Emerging Church Conference – Day 1

The Emerging Church Conference hosted by the Center for Action and Contemplation here in Albuquerque, NM (http://www.cacradicalgrace.org/) kicked off today.  There was a lot on the plate as we heard from Phyllis Tickle, Brian McLaren, and Richard Rohr so I think there is significantly too much for me to process now on this blog before I head to bed (and tomorrow promises to be not only a long day, but an early one as well).  But here are a few thoughts.

Phyllis Tickle – while I thought what she had to say was good, I also found it to be her latest book, The Great Emergence, condensed down into a 50 minute thing.  If you want to know what she said, then read the book (it’s a quick read) and I think does give some framework for our conversation now.

Brian McLaren – Much of what he said I had heard before, partially because I’ve read his books and talked with him, but also because I was at the Everything Must Change tour last year (and he even used the same slides which I thought was great).  He began with an exercise – he showed us a video and asked us to count the number of times people passed a basketball.  If you want to view the video, then click here and do this yourself: http://viscog.beckman.illinois.edu/flashmovie/15.php

 

So how many times did people pass the ball?

 

 

Did you notice the gorilla?

If you didn’t, go back and watch the video again.

Brian’s point was that when we’re looking for something in particular (i.e. the number passes) then we miss something else.  So when we’re trained to think about Jesus in a particular way, then what are we missing?

Richard Rohr – I thought he was great tonight!  He talked about being a non-dual thinker (which we in the western world have perfected, being dual thinkers that is).  Oddly he told us not to think and yet I think he gave us a lot to think about… hmmm… 

A couple of things Rohr said: “Jesus did not come to change God’s mind about humanity, but to change humanities mind about God.”

“Great love and great suffering introduce all people to non-dual thinking.”

“Once you need to prove one party right and another wrong, you are not a non-dual thinker.”

Anyway, there is much more to contemplate (a la contemplative, non-dual thinking) but I am too tired to put it down here now.

No More ‘Planned’ Software Launches…

I recently read an article at ZDNet about how the CEO of Red Hat Software has gone on record as saying Windows Vista will be the last “planned” software launch the industry will see, opting instead for more collaborative, open-sourced work (see the article here: http://news.zdnet.com/2424-9595_22-242593.html)

Now, I find this a very interesting corollary for the church as there has been much discussion among some in the church about structure and polity.  While much of what is seen in traditional, mainline congregations is a top-down hierarchy (at least as viewed from the outside… but that’s a whole other discussion), there is now a trend among many “emerging” congregations to eliminate all hierarchy in favor of a flat-structure.  

The push in software development (as seen in the quoted text below) is the sheer number of bugs found in top-down, planned releases such as Vista compared with collaborative, open-source releases such as Linux.  Another reason is to be able to serve the needs of the community because the greater number of people working on the software puts them in touch with more of the community – and in many ways because they themselves have felt the same pain.  So what does this all mean for the church?  I think it is a great idea, and yet in some ways we in mainline denominations (regardless of whether we have clergy or not) are not as open to the idea of open-source theology… interesting to contemplate.

From the ZDNet article:

However, because of the modular development model and the number of parties checking for errors, open-source software comes out with fewer errors and is more organized, he explained. Whitehurst attempted to explain the appeal of open-source software’s participatory “community” model by likening open source to US reality TV competition American Idoland closed products to US pop star Britney Spears.

Of American Idol, he said the record studios were able to spend less to market the eventual winner because audience participation accurately showed which singer was preferred before the competition was over.

Britney Spears, on the other hand, as a “product of millions of dollars in investment” is not a sure bet when each record is released to the public, because the marketing surrounding her was pre-planned and excluded the public, he said.

Whitehurst said during his presentation that development through the open-source community is also faster and often more precise in terms of what customers need, because enterprises are able to contribute code that they have written for their pain points back to the community. He contrasted this with the traditional proprietary method of “listening to customers” and writing code based on that interpretation.