2006 October » JakeBouma.com

Emerging church is the kitchen

October 31st, 2006 | Comments (1) |

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!

Emerging Church | Comments

1 comment »

Senior paper shift

October 30th, 2006 | Comments (2) |

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.

Academics, Emerging Church |

2 comments »

Three highly questionable food purchases at Wal-Mart

October 29th, 2006 | Comments (6) |

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?

Food/Drink |

6 comments »

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