Playing Catch Up

It has been a bit too long since my last post. However, not long enough to merit a full account of my recent thoughts since I need to go to bed and I am exhausted. I have been here at the Emergent Worship, Art, Liturgy, Preaching conference and it has been interesting. I must say that I am still a bit surprised that worship was included in the list as opposed to being an overarching concept (i had thought the name was worship: art, liturgy, Preaching, but there is a comma, not a colon).

The main sessions have been excellent thus far. Brian McLaren always has good things to say and tonight a woman named Maggie Dawn spoke and it was spectacular. I hope I can find a recording of it somewhere becuase she spoke to my heart and affirmed a lot of the thoughts I have been having about scripture lately. In fact, she poetically spoke on a topic that Kathryn and I had in the car on the way to Boston last week and explained it much better than I did. She was attempting to clarify the understanding that all scripture is inspired. She believes that the inspiration of the scriptures is not about the precision of the words, but about the power of the poetic to speak into particular human situations. I really like that statement. She also commented, "The Word of God is the second person of the Trinity, not the fourth and it should be treated as such." It was good stuff.

The seminars have been so so. I think I have just not gone to the right ones for where I am at currently. They were the ones that I wanted to go to, but they were not what I had hoped they would be. It has been to no fault of the speakers, everyone has done a good job so far, I have just not resonated with them as much.

My overall impression compared to three years ago (my last emergent experience) is interesting. Three years ago we were all still searching, I felt we were all very new to the conversation and the bookstore only had about 10 books and half of them did not even address the "emergent church" specifically (like Dallas Willard's Divine Conspiracy). However, now there are 75 books and 30 videos and 20 gurus...it is a different scene. I am still hearing, "we don't have any answers, just questions," but I believe it a little less this time around. So far this is not really a criticism, I need to think some more about it. We will see how the rest of the conference goes and I will probably comment more.