An Emergent Manifesto of Hope

Where We Stand

By Will Samson

Will Samson is a PhD student in sociology at the University of Kentucky where he is working on research in the areas of sustainability and Christian community. He, his wife, novelist Lisa Samson, and their family are participants in the life of Communality , a missional Christian community in Lexington, KY.

I think one of the most important concepts in philosophy (Hegel) and sociol social theory (Marx, Habermas) is the notion of immanent critique. Among other things, immanent critique assumes that the best place to stand when offering organizational assessment is on the inside. Advice is better heard from a fellow laborer than from a bystander.

I remember a story from my childhood. A friend and I had decided to turn on the hose, which was connected in the garage. The hose leaked, the garage flooded and we were given the task of cleaning it up. Rather than help, my friend leaned on his broom and offering me suggestions. In fact, he kept quoting from a movie he had seen recently, saying, “Move it along, this ain't ain’t no Lover’s Lane.” It was a lot of years before that joke got funny.

An Emergent Manifesto of Hope, by contrast, is written by practitioners. The authors are pastors, missionaries, and community activists. People from the Evangelical world, the mainline, and New Monasticism. When we speak of hope, it is the kind of hope that keeps us all on the inside of this thing we call the Church, our sleeves rolled up,  and our hands on the broom, even when we seem to be sweeping in different directions.

I look forward to the conversations this book will spark and I trust it is a blessing to those laboring in God’s field.

E-I-Web2.0 and The Reinvention of the Church

By Will Samson

Will Samson is a PhD student in sociology at the University of Kentucky where he is working on research in the areas of sustainability and Christian community. He, his wife, novelist Lisa Samson, and their family are participants in the life of Communality , a missional Christian community in Lexington, KY.

I've been on the Internet since before Al Gore invented it.

In the late 1980’s, it was still a dark wilderness. Green screens and archaic programs with names like Archie and Gopher. Then, in 1990, a group of forward-thinking legislators championed the High Performance Computing Act (led by, to his credit, the Senator Al Gore). One year later Tim Berners-Lee invented the methods for making the Internet graphically accessible. Millions of users suddenly had access to the Internet, and its popularity skyrocketed.

As a result of the growth, businesses began looking at ways to cash in on this new fangled access. In an effort to sell services on this new platform, by the mid-1990’s everything had an “e-” attached as a prefix. There were e-documents, e-commerce, and e-payments. People were still reading documents, or buying and selling goods — all that had changed was the method of delivery. It was as if, in the 1950's, after the massive expansion of the interstate highway system in the 1950’s, cans of peas would read, “Now delivered by truck!”

But American consumers could only stay interested in “e-things” for so long. So, by the late 90's the “i-” made its appearance. It was helped along by a huge marketing push from Apple, seeking to augment its the marketing of its new iMac.

Predictably, about five years later, everyone started talking about Web 2.0. This is what we do as Americans. We began as a nation of merchants and we can’t stop making up new ways to describe our products. It is as if we believe the right title can sell anything.

Why bore you with all this Internet history? Because I fear the Church can be just as susceptible to this kind of thinking: being driven by marketing and sloganeering, rather than a spiritual search to join God's activity in this world. In my essay for An Emergent Manifesto of Hope, I contend that there are three missional questions: 1) Who is God?, 2) What is God doing in our context?, and 3) How can I be a part of it? But, for various reasons which I discuss in my essay, we spend too much time re-inventing the answer to the third question and, never asking if we really understand the first two.

Hopefully my contribution to the conversation, as well as the this entire collection of essays, can begin a broader dialogue about how we might more fully participate in God’s work. I look forward to your feedback as you read this and the other chapters.