Emergence

Ok, so this past weekend I attended The Great Emergence conference held at St. Mary's Episcopal Cathedral in Memphis. I got there and it was like somebody turned a San Francisco coffee shop loose in a revival Anglo-gothic nave. I love St. Mary's architecture, yet it has an accessable and quaint sense like a doll house cathedral. The windows were glowing with heavy blue and red tones, people lounging in pews, sipping hot tea, munching on sweet rolls, noisy, messy, unfettered like cathedrals used to be. As Phyllis Tickle pointed out, who was the main attraction for the event, " In the day, cathedrals had no pews and did not have a seating arrangement. People were strewn everywhere like a town market awaiting the signal to pray."



This weekend did not fail to deliver. I was totally enamoured and challenged by newly ordained, "sarcastic Lutheran" Nadia Bolz Weber. Her gift of prose and uncanny ability to see the holy in our gritty culture drew me into the profanity of divine light. God, I have got to figure out how to get her to Holy Trinity. The talented and organizationally gifted Tony Jones and Doug Pagitt from Solomon's Porch in Minneapolis were conveners and emcees. The music was brought to us by the beautiful Celtic sounds of Stefan Walligur's works. There were angli-emergents, metho-emergents, plain emergents, and various curious denominational stripes represented. Clearly the conference convincingly identified that we are in the midst of another Reformation. It was weird that we were so self-aware of our time and movement. What seemed unclear was what exactly is "emergent"? From my view, I felt as if we were going through a convergence. Creeds, denominational peculiarities, recent cultural battles were melting away into a new consensus toward a new authority in the Church. From the middle ages we moved from sola ecclesia (church alone) to sola scriptura (scripture alone) and now we're headed for sola Deus (God alone) . "God alone" type of authority rests with a discerning community, much like the early church, pre-Constantine all over again. It made me think of the adolescence of our own Holy Trinity Church, how we moved from the gay bar to the storefront to the meeting house in sight of 15 years. I thought, in as much as Christendom seems to have a giant rummage sale every 500 years, I can see how Holy Trinity has shifted every 5 years. Our recent past five years of assimilation and validation seeking are coming to a close. The gifts of an emergent, queer affirming, warmly hospitable, musically eclectic, liturgically driven, diverse community based in the eucharist is already our past and is our future. We are a church from the get-go that is welcome to all, thoroughly messy and wildly unpredictable. Every Sunday we gather with words garnered from our experience, words given by our tradition and words broken over a table. We are an oddity in the United Church of Christ and a bastard to the Episcopal Church. The journey of Holy Trinity roams further into the great "rummage sale" of the church. Like we began back in 1990, we know that denominations will continue to submerge while the affinity in practice and belief will emerge. Once again, on a simply practical level, I see that the pews need to go and the coffee house needs to come back in. Liturgy matters. Beauty, metaphor, and fairy tales have their place in a binary world of ins and outs.



Gathered in the cathedral there we all were. When it came time for the body of Christ to divide up into it's distinctive parts like all conference meetings seem to do. There were no UCC emergents except us. And what exactly is an UCC emergent? More than likely the UCC would fall into a social justice category. Holy Trinity has some of that social justice stuff but that does not seem to be our center. Metho-emergents broke out in song singing, "blessed be the tie that binds." Presby-emergents planned for opportunities to influence their sessions. Emergents went and got another cup of coffee. Then, off we we went to join hands with the Angli-emergents and an affinity was confirmed. In unison, as we broke, we exclaimed, "Thanks be to God!"