Mark Scandrette is a writer, spiritual teacher, and executive director and cofounder of ReIMAGINE, a center for spiritual formation in San Francisco. Mark is also a founding member of SEVEN, a monastic community working as teachers and advocates for holistic and integrative Christian spirituality. He is an Emergent Village Coordinating Group participant, having served on the planning team for the Emergent conventions and the annual Emergent Gathering. A dilettante poet and chef, Scandrette lives with his wife, Lisa, and their three children in an old Victorian in San Francisco’s Mission District.
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, globalization, 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 intensities, depending on their region, personality, and social location. A common result is a great desire for conversation with other 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 toward a greater sense of authentic relationship than what some have experienced in more formal structures. Whatever the emerging churchbecomes, it began as a generative friendship among younger entrepreneurial leaders and seekers—an improvised support system for people desperate for connections with others engaged in experimenting with new ideas on faith and community.
We should acknowledge that, for many of us, the door was opened to re-imagine faith and the church through pain, disappointment, failure, fatigue, 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 shadowy 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 into 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 (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 characters of 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.
Excerpt taken with permission from www.markscandrette.com.