Mark Scandrette

In the mail I recently received a couple of copies of An Emergent Manifesto of Hope, a book that I contributed to and edited by my friends Tony Jones and Doug Pagitt. I think it is the best and most diverse compilation of writings by people considered to be part of the emerging church. Tony and Doug introduce the chapter sections in a helpful and friendly way. The articles contributed by 25 emerging church voices provide cautions, encouragements and challenges to us as we imagine and work toward a different and better future. Here’s an excerpt from my chapter entitled: The Messy and Fertile Process of Becoming:

Some among us, like the animals of the forest, have sensed a storm on the horizon, an intuition and murmuring of the torrent of change affecting the general culture and the church–shifts in social consciousness, globlization, economics, increasing mobility, plurality and societal fragmentation. These are examples of the many changes that determine the landscape of our journey to navigate faithfulness in the way of Jesus in the world we live in–changes that are coming and have now come.

People seem to be affected by these shifts in varying intensity dependent on region, personality and social location. A common result is a great desire for conversation with people who are also struggling to make sense of things. The emerging church is a place where people have felt the freedom to explore questions and experiment with new forms of lifestyle and corporate practice. Often these questions have been about the essence of the Christ-message, vocation, the nature and form of the church, cultural and philosophical analysis and the present agenda of God in the world.

We resonate with the story of two friends walking along the road to Emmaus, discussing the significance of the life and teachings of Jesus. During their conversation they were met by a stranger, and in the presence of a stranger their hearts were strangely warmed. Many of us have felt the presence of Jesus in the midst of our conversations with one another. For people in our time, conversation may be the first step toward entering the way. Conversation is also a path towards a greater sense of authentic relationship than some have experienced in more formal structures. Whatever the emerging church becomes, it began as a generative friendship among younger entrepreneurial leaders and seekers—an improvised support system for people desperate for connections with others experimenting with new ideas on faith and community.
We should acknowledge that for many of us the door was opened to reimagine faith and the church through pain, disappointment, failure, fatique, burn-out, public or private humiliation, or a sense of personal alienation. It can be argued that any social movement attracts anomalies, extremists and crazies— and the emergent phenomenon is no exception. We have brought along our peculiarities, unhealthy pathologies and shadow sides. Explorations into emerging faith have caused conflict in marriages. In isolated cases the emerging church community has been the stage on which people have played out their personal disintegration.

At times I’m fearful that permission to be deconstructive has attracted personalities that are prone to criticism, angst and melancholy. Some of us seem to avoid our unresolved personality issues, organic depressive tendencies and relational difficulties by transference to a perceived “spiritual crisis.” Some among us need encouragement and support to face our personal difficulties more directly rather than attributing so much of our struggles to ecclesiological or philosophical issues.

Even healthy rethinking of faith can still produce a profound sense of disequilibrium. My friend Craig Burnett suggests that deconstruction and reconstruction are regular rhythms in a life of apprenticeship to Jesus. We should not be too quick to dismiss or expect people to just “get over” their deconstruction– as if to graduate sequentially onto reconstruction. But concurrently we should encourage one another to imagine and enact proactive communal solutions and reconstructions.

Evan Howard suggests that spiritual conversion, rather than being a singular event is more accurately a series of distinctive epiphanies (ie. a conversion to the role of the Spirit, a conversion to social justice, a conversion to contemplative practices, etc). These are not conversions from one system to another, but represent the gradual complimentary and holistic renewal of the soul. These progressive awakenings can sometimes create a sense of grief and regret. For anyone not in a space of liminality, criticism, doubt and risky exploration may seem pessimistic and deconstructive. When we experience the deconstruction of our faith we are in good company with many of the characters of ancient scripture, whose expectations of what it meant to follow God were constantly being challenged and subverted. Our constructions of faith and practice are dismantled and at times, destroyed, so that we can approximate a more coherent and integrative orthopraxis.

Next week we are heading to Washington, D.C. for a family learning trip and book promotion. We are also looking forward to seeing friends. We thought that before we venture to Europe together we should stop by this nation’s capitol to study U.S. government and history. I will also be visiting Emergent cohorts in D.C. and Baltimore, promoting SOUL GRAFFITI. Here are the details, in case you live in the area:

Monday April 9: The D.C. Emergent Cohort at The Harp and Fiddle in Bethesda, MD 7-9 P.M.
Tuesday April 10: Baltimore Emergent Cohort at The Bare Bones Grill Ellicot City, MD 7-9 P.M.

We returned yesterday from our second annual silent retreat in Kirkwood. Since I generally talk 16 hours a day, it was quite refreshing to be forced into silence and a bit of solitude. The weekend was a good time to refocus and reflect on my priorities and goals. Somehow this year I would like to live with a greater sense of center, even when I am active and life is full. Here’s a poem I wrote about an experience I had this weekend:

Cautiously I step
onto the frozen crust
of deep packed snow.

Once or twice I hesitate
falling through up to my waste
Slowly learning to plant my feet
like stairs along the slope.

Past the fur trees I ascend
climbing a wall up toward the sky
on a path that goes on endlessly
My heart pounds
and my lungs labor
in the thin Sierra Nevada air.

At the top of the ridge
the wind howls through the stone crevaces
as I inch my way up towards the pinnacle
clawing through the snow
my hands scrape against the jagged ledge

I stop to catch my breath and notice
that I am at the top of the world!
with a three-hundred-sixty degree view
of surrounding mountains
stretching out in every direction
along the horizon.

I make my bed in the black lava
slowly removing my clothes
pressing my body against the warm ancient flow.

A top this perch I lay amidst snowdrifts
exposed to the sky
the sun beating down on my face
–and to shield my eyes from the brightness
I turn my head
gazing toward the mesa
on the far side of the valley

Hours pass like minutes
Nothing visible changes
until a cloud rolls by
veiling the mountain in cold blue shadows
that make my skin prickle

I look up at the swirling mist dancing above me
and wonder, “How long has it been?”
“Months? Years? A decade?”

This afternoon I will be still
sitting in silence, watching,
Remembering how small I am
in the vast expanse
of earth, sky and eternity
Bathed in the tempermental radiance of your wild.

There is a rapidly approaching event near San Francisco you may want to participate in. I think it has the potential to strengthen relationships among those of us in the Bay Area who long for a more holistic and integrated practice of faith and mission.

My friend Brian McLaren and Rene Padilla will be the key note speakers at the Integral Mission Conference in San Jose, March 30-31. There will also be workshops by local leaders, including myself.  The event addresses key questions:  What does a well-formed disciple look like? How does mission fuel discipleship? AND How does discipleship fuel mission?

For more information and registration, go to  www.integral-mission.org

Best wishes!

–mark

There was an early March heat wave
the year I turned sixteen
And on my birthday
my friend Erich and I
Built a fire
And took our shirts off
to bath in the sunlight
Along the banks of the Mississippi

From noon to sundown
we were Tom Sawyer and huckleberry Finn
Camping out along the mythic river
The white sand beach
Was bright and warm
and our minds swam
With the hopes and dreams of growing manhood
bathed in the confidence of new found strength,
first loves and an aching search for identity
By the end of the afternoon
We felt the sting of sunburn on uur acne pocked faces, arms and shoulders
as we walked back toward the small house
Where we were still our mothers boys

In four months time I would move away
And we would begin to loose the tender magic of our adolescent friendship:
Our shared secrets,
earnest discoveries and virginal innocence.
Erich would go bald prematurely, become a nurse,
move to Chicago, marry a woman named Lisa,
and complain about Candida infections and New Age conspiracies
I would settle in California– a world away
Where the ties of our kinship, shared geography and religion quickly unraveled—lost in the tangled fragments of a mobile society.

Twenty years later
On this same day
The weather is unseasonably warm again
And my face stings again with the surprising kiss of early spring sunshine
I feel the strength of my youth slowly fading,
But Life still feels mostly brand new,
bursting forth with possibilities
And the Mississippi still flows
swiftly following its course
down past St. Louis to New Orleans,
and out into the gulf of Mexico
and up into the circulating breeze of the moist ocean air that I breath
on this warm March evening.