wicks
-Church of St. Andrew, Christmas, 2006

1.
Until pews are dandelions
–sprig leggy levers–
catapulting young minds into kingdomcome;
sweeping elderminds like dreamseeds of evervision.

Until songs take wing
stretching strong like the arrows of migrating Juncos
lending lift, everloft, and standard.
Tail feathers slicing
tomorrow unto tomorrow.

Until prayers shovelset us into the red Georgia clay
sinking our toes like the magnolia’s roots
breaking open bone-earth’s chapped tongue
making our hope particular and rooty
tangling us here, now, to daily bread

2.
Until our aviary,
a loose canopy tabernacling for us,
meets the winds of intrastators
and price-per-acre
and towers catch-and-releasing invisible information;
until the long carving frenchdrains spoon away at its stature
(walk humbly with your God)
until the pieces of our umbrella
–the very stones and mortar of this sanctuary–
must join their sister elements
that groan and clap to the song that sang  us all into

existence.

3.
Until then,
inhale;
receive Spirit here.
Spirit who practices this all like Moshe’s bush on Horeb
who sings that song to which our ears belong.
Take the cup,
raise her,
exhale the gratitude of
carbon dioxide and moisturedrip for the forest,
lick your lips and dig your teeth in
to heaven’s sweet ‘what-is-it.’

4.
Today is a Tuesday,
December’s light is late as usual.
Slipping past the commute
into this morning’s eye,
I sit in my study,
a place of words, walls, and a solid oak desk that all precede me
and I watch this candle devour the cold room
and flicker
hotter than any coal placed on my lips.
And I remember,

we are already lit. Burning
but not consumed.
Set to flight.
Racing but not exhausted.
And this building already sings
and breathes
and joins creation.
And the dead are raised in Christ,
worship already working,

and the old and the future are part of today’s
firelight.

Wildest Imagination (Bass)

Wildest Imagination (Guitar Capo2)

Oh Blessed God

Bring Forth

I’m excited to be collaborating with Paul Soupiset, Tim Snyder, and Makeesha Fisher, among others, on this long awaited project. I will be editor of visual and performing arts.

HERE’S THE SCOOP…

GENERATE Magazine has been an open, collaborative project in the works for more than six years now. And after many casual conversations — and the 2009 convening of an editorial team — we are ready and eager to involve you, the larger community, in helping realize this dream with us.

The seeds for GENERATE Magazine were sown sitting around a fountain in San Diego in 2004 — a few writers, poets, artists and designers explored and dreamed about launching a print publication that would embody the ethos and tell the stories of the growing, generative conversation that some have called the emerging church conversation.

Again at the 2007 Emergent Gathering, another planning group was convened to discuss logistics, bring some leadership to the dream, and get things rolling. GENERATE Magazine is the fruit of many months of their planning.

VISUAL AND PERFORMING ARTS?

Art provides resistance and lift to what the Spirit of New Creation is generating. The beauty that artisans fashion, sing, and perform can testify to what is possible and evoke imagination for what is yet to come. We are drawn to paintings and songs that put us “in play.” GENERATE aims to fashion a synthesis of such works of art, and to celebrate the lives of their creators, in order to put our readers in play as well.

WHY GENERATE?

GENERATE exists as a forum to retell the stories of the grassroots communities and individuals who are finding emergent and alternative means to follow God in the Way of Jesus. We hope to create an artifact of this historical conversation. These stories will be transmitted through narrative, works of visual art, documented performances, verse, fiction, non-fiction, essays, and interviews.

We/you are the conversation; our art, our lives, our hopes and failures all meet up with God’s approaching dreams for creation. We converse and in doing so spread the news that we are not alone — that joy is found in our generative friendship.

GENERATE Magazine is a grassroots-organized, independent publication affiliated as a friend of Emergent Village, but not affiliated with any publishing house. We are currently exploring ways to distribute GENERATE Magazine via the Emergent Village Cohorts and wider friendships. More on that in the days to come.

I hope this gets your wheals turning!

Well, Ryan Bolger, co-author of Emerging Churches:Creating Christian Communities in Postmodern Cultures was asked by his seminary to devote an issue of their quarterly journal to Mainline Emergents, and I agreed to write a piece that needed to be longer than their publishing space. So it is split into two places:

The first installment can be found in Fuller Seminary’s Theology, News and Note, Fall 2008 Issue.

The second is forthcoming on the Presbymergent blog. I will post more on this later and sometime in the next month will have a blog conversation with Ryan about the whole journal issue including the following other articles:

Eddie Gibbs and Ryan Bolger wrote The Morphing of the Church;
Walt Kallestad, Lutheran pastor, Community Church of Joy, wrote Redefining Success, Moving from Entertainment to Worship;
Ryan Bell, pastor, Hollywood Seventh Day Adventist, wrote From the Margins: Engaging Missional LIfe in the Seventh-Day-Adventist Church;
Nadia Bolz-Weber, mission developer of a Lutheran church plant in Denver, “House for all Sinners and Saints”, wrote Confessions of a Sarcastic Lutheran;
Troy Bronsink, PCUSA pastor and community organizer in inner-city Atlanta, wrote Of Dying Breeds and Swelling Hopes: A Mainline Emergent in the Reformed Tradition;
Eugene Cho, pastor of Quest, Seattle, wrote Quest and Its Relationship with the Evangelical Covenant Church;
Phil Jackson, pastor of The House in Chicago, wrote A Reciprocal Connection: The Surprising Convergence of Hip-Hop and the ECC;
David Fitch, pastor of “Life on the Vine”, in outlying Chicago, wrote On Being an Emerging Christian in the Christian and Missionary Alliance;
Liz Rios, founder for Center for Emerging Female Leaership, and Luis Alvarez, pastor in the AG, wrote Will a New Church Emerge? Las Raices in the Assemblies of God.

 AJC: So when Chris interviewed you were you a minister?

TB: Yes, I was ordained in July of 2006 and have been a minister ever since, serving at large within the presbytery for the past year.

AJC:  So does “at large” mean you were not at a church?  ‘Because the AJC is committed to being accurate from the perception of a bystander, and not neccessarily the technical terms of a particular denomination.

TB:  Well, I have been doing minister things, like marrying people and leading funerals and  preaching at churches.  But I was doing that before I was ordained.

AJC:  So would someone in your church say you were a pastor?

TB:  Well it depends on what you mean by church.  I am a part of the universal church but I don’t belong to a particular church. Reformed churches generally considers an ordained minister a pastor for her/his whole life.  But my denomination did change my “standing” from “At Large” meaning in no presbyterian post, to “organizing pastor”  meaning starting a congregation that is as yet not chartered. So the problem includes one’s definition of “church” too.

AJC:  So you mean you do “have” a church?

TB:  I’m not trying to be evasive here.  But all I have is friends who are meeting oneanother on the journey that might end in becoming a formal church.  We plan to meet monthly for the next half year and to seek God’s dreams in the city. But thats it- so far. And I guess 2 or 3 meeting for this purpose includes the presence of Christ who is both Word and Body broken… so you could say this is church.  But none of us thinks so, yet.  Not yet, at least.

Well this went on a bit more until I apologized and said, “Sorry for complicating matters.  My primary concern here is that folks in my neighborhood, colleagues in my denomination, and potential benefactors beyond those groups not think I’ve jumped ship.”  To which he said, “Oh, I see.  Well, thank you for your time.”

And after that I think we both hung up the phone and went our separate ways to find a stiff drink and this is what resulted in the paper the next day:

A story in Saturday’s Living section about author Phyllis Tickle included incorrect information about Troy Bronsink’s status with the Presbyterian Church. He is a pastor.”

Nice, huh?

The Rules // Presbymeme II

• in about 25 words each, answer the following five questions;
• tag five presbyterian bloggers and send them a note to let them know they were tagged;
• be sure to link to this original post, leave a comment or send a trackback to this post so others can find you;

The Questions // Presbymeme II /

1. What is your favorite faith-based hymn, song or chorus.

Currently tied between Lori Chaffer’s “Please Don’t Make me Sing this Song” and “Come Ye Faithful Raise the Strain” (hymn 14 blue hymnal- though I mess with 1870s melody) by John of Damascus (c. 675-749).

2. What was the context, content and/or topic of the last sermon that truly touched, convicted, inspired, challenged, comforted and/or otherwise moved you?Mark Lomax at Church Unbound as he spoke about the reign-dom of God.3. If you could have all Presbyterians read just one of your previous posts, what would it be and why?

I think the discussion around the future of presbymergent several months back was a good one to have my presbyterian colleagues weigh in on.

4. What are three PC(USA) flavored blogs you read on a regular basis?

• LeRonShultz
• Reverend Mother (a pseudonymous seminary classmate)
• Adam Walker Cleaveland
• Ryan Kemp Pappan

5. If the PC(USA) were a movie, what would it be and why?

“Stranger Than Fiction” the pop-pomo film where Will Farrell meets the voice of his narrator and strives to control his poetic destiny. Why?: Because we continue to hear the voice of our Narrator, but in our fear of our imminent death we run the other way or try to form committees of experts to avoid our very vocation. And because I’m pleasantly surprised at the courage of folks I meet who do take the risk of stepping into the script, and laying down our tribe’s future for something larger than our own story, only to find that this is the very act that makes our story and tribe what it is.

“Thank you, Tom, Trey, Amy and others.”

The Re:CONNECT weekend was an invention of Nate Ledbetter, Melvine Bray, and Leroy Barber and myself. We wanted folks in Atlanta to meet other people doing justice and to learn about justice/social community work. The weekend rocked! We had a panel discussion on Friday night and the panelists included (I’ll add more as I have their blogs):

Rusty Prichard : Evangelical Environmental Network

Mark Anthony: Pastor, Jesus for Justice

Carlos: Mentoring and Public Speaking

Daniel Hombrich: INnocence Atlanta

Nate Ledbetter: Charis Housing

Deborah: Mothers and children

Chris Capehard: ROOV.com

They described their work and they answered questions including:

1. How do others’ passions contribute to the reach and focus of your ministry?
2. How do you meet Jesus in doing your work?
3. What has your work taught you about engaging civil government?
4. How do local neighbors and the contexts of individual neighborhoods play a roll in the kind of ministry you do?
5. How do church congregations help or hinder the work you feel called to?

The next night we had Shane Claiborn, Chris Haw, and Scott and Jay from The Psalters come and perform “Jesus for President.” It was an unbelievable synthesis of narative theology, liberation theology, political imagination, and John Howard Yoder with some deep country Tennessee thrown in. I felt like I was simultaniously at a Tom Wait’s show, a Toni Morrison poetry reading, Walter Bruggemann seminary class, and post modern theatre. My friends Ryan and Holly Sharp also known as the Cobalt Season, were the artists behind the book design and the multimedia support- they nailed it!

The whole weekend was a huge success. The AJC wrote about it, we had folks from Auburn and Columbia, SC. And we had a huge crew of volunteers from the Atlanta Emergent Cohort, Marietta Presbyterian Church, and Mission Year.

If you’re from the ATL go to Re-CONNECT.us and keep the movement going!

And in June 8-11 of 2009 I’ll be a keynote at the Alt7 event, as well as presenting there with Adam Walker Cleaveland.

I look forward to meeting many of you along the way!