing in the church. 4) Its always fun to come to an Off the Map event. 5) It was cheap– $79 for 2 full days.

Here are a few random quotes from tonight’s opening session that made me want to stop and think while the speaker kept going. . .

From Diana Butler-Bass:
“Every 500 years, there has been a major shift in Western Culture. Starting with the birth of Christ, 500 years later the Roman Empire fell. Afterwards, we entered the dark ages, followed by the Reformation (beginnings of modernity) and now we live in a time when another major shift is going-on.”

“Modernity is a culture of hubris — our ways are the right ways. For Christians, postmodernity opens the door to a spiritual culture of humility instead of hubris.”

From Brian McLaren:
“The Church impacted the Roman Empire into Christianity, but the Roman Empire impacted the church into empire-ism.”

From Richard Twiss (a native American):
“Native Americans are marginalized by the dominant culture church as a perpetual mission field.”

“When the chips are down, the buffalo is empty.”

From Todd Hunter:
“Fear is an evil master.”

I’m attaching a Word doc that has more thoughts by Brian and Diana. Brian said he dropped his prepared notes and spoke about 30 minutes off the top of his head. I found the comparison of traditional church to classical music to be very helpful.

More Thoughts by Brian McLaren and Diana Butler-Bass

Blessings,
Jeff Glass

I absolutley love reading Mark Batterson’s blog and highly recommend it to you!  Here is a link to another blog that has a novel idea that I thought would resonate with many Brethren….  http://www.junkycarclub.com/

Yesterday, my church had a prayer meeting for the fire situation in California. One news report this morning said that more people have been evacuated in Southern California than those evacuated for Katrina. I don’t know if that is true, but over 500,000 evacuees is the largest number ever in California history. The fires this week have been much worse than those of 4 years ago.

I was asked to create 4 prayer experiences for the prayer service today. It was a short-notice affair. I’m sending them on to you, in case you would like to add your prayers to those of others in the midst of this tragedy.

I created 4 stations: one each for those who have been displaced (victims.doc & fire prayer requests.doc), emergency personnel (firefighters.doc), our own feelings and emotions (our feelings.doc), and an offering table (our response.doc).

After I printed out the prayer requests, I burned the edges of the paper to make it look like the requests came right out of the fire.

I’ve also attached some pictures to give you an idea of my set-up. After I took the picture of the offering station, we added some small material items (bottle of water, tooth brush, tooth paste, kleenex, etc.) to symbolize one way we are giving.

If you use these ideas, or modify them, please let me know!

Blessings to you,
Jeff

Prayer Station Signs

Pictures of the Prayer Stations