Emerging church is the kitchen

I stumbled on googlism.com, a website that:

was created as a fun tool to see what Google “thinks” of certain topics and people.

You can search who, what, when, or where. I tried searching my full name first with no results, so then I just tried “Jake” and I had a good laugh. My next impulse was to search “emerging church” and the results were pretty good. Since it searches all websites with the phrase “emerging church” it brings up those opposed to the emerging church as well (e.g., “emerging church is a bunch of whiners and complainers”). I thought many of the responses, however, were dead on. Here are a few I thought were particularly authentic:

emerging church is still in the process of being born
emerging church is about the spirit producing missional kingdom
emerging church is along the lines of orthodoxy/heterodoxy
emerging church is a return to [no direct object here is effective, huh?]
emerging church is bottom up/grassroots and not hierarchical

Of course, there are several pretty funny ones (which makes me wonder from which pages they were drawn):

emerging church is just three things
emerging church is true—somewhere
emerging church is billed directly
emerging church is a bunch of whiners and complainers
emerging church is dog
emerging church is the kitchen

Heck, with this new tool doing all the work, writing my new senior paper will be a snap!

Senior paper shift

In order to graduate from Luther College, one must either (a) write an extended (20+ page) academic paper in his/her major or (b) organize a creative senior project such as an art show, etc. Because my major, Religion, is an academic one, I must write a paper. The senior paper is a one credit hour “course” which is a faculty-guided independent project. I optimistically enrolled in the senior paper course for this fall, hoping to get it out of the way so that I might have an easy spring semester. I submitted a proposal with the title of The Function of Music and Dance in Communal Utopian Societies in the Early Nineteenth Century.

Now, I know that gets you going, but not so much me. I emailed a professor in the department and asked if I could write my paper next semester instead, and on the topic of the emerging church. Now this gets me going. I also asked if he’d be my academic sponsor for my grant proposal to attend Mainline Emergent/s: Conversations in Theology, Hope and Practice at Columbia Theological Seminary in January 2007. I received an enthusiastic response to both questions. I can’t wait to write this paper (I’m not sure I ever thought I’d say that).

If you’ve no idea what the emerging church is, here is a full transcript (.pdf) of Dr. Scot McKnight’s address “What is the Emerging Church?” at a conference called An Eternal Word in an ‘Emerging World’? at Westminster Theological Seminary.

Three highly questionable food purchases at Wal-Mart

The following are actual purchases I made at the Decorah Wal-Mart in the last four years.

1. A very large, tupperware-like container of Banana chips.

2. A twelve pack of Pepsi-Cola Holiday Spice, without having previously tried the (disgusting) product.

3. Totino’s Chicken & Cheese Quesadilla Mexican Style Rolls and taco sauce.

Honorable mention: Coke Blāk.

What is your most questionable food purchase?

• I cannot possibly buy Girl Scout cookies from your daughter at this time. “The fact that she has employed you, her mother, in the execution of her sales reflects a lazy, manipulative approach to what could have been a valuable learning experience and community-building exercise.” 10/27/2006
• Favcol is a website whose background is “flickr’s favourite colour”. They analyze each photo tagged with “favcol” to work out the average color and then use that color for the background. Maybe I’ll start tagging my flickr photos with “favcol”. 10/24/2006
• 50 interesting science facts. “#3: 10 percent of all human beings ever born are alive at this very moment.” 10/24/2006
• Will Braun writes about high efficiency worship for Geez Magazine. “Imagine, instead of the usual Sunday service, let’s have a fun funeral for the church air conditioner, or a blessing service for the new high-efficiency furnace, or an anointing of the caulking to be used around those old windows.” I wouldn’t mind a subscription (wink, wink). 10/24/2006

A photoblog

• Choose the iPod nano (PRODUCT) RED Special Edition and Apple will give $10 of its purchase price to the Global Fund to fight AIDS in Africa. 10/13/2006
• I won a free copy of the book Divine Nobodies: Shedding Religion to Find God by Jim Palmer. Adam from Pomomusings had a contest and because I responded within 1.5 hours of the post being up, I won the book. 10/12/2006
• A Chevy Corsica, tendonitis, and Mean Gene’s Pizza are in the pan. Apparently, so is Jesus. Notice that the “P” of “Pan” doubles as a Chi Rho cross. 10/12/2006

How (Not) to Speak of God

Fall break is coming up soon and it marks the one year anniversary of when I read A New Kind of Christian by Brian McLaren. It is an incredible, eye-opening book that I have since loaned to several people. Shortly before I read that book I became intrigued by the emergent church conversation and read that ANKOC was a good starting point, so I read it.

My goal this fall break is to read Peter Rollins’ How (Not) to Speak of God (back cover). Adele Sakler has written a great article, which is the first in a four-part series, about the book for Church and Postmodern Culture: Conversation (here’s a .pdf if you prefer). The article has several tantalizing quotes from Rollins’ book, and I am very excited to dig in when I finally have some free time during break. I’ll be sure to write a review shortly after I am finished with it.

In an interview with Leif Hansen, Brian McLaren says:

One of the things that I love about [How (Not) to Speak of God]… is that I think it correctly identifies so much of the problem as [to] the way we speak of God… The God who would really exist has to always be greater than the language that we use in speaking about God. It gives us permission to doubt the way we speak about God as an act of faith in saying that the real God would have to be better than the way we speak about God.

Relevant Magazine recently published a concise and balanced review of the book. Also, I did some poking around and it looks like the author has a blog (who doesn’t?).

• There are lots of myths about the emerging church out there, and this post responds to most of them. 10/11/2006
• Here’s a fascinating flash animation of the imperial history of the Middle East. In 90 seconds, you can see 5,000 years of empires rising and falling, but the most intersting thing is at the very end when Jerusalem and Baghdad are shown with all of the various empires layered underneath. 10/11/2006

Popped collars

A friend of mine tipped me off to a picture of mine appearing on poppedcallarsarelame.com (halfway down). This is interesting for several reasons.

First, the webmaster is breaking copyright law by using the image on his website without my persmission. You can see on the right-hand side of the flickr page that the image has “All rights reserved”. Apparently all poppedcollarsarelame.com’s webmaster did was a search on flickr for “popped collars”. That search reveals several of the pictures features on poppedcollarsarelame.com such as this one, this one (apparently these two guys are friends; look at the comments) and this one. The first two are protected under a Creative Commons License, but the last one, like mine, is “All rights reserved.”

Second, it is a bit ironic that this particular photo made it to the poppedcollarsarelame.com (I am getting sick of typing that) gallery because our dodgeball team was making fun of popped collars in the first place. This explains why we are all sporting layered polos and why Tom and I have particularly ridiculous hairdos/facial expressions.

Maybe he just really despises popped collars, or maybe he’s just trying to make a few bucks. That would certainly explain the Popped Collars Are Lame.com Store. Regardless, I sent him a message via the contact form on his website with a link to this post. I don’t mind the picture being on the website, but I would appreciate a little more effort put into contacting the photos’ owners.

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