An Emergent Manifesto of Hope

An Emergent Manifesto of Hope (video)

Sample Chapter (Sally Morgenthaler)

15: Leadership in a Flattened World

Grassroots Culture and the Demise of the CEO Model;

Sally Morgenthaler

What is leadership in an age of unprecedented connectedness? When information is as accessible as the Blackberry in your back pocket? When the world no longer needs data brokers, when the word authority inspires only suspicion and revolt, and when business, political, and religious icons are deconstructed at the click of a mouse button? What does it really mean to be in charge of anything?

Nothing. Because, in the new and increasingly flattened world, being in charge is an illusion. Being in charge worked (and marginally so) only in a world of slow change, in a predictable universe where information (and thus, power) is ensconced in the hands of a few. But that world is gone. With the rise of the individual (the power of one) and the rise of the tribe (the power of one connected), all bets are off. From Al-Qaeda to the post-Katrina revolt to fragmenting retail markets to the small-enterprise explosion in India and China, we see the old world of “big and powerful” unraveling.

Still, we hang on to our illusions. We retreat into the old story: leadership as domination and control. Margaret Wheatley describes our desperate attempts to hang on to what is gone:

Ever since uncertainty became our insistent twenty-first-century companion, leadership strategies have taken a great leap backward to the familiar territory of command and control. . . . How is it that we failed to learn that whenever we try to impose control on people and situations, we only serve to make them more uncontrollable? All of life resists control. All of life reacts to any process that inhibits its freedom to create itself. When we deny life’s need to create, life pushes back. We label it resistance and invent strategies to overcome it. But we would do far better if we changed the story and learned how to invoke the resident creativity of those in our organizations. We need to work with these insistent creative forces or they will be provoked to work against us.¹

Perhaps what Wheatley describes has always been a reality: human beings are simply wired to push back. Maybe the real shift is that now we have an unprecedented ability to do so. Now eighty-year-old Uncle Harold can post his very own book review on Amazon.com. Aunt Sarah can finally sell her Hummel collection, not at the neighborhood garage sale but on eBay. Now we have Google in our hip pockets, and our cell phones double as personal computers, televisions, cameras, video recorders, and stereo systems. Do we really get the significance of those sideways, post-terrorist clips from the bowels of a London subway system? Suddenly it actually matters that we exist, that we live in a certain place and time. No matter what our income or educational level, we can join the posse of several thousand bloggers and send CBS’s Dan Rather a group message. A big and terrifyingly audible message: “Dan, we smell a rat. We know too much. Get the story right or get out.”

Sample Chapter (Barry Taylor)

14: Converting Christianity

The End and Beginning of Faith

Barry Taylor

“God is nowhere. God is now here.” In his book Hey Nostradamus! Douglas Coupland tells the story of Cheryl Anway, a Christian teen, pregnant and secretly married, who scribbles this epigram on her school binder before a rampaging trio of misfit classmates gun her down in a Columbine-style high school shooting.¹

Since I read those words in Coupland’s book a couple of years ago, I have been turning them over and over in my mind. For me, this linguistic trick sums up much of how I feel about the present condition of faith in the twenty-first century. The spacing of the letters transforms God from absent to present, and this is surely indicative of the current situation. God may have always been Immanuel (“God with us”) to the church, but the same cannot be said of the wider culture.

Much has been said and written about the collapse of the secular project and the subsequent reenchantment of Western culture that is characterized by a rising interest in issues of faith and the “return of God” to the public realm. God, it seems, is a topic of interest once again, and in our postsecular world it is possible and permissible to speak of God and find a willing conversation partner in our culture.

But before we get too excited about the return of God to our cultural landscape, I think we should be aware that God’s return is not a return to business as usual for religion, nor is it a wholesale embrace of traditional faiths by the broader culture. In fact the literary device Coupland uses resonates so much because it represents the ongoing tension that exists in the arena of faith today; God is both present and absent in that the return to God is not a return to traditional concepts and ideas of God. “Throughout history people have discarded a conception of God when it no longer works for them,” wrote Karen Armstrong in her book A History of God.² Faith in the twenty-first century is not exclusively centered on concepts of God.

Introduction by Tony Jones

Introduction: Friendship, Faith, and Going Somewhere Together;

Tony Jones

To answer the question, “What is Emergent Village?” I often go back to the beginning. When I jumped on board Emergent Village, I really didn’t know what I was getting into. I was invited to a meeting in a crummy hotel meeting room in Arlington, Texas, in August of 1998. And, as so many have found, being in a room with these individuals was an exhilarating experience. The energy in the room was palpable. The room positively crackled. I think that’s because we had the feeling, even back then, that we were on to something.

Even as we struggled to determine what that “something” was, we talked about an element of the connection that was seemingly even more important, and surely more elusive, and that was and is friendship.

To be sure, there are words in English that have been overused to the point of confusion. Love is one. And friend is another. Yet as we searched for ways to identify ourselves, other appellations didn’t fit. We were more than a “network,” and we surely weren’t a “denomination.” We didn’t want to be a “club” or a “society.” Some people have called us a “think tank,” but that doesn’t quite fit either.

We just kept coming back to the word friend. We wanted to recover that word and to invest it with theological meaning. We knew this wouldn’t be easy, for not only were we fighting the meaninglessness of a word that had been overused, but we also had the creeping suspicion that many of us didn’t really know how to be true friends.

It doesn’t take long to figure out that friendship is hard. Most of us find this out by, say, kindergarten. Recently I had to walk with Tanner, my five-year-old son, to his friend’s house a couple blocks away and watch him apologize for something he’d said on the bus. There, standing in the driveway, watching with his friend’s mom, I experienced vicariously through Tanner how it felt to discover for the first time that a friendship is a fragile thing, something that needs great care.

By the time I was first getting involved in Emergent (before it was even called Emergent), I had had about two and a half decades of struggling through friendships—enough to keep me quite humble about the prospect of more and better and longer-lasting friendships. Like most everyone, I suppose, I had a wake of ex-friends (not to mention ex-girlfriends!) in my past as I encountered Emergent.

Yet I did immediately sense that there was something different about this group. We talked about ideas we had for the church and for developing a deeper life with Christ, but we almost always talked about doing it together. In fact I had the growing sense that this was the group of men and women who would take the church into its next iteration, and I became convinced that we were going to do it together.

Download the Sample Booklet

Includes the cover, table of contents, introduction from Tony Jones, and chapters from Barry Taylor and Sally Morgentahaler.

Download An_Emergent_Manifesto_of_Hope_Sample_Booklet.pdf  

Table of Contents

Introduction: Friendship, Faith, and Going Somewhere Together    11; Tony Jones

Part 1

A People of Hope    17

Emergent—a Generative Friendship of Missional Christians; Doug Pagitt

1. Growing Pains: The Messy and Fertile Process of Becoming    21; Mark Scandrette

2. Meeting Jesus at the Bar: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Evangelism    33; Heather Kirk-Davidoff

3. What Would Huckleberry Do? A Relational Ethic as the Jesus Way    41; Nanette Sawyer

4. The Postmodern Parent: Shifting Paradigms for the Ultimate Act of Re-Creation    51; Carla Barnhill

5. The Art of Emergence: Being God’s Handiwork    59; Troy Bronsink

Part 2

Communities of Hope    75

New Ways, Questions, and Outcomes for Churches of Our Day; Doug Pagitt

6. An Ever-Renewed Adventure of Faith: Notes from a Community    79; Sherry and Geoff Maddock

7. Jailhouse Faith: A Community of Jesus in an Unlikely Place    89; Thomas Malcolm Olson

8. The Existing Church/Emerging Church Matrix: Collision, Credibility, Missional Collaboration, and Generative Friendship    97; Tim Conder

9. The American Catholic Merger-Church: A Too Small Answer    109; Brian Mitchell

10. Presbymergent: The Story of One Mainliner’s Quest to Be a Loyal Radical    119; Adam Walker Cleaveland

Part 3

A Hopeful Faith    129

Christianity and the "God of Good Hope"; Tony Jones

11. Following Jesus into Culture: Emerging Church as Social Movement    131; Ryan Bolger

12. Church Emerging: Or Why I Still Use the Word Postmodern but with Mixed Feelings    141; Brian D. McLaren

13. The End of Reinvention: Mission Beyond Market Adoption Cycles    153; Will Samson

14. Converting Christianity: The End and Beginning of Faith    163; Barry Taylor

Part 4

A Hopeful Way Forward    171

Theology of Practice, Practice of Theology; Doug Pagitt

15. Leadership in a Flattened World: Grassroots Culture and the Demise of the CEO Model    175; Sally Morgenthaler

16. The Sweet Problem of Inclusiveness: Finding Our God in the Other    189; Samir Selmanovic

17. Orthoparadoxy: Emerging Hope for Embracing Difference    201; Dwight J. Friesen

18. Humble Theology: Re-exploring Doctrine While Holding On to Truth    213; Dan Kimball

19. Leading from the Margins: The Role of Imagination in Our Changing Context    225; Tim Keel

20. Digging Up the Past: Karl Barth (the Reformed Giant) as Friend to the Emerging Church    235; Chris Erdman

Part 5

Hopeful Activism    245

The Jesus Way in the Realities of Life; Tony Jones

21. A Pound of Social Justice: Beyond Fighting for a Just Cause    247; Rodolpho Carrasco

22. Emergent Kissing: Authenticity and Integrity in Sexuality    259; Karen E. Sloan

23. Our Report Card in the Year 2057: A Reflection on Women’s Rights, Poverty, and Oppression    269; Deborah and Ken Loyd

24. Practicing Pentecost: Discovering the Kingdom of God amid Racial Fragmentation    279; Anthony Smith

25. Restoring Honor in the Land: Why the Emerging Church Can’t Dodge the Issue    291; Randy Woodley

Afterword:
This Is Just the Beginning: Living Our Great-Grandchildren’s History    303; Doug Pagitt

Notes    309

Praise for An Emergent Manifesto of Hope

"Here, in very clear words and matter-of-fact sentences, is the Emergent Village—its people, its prophets, its present construction, and its future courses. Read, Christian, and rejoice!"

—Phyllis Tickle, contributing editor in religion for Publishers Weekly

"Tony Jones and Doug Pagitt have brought together an important and engaging group of voices that testify to the hope many have found in the Emergent movement. All those who still view Emergent as a homogenous enterprise need to read this book, which provides a snapshot of the considerable diversity that shapes its conversations."

—John R. Franke, professor of theology, Biblical Seminary

"I hate smorgasbords. I'm sure as a cultural event they are fabulous, but as a meal they tend to be massive displays of mediocre food at a cost that is unrighteous. The same is often true for edited works with multiple authors. But not in this case. This volume holds some of the most innovative, daring, and deliciously presented fare that one can hope to taste. And instead of it being offered in a haughty style, it is down home and messy, exquisitely like the gospel. There will be many thoughts you differ with to a point of vehemence, but it will compel you to focus on how you do think the gospel transforms persons, communities, and cultures without bearing the baggage of our past mediocrity and unrighteousness."

—Dan B. Allender, PhD, president, Mars Hill Graduate School; author, The Wounded Heart, To Be Told, and Leading with a Limp

"For both those well versed in the emergent conversation as well as those who have not taken the time to get close to this diverse and important movement, An Emergent Manifesto of Hope offers another step deeper into helping us all to see how this conversation matters. Life is different today—who could argue that?—yet many remain wary of ‘what this emergent gang is up to.’ Fear not, you skeptics, for these are solid, sharp, and committed men and women who have a great deal to say to us. Whether you are a long-term believer in the conversation or have remained on the sidelines, this great book will help you find your place among the conversants, to the glory of God and for the furtherance of his kingdom."

—Chap Clark, PhD, senior editor, Youthworker Journal; professor of youth, family, and culture, Fuller Theological Seminary

"The missional heart of this movement is undeniable as you read the words of a diverse community that is seeking as brothers and sisters to walk the path of Jesus the Messiah. If it seems like the emerging church is stumbling through a theological minefield, it is because we have chosen to plod along together rather than sprint alone. In this book you will find new friends for the journey that love the Scriptures, respect their traditions, and find hope in both the past and the future."

—Chris Seay, pastor/lead elder, Ecclesia

About the Editors

Doug Pagitt (MA, Bethel Seminary) pastors Solomon's Porch (www.solomonsporch.com) in Minneapolis, writes (www.dougpagitt.com), and is seeking to find creative, entrepreneurial, generative ways to join in the hopes, dreams and desires God has for the world.

Tony Jones (MDiv, Fuller Theological Seminary) serves as national coordinator of Emergent Village and is author of The Sacred Way, Postmodern Youth Ministry, Soul Shaper, Read.Think.Pray.Live., and Pray.

Book Description

An Emergent Manifesto of Hope, edited by Doug Pagitt and Tony Jones

• Includes chapters from over 20 key Emergent Village leaders including Brian McLaren and Dan Kimball.
• Conversation starters on a breadth of issues within the emerging church.
• Premier book in the emersion line.

An Emergent Manifesto of Hope is a coming together of divergent voices into a conversation that you can now learn from and engage in. This unprecedented collection of writings includes some of the most important voices in the emergent conversation, including Brian McLaren, Dan Kimball, Sally Morgenthaler, Ryan Bolger, Heather Kirk-Davidoff, Mark Scandrette, Tim Keel, Anthony Smith, Samir Selmanovic, Will Samson, Karen Sloan, Dwight Friesen, and Tim Conder. The articles cover a broad range of topics, such as spirituality, theology, multiculturalism, post-colonialism, sex, evangelism, and many others. Whether you are already involved in the conversation or just want to know more, An Emergent Manifesto of Hope offers insights into the emerging church and provides tools for meeting the challenges of our rapidly changing world.