SAN DIEGO UNION TRIBUNE: Spirit moves them: The philosophy within the emergent movement: ‘It’s time for us to take back Christianity’

By Jane Clifford
FAMILY EDITOR
June 21, 2008

It’s not often that you can go out for an evening and enjoy book readings, musical theater and a spiritual message – all in the same place. But that’s exactly what happened for those who showed up for “The Church Basement Roadshow: A Rollin’ Gospel Revival” Sunday night at Christ Lutheran Church in Pacific Beach.

Three guys – Tony Jones, Doug Pagitt and Mark Scandrette – play six characters in their 90-minute show, which is a provocative way to sell their books and reach an audience hungry for more. The show opens with them as 1908 revivalists – Preacher A.L. Withee (Scandrette), Big Brother Duke (Pagitt) and Professor A.W. Hawthorne (Jones).

A revival can get the spiritual juices flowing, and that’s just what happened when Doug Pagitt (left), Mark Scandrette (center) and Tony Jones came to town. Photo: CRISSY PASCUAL / Union-Tribune

“We’re growing a constituency among people who feel disenfranchised, but long for a spiritual path,” Scandrette says.

“Our philosophy is, it’s time for us to take back Christianity,” Jones explains. “It’s not the property of ordained people. It’s not the property of seminary master. It’s not the property of elite people with diplomas. It’s the property and purview of all of us.”

To that end, emergent churches don’t have services; they have gatherings.

“In the early church, everyone sat around, they brought food and had a potluck meal and someone would say, ‘Hey, look, we got a letter from Paul. Let’s read it and discuss it,’ ” Jones says. And the conversations began, and interpretations expanded understanding, Jones says, and faith grew and people went out and did their best to live the way Jesus did, ministering to the sick, the poor, the people looking for God in their lives.

“I would describe it as a network of friends and colleagues who are all committed to being in conversation with one another about being a people of God in the world today,” says Erin Martinson, outreach pastor at Christ Lutheran.

The three friends explain on their Web site why they chose to re-create the atmosphere of a revival.

“Perhaps no American archetype better embodies the glories and struggles of our search for collective meaning and divine purpose than the tortured soul of the self-proclaimed and duly anointed gospel preacher or revivalist – that rare mix of eloquence, showmanship, falsetto emotion, alligator tears and stark piety – selling us God, salvation or a revelation from the best or worst of intentions. But secretly we know that the perspiring troubadour is just like us, and we wonder and we hope that the healing change being proclaimed is really possible – because if there was ever a time when our world needs love and healing and reinvention and redemption, that time is now.”

And in that spirit, the show begins.

The three men of 1908 talk about their lives, their world, their spiritual journey. A clever script lets the audience of about 60 know that, for people back then, times seemed as revolutionary, as tumultuous, as tenuous as in 2008. Slides of advertisements and narrative make it easy to slip back 100 years. And with the stage set, the men bring the audience quickly forward in time. Portraying the great-grandchildren of their historical characters, Pagitt, Jones and Scandrette connect the dots, then link both eras to the time of Jesus and how he responded to challenges of the day.

Using music and humor, and reading excerpts from their books on spirituality, they prompt the audience to consider the thought-provoking message.

“I think a lot of people have been searching and searching,” Jones says. “What people want in a religious community is to ask questions.”

He adds that some of those people don’t buy the answers they hear. “It’s all scripted.”

Don’t misunderstand the emergent church, these three men say. They are Christians to the core, but they want to discuss the Scriptures, find out how to apply them to their lives today, how to live in this world as Jesus did in his. “We still think there is something magical in the life and message of Jesus,” Scandrette says. “Jesus was inviting people to become part of a revolution.”

Over the last decade the emergent church has grown as more people, who hadn’t found what they wanted in traditional Christian churches found each other.

“By 2001, we had formed an organization around our friendship, known as Emergent, as a means of inviting more people into the conversation,” reads the history of Emergent Village. “As time passed, others joined the friendship, and the friendship began generating things like books, events, Web sites, blogs, and cohorts.

The spirit of the movement is evident in the road show.

“I think I’ve always felt this way,” says Loni Vossekuil when the lights came on in the hall. She and husband Craig had come from Encinitas after reading about the road show coming to town. They acknowledge that, though they are in their early 60s, they, too still are searching. They lost the pastor of their former church and are intrigued by the emergent movement.

“I’ve been doing some reading about this,” Craig Vossekuil says.

They liked what they heard during the show, which doubles as a provocative way for the men to sell their books.

Jones, national coordinator of Emergent Village, is author of “The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier.” Pagitt, founder of the network that became Emergent Village, is author of “A Christianity Worth Believing.” Scandrette, executive director and co-founder of ReIMAGINE, a center for spiritual formation in San Francisco, is author of “Soul Graffiti: Making a Life in the Way of Jesus.”

They started their tour last weekend in Santa Monica, moved on to San Diego and will hit 32 cities across the country before they return to their wives and children.

“This summer will be a defining time,” Pagitt says. “We’re preaching a fresh way of life and faith – one that is in rhythm with the life of God.”

Says Scandrette: “People will laugh and sing, but they’ll also be challenged to join the Jesus Revolution.”

An article about ReIMAGINE appeared in the Contra Costa Times last month: See excerpt below:

CONTRA COSTA TIMES: ‘Emerging church’ seeks the justice Jesus sought
Adherents explore a faith of service, find fulfillment in action

By Rebecca Rosen Lum
Contra Costa Times
Article Launched: 06/05/2008

Lyle Birkey of the emerging church movement picks up trash in the Mission district with others…

In an apartment a few steps below street level in San Francisco’s Mission District, several people — most in their 20s — sat in a horseshoe of couches to consider the meaning of service.

In black high-tops, Crocs, hoodies and jeans, they looked much like the hipsters who wait in line Sunday mornings for a table at Boogaloo’s a few blocks away on Valencia Street.

This group of Christians gathers each week to grapple with seven intangibles: service, simplicity, creativity, obedience, prayer, community, and love. A young man in a cap reads Colossians I aloud while some look down, others into the distance. Midway into the evening, all take to the streets, battling an icy wind to pick up trash, scrub graffiti and post signs in shop windows exhorting people to honor their neighborhood with cleanliness.

From left, Emerging church movement members Caroline Pappajohn and Sarah Montoya put up a sign that reads “Our Neighborhood, What We Do Matters” at a doughnut shop in the Mission district of San Francisco, Calif. on Tuesday June 3, 2008. People in the movement aim to live like Jesus, but say they have no use for church as an institution. (Photo by Nader Khouri)

The group is part of the decade-old emerging church movement, an eclectic wave of change propelled by the Internet and peopled globally mainly by the young.

Their Jesus is a radical. They have little use for the institutional church, with its buildings, budgets and boards. They meet in homes. Their aim is to live like Jesus, compelled to service among the poor. They eschew congregations for communities. Their faith is not a doctrine but a conversation — fluid and evolving.

“Experiment is a word we use a lot,” said Adam Klein, who helps lead the loosely organized San Francisco community that calls itself reIMAGINE.

“Nobody has lived in 2008 before and lived the way of Jesus, so you have to figure out what it means to you.”

Their expression of faith harkens back to the early days of Christianity, he said.

“Part of Paul’s job was to encourage people to continue on but without the dogma. When Constantine came around and nationalized the church it became a place where power and control were brokered.”

Estimates place the number of emerging church communities at several hundred and growing. The Internet has figured hugely into the movement’s growth, “not only in connecting, linking, promoting, recording and communicating, but also in the new media mind-set that it is creating,” said Andrew Jones, a New Zealand emergent who blogs from Czechoslovakia under the name tallskinnykiwi.

“The net affects the way we think and relate and store knowledge. It is creating a new set of values and a new hierarchy of leaders. We haven’t seen the half of it yet.”

They know they are not the first believers compelled by faith to give to the needy. Their difference is that traditional Christian charity may involve compassion but not always a commitment to justice, said Brian McLaren, one of the early emergent thinkers and the author of several books, including “Adventures in Missing the Point,” which he wrote with Tony Campolo. “Eventually, we have to deal with the people causing injustice,” McLaren said…The emergent church emphasizes Christ’s message of social justice, seeks the kind of spirituality that flows from that and creates a community that supports that spirituality, he said.

Members of the emerging church movement participate in an exercise with one another in the Mission district of San Francisco, Calif. on Tuesday June 3, 2008. People in the movement aim to live like Jesus, but say they have no use for church as an institution. (Photo by Nader Khouri)

Some emergents embrace ancient ritual, including the Eucharist, and they evangelize, although in social action they may not necessarily talk about their faith at all.

“St. Francis of Assisi said it best: Go preach the gospel and if necessary use words,” said Darin Petersen of Oakland, who travels frequently to Philadelphia for community projects. “The best evangelism is living a contagious life.”

“The problem with (traditional) evangelizing is that it is delivering answers to people who are not seeking them,” he said. “We need to be a peculiar people. Jesus gives the order of what that looks like and what that means….”

“Jesus was political,” said Klein, whose community helped pay for his recent trip to Africa to build mobile medical clinics. “If it was all about the life after, he wouldn’t have been killed the way he was.”

Some ReIMAGINE participants just bought a duplex on an East Oakland street that has been rocked by sideshows and three murders over the past few weeks. They want their new Shalom community to love, serve, and engage the troubled neighborhood, said Nate Milheim.

“What I’ve been excited about is taking Jesus more seriously as a teacher as well as a savior,” Milheim, 30, who is cleaning up the house with his wife, their two daughters and a couple who will share it. “Let’s learn from this master, Jesus, this revolutionary, radical guy. I want to explore what it would be to live like him.”

“I realize we have a lot to learn,” he said. “If the things happen that I dream of happening, it will take a while.”

September 29 - October 26

Soul Graffiti: Making a Life in the Way of Jesus

As you may know, they call me Preacher A.L. Withee– that’s Allen Lockwood Withee–W. I. T. H. double E. Hailing from Wessington Springs, South Dakota. Called to be preacher when I was a tender 12 years old, I’ve traveled far and wide to proclaim the kingdom of love at hand in these present times. I’m the son of a farmer, a proud son of the American plains, and by God’s mercy and holy ghost power, a son of the living God– hallelujah!

I haven’t got much time tonight, so I will get straight to my point. I am a plain speaking man endeavoring to speak to plain and sensible folk. Kind ladies and gentlemen I wish to address the present controversy over the illicit soul Graffiti-trade. — a blight sweeping like wild fire across our great nations public streets, civic buildings and private dwellings– this tagging, scratching, spraying– the questioning of values and assumptions that mars the air-tight and lilly white vistas of our religious landscape. Why the silver bugbear. That’s what’s the matter with this country.

Now I’m sure you know that in every literate society since ancient times we human beings have acted on the impulse to scratch our names, our questions, our wisdom or our subversions upon the floors and walls of public spaces– in both public discource and private consciousness and conversations. The vile pestilence and dirty work of the graffiti-trade is causing a panic that threatens to defile and upset the common decency and fragile sensibilities of the status quo of religious life in these United States that has been so daintily wrought over so many years.

Be it ever so humble there no place like home… without the illicit soul graffiti-trade

Now I ask you, and please be honest with yourself, “If no one was looking –and you could do so annonymously–What would you dare– what would you be tempted to write on walls or sidewalks about your deepest spiritual longings, your doubts, or your questions?

I don’t blame you for the lump that comes to your throat when I ask you this– because I know that you have been tempted by the graffiti-trade. I know i speak to people with discontent and hearfelt questions about what it means to be truly spiritual in the times and places where we live.

Would you confess your dissatisfaction with the substance or limitations of the religious life you have inherited?

Would you admit that secret longing for a larger story that helps you make more sense of all that you see?

Would you confess your illicit longings for community, justice, simplicity, and peace?

Would you admit that you have often found yourself in the valley of the shadow of death? That dark night of the soul called deconstruction?

I believe the villanie of the graffiti-trade, this trafficking in questions and conversation, is a medium of deconstruction, revealing an utterly primitive hunger for renewal that some might say makes space for what is emerging. You and I, ladies and gentlemen, are alive during a time that many believe to be one of the great turning points in history—a time when previous constructions are breaking down and we search together for solutions in an increasingly complex, mobile, interconnected, and fragmented world. This is a time of great possibility– for healing, reconciliation and greater awareness about how we can live together in harmony with our Maker on the planet we call home.

Yet these changing times have created fault lines, particularly within our religious communities. Surely you have heard about the widespread intrigue and controversy over what some have describe as “the emerging church”– one of the main instigators of the illicit-graffiti-trade. But is this really something new?

I suggest to you, dear brothers and sisters, that this phenomenon, rather than representing a particular organization or comtemporaneous movement, is the historic and pervasive process of our collective response to an ever evolving and emerging flow of human consciousness. Show me a time when faithful people have not aganized over the meaning of the gospel of Jesus Christ in their day? The church of Jesus Christ has always been emerging—wrestling with what it means to follow his message and teachings faithfully in particular times and places.

Don’t let anyone fool you. The soul graffiti-trade, this discontent and heartfelt questioning about what it means to be truly spiritual in the times and places where we are living, is dangerous business– utterly and dangerously alive. And I defy anyone to say otherwise. The soul graffiti-trade in its most provocative form, is a tool for revolution that sounds the alarm and calls men, women and children to action. The Graffiti trade reveals tremendous dissatisfaction with religion as usual–it betrays a vile quest for perspectives and practices that integrate, body, mind and spirit with moral, social and political consciousness to address tanglible needs and opportunities in our world. The graffiti-trade leads people down a slippery slope in search of a spiritual path that is not merely a way to believe, but also a way of life.

Well, by the Grace of God I am going to give it a push, with a whoop, for all I know.

You say that the graffiti trade is just an innocent and innoucuous venture in cultural relevance or theological inquiry. Alas, All be damned to hell, if we forget that soul-graffiti is the most potent and vile form of vandalism known to humankind. There is nothing more disruptive, scandalous, or criminal than the very possibility that God the eternal being might actually be speaking into our history and humanity, spraying a message of subversion onto the hard as a brick walls of our hungry hearts, disrupting our assumptions, guiding us toward a new way of being and inviting us into the freedom we fear through the frailty of a trickster, messiah prophet. I mean to tell you this is not child’s play, watch out for this long-haired fanatic from Nazareth whose life, message and sufferings continue as an enduring scandal.

You might as well try and dam Niagra Falls with toothpicks as to stop the raucaus revolution that is being caused by this Nazarene love fiend.

Let me assemble before your minds the possibility that is before us. Experts debate at what point the soul graffiti-trade crosses the line from art-crime to art work. Gradually the voices of dissent can become the voices of hope, generosity and beauty. It is my hope that we can move from being “haters” to creators—imagining and working towards a different and better future together. If we don’t like the direction things are going in we can collaborate with our Maker’s good dreams to seek the kingdom “on earth as it is in heaven.”

In the land of the free and the home of the brave, its time to make beauty with our lives. I am on the side of love. Everybody fall in! Come on, ready, forward, march. right, left, here we come with all the courage we can muster….we can make beauty with our lives. We can expand the boundaries of love in forgotten and unlikely places. By the Grace of God I am going to give it a push, with a whoop, for all I know.

In the name of your pure mother, in the name of your manhood or womanhood, in the name of your wife and the poor innocent children that climb up on your lap and put their arms around your neck, in the name of all that is good and noble, will you pledge yourself to cause of beauty?

WIll you pledge yourself to the cause of the kingdom of Love? Let me hear you say, AMEN!

Will you plege yourself to the path of the Nazarene? Let me hear you say, AMEN!

Nothing illustrates the tensions we feel about religion and our humanity more than the cultural relic of the revival meeting and the revivalist phenonmenon. In America, everyone is converting to something — to Jesus Christ or the teachings of the Buddha, from P.C. to Mac , from City to Suburb or country to city. We are going green or going straight edge, coming out gay or republican, becoming locavoires or vegetarians, quitting our smoking or not buying anything. We put our faith in the latest technology, the newest idea or the best looking person that serves it all up to us just the way we like to hear it.

Perhaps no American archetype better embodies the glories and struggles of our search for collective meaning and divine purpose than the tortured soul of the self-proclaimed and duly annointed preacher or revivalist–That rare mix of eloquence, showmanship, falsetto emotionalism, alligator tears and stark piety–selling us God, salvation or a revelation from the best and worst motives or intentions. Few images are more enduring or annoying than the two-bit, second rate evangelist in a starched white shirt, sweating up a storm as he labors to convince us to repent, to change our ways and to make a fresh start. He is running from what he knows about himself, fleeing from the leaks and shadows of his own brokeness that is briefly suspended by the white/black contrast of heaven and hell, God and Satan, good and evil that he whoops up into an ecstatic fury over 50 or 60 minutes. But secretly we know that the perspiring troubador revivalist is just like us and we wonder and we hope that the healing change being proclaimed is really possible. Because if there was ever a time when our world needs love and healing and reinvention and redemption, that time is now.

“When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs as you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock, to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind, you draw large and startling figures.” Flannery O’Connor