Just Passing Through

The word "character" means something distinct from others of a similar nature. We refer to characters in type setting and fonts, because if you can't tell what the marks mean, they don't mean anything beyond some nebulous decorative purpose. For words to have meaning, they must exclude things they don't mean. Though Heaven's language is indicative symbols, there are lots of things we have to do to make the symbols work, and that means having human language with sounds and character combinations which take on meaning by narrowing down what it indicates. Degrees of precision may be the subject of debate, but the basic principle stands.

By choosing terms such as "mystical" and "emergent," we naturally exclude things we don't want associated with our ministry. That we would also find ourselves including things we may also not want is another matter. The process of communicating is presenting pools of meaning, then pointing to the place where those pools overlap. Two words each meaning very broad ideas will then together winnow out the chaff.

It is likely we could never be a part of the Emergent Village -- the original emergent ministry -- because we are frankly not inclusive enough. For them to include us would dilute or tarnish the branding, as it were. But we cannot easily avoid the connotations of what they are. There comes a point where you don't waste too much effort chasing down every possible meaning, defining and defending it every time someone asks. This remains a fallen and imperfect world, and part of being emergent surely includes embracing and tolerating things unsettled, as a part of the on-going conversation with God and His Creation.

This is precisely the point. No one of us, nor any group of us is fit to be all things to all men. We would love it if God would do that, but He made it pretty obvious He would not. Only Jesus gets that privilege. The rest of us are the multitude of expressions of Jesus who take Him to little parts of God's Creation. Choosing the label "emergent" means we exclude folks who don't like that label. We do add to the pool of meaning, but we hardly control how it registers in the minds of others. Accepting the very real limitations, we seek God's face for definitions to our service in His Realm, and it seems He has led us to this choice. We are called now to work with those who won't choke on the term "emergent." We let go in peace those who don't like what they feel "emergent" means.

The baggage we do have is now pretty easy to start identifying. Mysticism, which we have already embraced long ago, is an obvious part of that label. In some ways, I feel our justification for mysticism is probably stronger than I've seen offered by most emergent writers. I'm not sure how to go about sharing that with them, but I would gladly. Meanwhile, there are a host of other associations.

We don't do suit and tie, nor any part of the subculture which calls for it. Feel free to wear one, but don't ever pretend it's important to what we do. We don't do settled and predictable, so organization will always be fluid, contextual. While ideas surely matter, people matter more. We place the burden of adjustment on ideas to meet the needs of people. That hardly excludes some things being settled in Heaven before God. At the same time, we quickly take issue with what most people assume is settled in Heaven.

Most obvious, and most perplexing to non-emergents, is our actions tend to follow a wholly different logic. We utterly reject the notion conversion is a cognitive process. It surely has cognitive results, but redemption is born -- is rooted -- somewhere else in the human soul. If your definitions of things forces that to mean "subjective emotions" then we can't offer you much help. That is, we discern you lack the spiritual equipment to hold a discussion. In our minds, there is such a thing as heresy, and Aristotelian/Enlightenment epistemology is that.

Thus, or actions will make no sense to folks still rooted in human rational "theology" which declares a "propositional truth" in God's Word, since Jesus Himself eschewed such a thing. We aren't selling a cognitive decision, but offering eternal grace, a mystical gift which will always defy human understanding. We can walk among the sinners of this world making no demands whatsoever unless absolutely critical to our own witness. We don't care about keeping our personal boundaries intact, because we are nothing in ourselves; our only value before God is our commitment to Him. We draw that circle of defense much closer to ourselves. We don't believe keeping yourself "unspotted by sins of this world" means public relations maneuvering, and we don't believe keeping yourself from "the appearance of sin" means a shallow pretense.

We expect to earn the privilege of being heard, but demand the right to be seen. We'll stick out not because of our subcultural expressions of artistic and stylistic tastes, but by the graceful personal interactions. To a large degree, we choose to absorb a lot of abuse just for the sake of the Cross. We let splash on us lots of filth because appearances mean very little, but persistence means a lot. So, yes, I call homosexuality a sin, but I can't do much good to gays if I don't remain friends with them in the long term. They need to know grace from Heaven is stronger than all their other gay friends, and what bonds me to them is not some sexual preference, nor merely an acceptance of it, but something deeper. If they never catch on, that's not my problem, because only God can reveal Himself. Yes, it will surely lead to some misunderstandings, but I'm sure Mary faced a lot of them, as did Jesus regarding His paternity.

So we defy convention, not merely for the sake of defiance, but because it is broken. The very definition of convention is whatever people come up with to reduce complexity and increase convenience and comfort. Convention is fundamentally a product of avoiding difficulties by nailing things down in neat categories and procedures. The Truth of God cannot possibly come to us in that framework, since He is ineffable. God always colors outside the lines, and even redefines color itself. Man is utterly unable to grasp order on God's level, so he mocks God by creating his own pitiful caricature of order, and thereby rejects God entirely. How else can we bear that mighty grace to you if everything we do is what you already expect? Your god is too small.

I love Classical Music, but I'll put up with almost any artistic acoustic expression if it gets me closer to people who need Jesus. I'll make friends with tax gatherers, prostitutes, queers, traitors, commies, thugs, dope dealers, pedophiles -- I'm not afraid to be seen with them. It's no different from helping the blind, burn victims, broken hearted, poor and anyone else who is suffering. It won't matter how they got there; they need to get out. I can't help them if they can't touch me.

That's the choice, and giving it the label "emergent" is simply a measure of accuracy.

We didn't belong. We had friends there, but the organization really had no use for us, so we left the mainstream institutional church. For the past two-and-a-half years, my wife and I have worshiped at home. During that time, more and more of the past was sheared off, and we forged into new territory.

Now we have come to the place we realize we are precisely what the emerging church is about. We haven't set out to join some movement. It's simply a term for the things to which we are committed. Today we make it official, insofar as such a thing is possible.

It's not as if we are going to spend an awful lot of time studying and talking about the thing itself. I'll use the label when it's appropriate, but I'm not going to write all that much about it. Instead, I'm simply letting folks know we begin today working toward starting a community, a fellowship which will consciously wear the label "emerging church."

I'm not the pastoral type. My calling from God is more administrative and educational in nature. I happen to believe that's what the New Testament means when it mentions "elder" as a role in the church. We will be seeking a pastoral spiritual leader to work with us here in Eastern Oklahoma County. That will be our initial target. No one knows how this will turn out except God, and I feel certain He plans to surprise us in many ways.

From time to time I'll post here some of how things are going. If you are the sort to pray, then join us in praying we are able to fulfill the calling of God in this work.

Yesterday we had a huge house full of guests for Thanksgiving. Nice. But they drank up my wife's soda pop. She only drinks this nice stuff called Jones Cola.

Today, she started the van, but it would not shift out of first gear. The transmission had been signaling impending failure, but repairs cost more than the van did. It's dead. No run to the store; no caffeinated soft drinks.

My wife made iced tea.

I got my bicycle out and did some work on it. Rode the 7 miles (11.26km) one way to the store which sold this precious, life-giving stuff in cans. Tied it to my rear rack with some bubble wrap underneath, and rode back home. No cans exploded.

Hero for at least the 15 minutes it took to pour and consume the first can.

She's worth it. Oh, and pray with us to save up and get another vehicle.

Opera isn't so bad under Windows Vista.

I found out Dell was offering me a free upgrade to Windows 7, but as an "upgrade" I have to be running Vista first. So after running into just a few more glitches in Linux, as it struggled to use my hardware properly, I gave up and put Vista back on. This is all 64-bit, by the way.

In Linux land, just about everything comes in 64-bit if you want it that way. Not so much in Windows land, but I can understand the concept of running 32-bit applications on a 64-bit system. It's not quite so easy to slip in viruses and malware, particularly if it means changing the system files. So far, there haven't been any 64-bit viruses.

So naturally I had to add all my favorite free software. Most things which worked in XP work in Vista. The list includes things like Firefox, Emerald Editor, Cream/Gvim, Lynx text browser, and PuTTY so I can log into my Unix shell account. The Vista interface looks better than anything the X server can do, but I'll get sick of this baby blue. I'm not sure why Microsoft never came up with other basic colors to run with Aero visual effects.

But I see Windows 7 is faster and not quite so limited. I'll let you know when it gets here.

Those over thirty today can remember not having the Internet. That is, what we know as the Internet was not in the mainstream consciousness much before that. Most of us thirty and over can recall the freshness of the experience of pulling up content not already on our computers, and sending messages to people across the world without postage and envelopes -- and a whole lot quicker.

I'm not suggesting the network of networks is going anywhere. It's going to change so drastically we won't recognize it, and very soon.

There are a few million hobbyists, and a few million more die-hard oldsters who will continue buying and using personal computers, regardless of the brands and types. We'll continue running various operating systems, mostly Windows, then Mac, then other stuff. Maybe Linux and friends will gain market share, but that won't really change the overall picture so much. Then, of course, you'll have a very large number of business workstations around for a very long time. The corporate world tends to change glacially slow when it comes to such things.

So something like a PC unit will still be around after you and I are forgotten. But the way we use them, particularly in how we interact with the Internet, will be gone even sooner. Already there are thousands of devices using the Net which aren't anything like a PC. That will explode in the coming years, slowed only by the broad current economic misfortune. For consumers, most of it will be via something like cellphones, though that beast, too, will soon morph into something we can't imagine right now. But the vast majority of what passes over the Net to consumer devices will become controlled by increasingly fewer hands, so to speak. More and more content will be restricted to the looming giant gatekeepers, and independent content will disappear.

That is, it will disappear as far as consumer devices are concerned. Those devices will become increasingly "commoditized" -- made so utterly essential, so cheap, so very similar with precious little variation. It's the nature of how hardware, software, services and access is blended in the market. We now refer to that as an ecosystem. I'm doubt anyone can be sure how much of this drift in the ecosystem is a matter of reading the consumer's wishes, and how much of it is manipulating consumer perceptions (and thus, their wishes), but the field is shifting. Where the money goes is where the entire field of endeavor will go.

Those who use it for different reasons were there when it all started, and will still be around when the rest have moved on to other things. I'm one of them. It's hard to tell which way we will go in the next few years, but the underlying "geeknet" will not die easily. Either we will get to keep our old network flowing over the mainstream Internet, and keep the old protocols while everyone else moves to new ones, or we'll have to shift to another infrastructure completely. Right now, there's a lot of exploration in both directions. Since it's really easy to keep the geeknet stuff mostly below the radar, using far fewer resources to share information we find useful, there's a good chance we'll still be hidden on the mainstream network system. Maybe it will be some of both; who knows?

But the geek community will increasingly drift off into other worlds, because the center of attention and imagination will move, drawing most of them along with it. Only a decreasing number of folks will try to keep the older technology alive and improving. Should the Third World start grabbing a big share of access at slow speeds and such, they'll keep it alive for a time. But eventually they'll demand their share of what everyone else has, and they probably won't spawn too many older style computer geeks. In other words, they'll pass through the same territory much more quickly. The original academic free exchange will shrink to obscurity.

Perhaps the geeks will find other ways to connect. The whole thing is really just a by-product of oddballs, misfits, even geniuses, artists of that other kind who just can't confine themselves to the mainstream of life. There has to be a better way, not just how we do it, but how we even think about it. They are the heart and soul of what brought the Net to life, and they will continue on with our without it. The Net was a tool, and for a time the ultimate tool, but still, never more than just a tool. For now, as long as there's a way to keep using some part of the current Internet as it exists, they'll avoid having to reinvent the wheel of rolling traffic back and forth among themselves. If they ever find another way to do that, something better for the purpose, the Net will truly die. It might continue to exist as a means of daily commerce, etc., but it will be dead all the same.