The final senior paper post

I spent a good portion of this semester working on my senior paper and finally turned in the final draft on Friday. It went through several drafts and I worked closely with an academic adviser to clean and tighten it up. The title of the paper is Toward a Postmodern Youth Ministry: An Examination of Postmodern Youth Culture in Conversation with the Emerging Church.

I am presenting a distilled version of the paper this Tuesday, May 1 at the Research Symposium for Senior Recognition Day here at school. If you’re a student at Luther and you’re interested, it’s at 10:10 in the King room on the second floor of the Union.

I’ve also uploaded the paper and would love to hear some feedback. You can download it here (PDF, 197kb). It is seventeen pages total, but just think of it as reading a chapter in a book. If you read it, you can leave me feedback via commenting on this post.

• Kester Brewin is the author of Signs of Emergence, a book from the new Emersion line of books to be released on July 1. “If you read the book, you’re not reading something by someone paid to be a Christian. You’re not reading something by an academic stuck in a dark library. I teach math in high schools in London. I make short films. I read Pynchon and Eggers[!]. But I’m also passionate about practical, dirty theology forged in the everyday.” He’s a man after my own heart. 03/02/2007
• Andrew Jones (TallSkinnyKiwi) offers his review of the new book Listening to the Beliefs of Emerging Churches: Five Perspectives (@ Amazon). “Critics who say the emerging church leaders are not clear on their theology should shut the heck up and buy this book.” 02/14/2007
• Scot McKnight has written another great article regarding the emerging church for Christianity Today entitled “Five Streams of the Emerging Church”. The five streams are: prophetic, postmodern, praxis-oriented, post-evangelical, and political. Related: Senior paper shift (has a link to another of Scot’s articles). 01/20/2007

Richard Dawkins, Atheism, and Christianity

Richard Dawkins is omnipresent.

His new book, The God Delusion, is currently #6 on the Amazon.com bestselling book list, and lately his name has been popping up everywhere in my life. I first saw his name on kottke.org a while back, and about a week ago I read an article that mentions him at TSK (which I posted as a digression). I have subsequently seen several stories about him on Digg, most notably one entitled Atheist Richard Dawkins Destroys Students from Jerry Falwell’s University (500+ comments!), which links to a video of a rather lenghty Q&A session with Dr. Dawkins. I probably wouldn’t have thought too much of it, but then during our student-led worship on Sunday night the speaker referenced a recent issue of Time magazine that features him in the cover story, God vs. Science. And just to top things off, I passed a professor today who was holding a book of his under her arm.¹

Here’s how I feel about the whole situation.²

Read the rest of this entry »

1. I could actually only see “ichard wkins” because her arm was covering half of the book, but who else would it be, right? ↩
2. To be fair, I haven’t read his book, and I am not very familiar with any of his arguments or agendas. At this point I just want to provide an overarching reaction to and analysis of what I think is happening. ↩

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.

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?).

A postmodern canon

can·on (noun): a sanctioned or accepted group or body of related works. [the canon of great literature]

Precipice Magazine, an “online Christian resource for dialogue, interaction and opinion about… the postmodern era; as well as the subsequent rise of the emergent church,” is publishing a list of books to include in a ‘postmodern canon’ (one page says it will be 50 books, another says 40). They just published Part 4 of the series, which contains books 16-20.

I’ve read at least one book in each of the four sections so far. Those books are Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, A Generous Orthodoxy by Brian McLaren, The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller, and God’s Politics by Jim Wallis.

I really want to read a few of the books on that list, like Stanley Grenz’s A Primer on Postmodernism (I added it to my wishlist a few days ago), but I’ve got a lot more reading to do first.

Tony Jones forum follow-up

Being home, attending Valley Church and its new(ish) college ministry, and conversing with/ listening to Tony Jones was amazing.

Sunday night, he spoke to the church’s high school group about humanizing versus objectifying people.

Monday, however, was where it was at. Tony spoke to and fielded questions from a small group of area youth pastors and volunteers for nearly three hours on Monday morning. Topics ranged from Tony’s life story to postmodernity to theology of the cross to the emerging church to methodology (how to “do” youth ministry).

There’s really no way I could sum up everything here, but I did take notes (unfortunately, the conversation was not recorded). If you’re up to trying to decipher my notes, you can download them here (in Rich Text Format). Some of it probably won’t make sense out of context, and if I had more time on my hands, I would annotate the notes but that’s just not an option at the moment.

Thanks to Brandon Barker for having the courage to invite Tony into your house and church, and thanks to Tony Jones for having the courage to rethink important Christian issues and talk openly about them.

Tony Jones

I am in Des Moines today and tomorrow. I came home to attend a mini-conference (edit: at Valley Church… no, I’m not embarassed) led by Tony Jones, the newly appointed National Coordinator for Emergent-US. Tony has penned five books to date, including Postmodern Youth Ministry and The Sacred Way: Spiritual Practices for Everyday Life.

Tonight he is speaking to my youth group, and tomorrow morning he is leading a forum for youth pastors and workers. I plan on taking notes and (maybe) posting them here when I get back.

What is the emerging church?

You may have noticed that I am intrigued by what is known as the ‘emerging church’. There is button on the right side of the page that says “Friend of Emergent,” and emerging church even has its own category for posts. But what the heck is it?

Scot McKnight wrote an article for The Covenant Companion titled “The Future or Fad: A Look at the Emerging Church Movement” (download .pdf) that is the most concise and articulate description of the emerging church I’ve read to date. If you are a Christian that has no idea what the emerging church is, I suggest you take a few minutes to read this short article; you might be surprised how much you resonate with it (and if you don’t, that’s okay, too). Here’s a quote from the article to whet your appetite:

The EM [Emerging Movement] prefers global theological affirmations and the classical creeds rather than denominationally shaped theological creeds, and the reason for this is clear: the EM is a missional shaped ecclesiology that seeks to unite Christians for the sake of unleasing the gospel to change the world, rather than a theological movement designed to demand conformity on specific theological issues.

Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

What’s your theological worldview?

Here’s mine:

“You scored as Emergent/Postmodern. You are Emergent/Postmodern in your theology. You feel alienated from older forms of church, you don’t think they connect to modern culture very well. No one knows the whole truth about God, and we have much to learn from each other, and so learning takes place in dialogue. Evangelism should take place in relationships rather than through crusades and altar-calls. People are interested in spirituality and want to ask questions, so the church should help them to do this.”

Emergent/Postmodern		93%
Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan		75%
Neo orthodox		54%
Charismatic/Pentecostal		54%
Classical Liberal		50%
Roman Catholic		36%
Modern Liberal		36%
Reformed Evangelical		25%
Fundamentalist		0%

What's your theological worldview? (created with QuizFarm.com)

I wish I would have taken this three and/or four years ago to compare results.

Faith Journey

I stumbled upon a post the other day that almost perfectly describes where I am on my faith journey. The post, called A Different Kind of Evangelical, is by Steve Bush. I highly recommend that you take four or five minutes and give it a read.

If you’ve read this website, you know that I read A New Kind of Christian and A Generous Orthodoxy by Brian McLaren and have been investigating the Emerging Church. I’ve come a long way in my journey of faith since I was a senior in high school, and I know that I have a long way to go. In fact, the journey is never over.

I recently wrote an email to a former professor of mine, who moved to New York to teach at a graduate school. I’ll let the email do the talking:

I’ve been doing a lot of personal reading this semester, and one book in particular is of interest. I read “A New Kind of Christian” by Brian McLaren, one of the leaders in what is known as the Emerging Church (I’m not sure if you’ve heard of it or not). Without minimizing the movement, the main idea is that as we shift into a new era - Postmodernity - we need to rethink how we do church. After I read that book, which blew my mind, I read “A Generous Orthodoxy” by the same author and it is equally mind blowing.

I’ve been reflecting on these readings and I am almost upset that I didn’t read them three or four years ago, before I came to college. I would say (and I think you would agree) that I came to college a conservative Christian and I was searching for something “better” or maybe more relevant. Well, I think the whole time I was here you were pointing me in the right direction but I never REALLY caught on. I find myself wishing I could take all of your classes again with this new set of glasses on, you know? I don’t think I could have arrived here without your influence, yet I think I could be much further on my journey. I remember specifically you giving the class a handout on postmodernity and at the time I was really confused. I think I’m starting to get it, and better yet, I find myself resonating with it.

She hasn’t written back yet, but I’m sure she is incredibly busy with finals and such. I want to do a lot more reading and a lot more reflecting on all of this - it is very exciting.

Emerging in Blue Like Jazz

In the short span of time that I’ve owned Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz (about 9 or 10 months), it has become one of my favorite pieces of literature. I read the book several times, discussed it with my high school guys this past summer, and led a discussion here at school on it this semester. The book resonated with me in a big way, and I never actually questioned why it did (”it resonated with me because it made sense, duh”) until recently.

I recently read A New Kind of Christian by Brian McLaren, and I am now about 2/3 of the way through his A Generous Orthodoxy. I’m taking my time with the latter so that it might sink it a little better. These two books probably have affected and continue to affect me more than anything I have ever read. McLaren’s ideas make more sense to me than anything I heard about Christian faith in the first eighteen or so years of my life. In the emerging church conversation, about which I have posted in the past, McLaren is one of the prominent voices.

After immersing myself in this idea of “the emerging church” I began reflecting on some things, including Blue Like Jazz. It occured to me that perhaps the reason the book affected me so much was because it shares many of the ideas of the emerging church, although it is never explicitly mentioned. So I kept thinking about this and even thought about bringing it up in the discussion I am leading on Blue Like Jazz. And then I found something.

As usual, I was wasting my time on the internet when I came upon the article for the emerging church in Theopedia, an encyclopedia of Biblical Christianity and counterpart to Wikipedia. In section six of the article, “favorite books”, Blue Like Jazz is mentioned with a parenthetical statement saying, “also could be considered favorable” to the ideas of the emerging church. It was a good feeling to have made that connection in my head and then discover that it wasn’t just a fanciful theory but that others think the same thing - in an encyclopedia nonetheless.

I guess my main point is that if you enjoyed Blue Like Jazz, it might benefit you to look into the emerging church movement. My post entitled The Emerging Church is a good starting point, and an even better starting point is picking up A New Kind of Christian by Brian McLaren.

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