So, what is Clayfire, and why would anyone care if its gone (here’s the closing announcement)  ?

Their tagline, “reshaping worship together” sums up what I think they/we were after.  But they also needed to figure out how the reshapers or users of “pre-shaped” worship were going to access the designs… and in the world of Planning Center Online and various denominational worship resource companies, Clayfire never figured out how to break into the industry.

About two years ago at Christianity21 event in Minneapolis I met Linda Parriot and got reacquainted with Sally Morganthaler, they were beginning a project around worship that would combine resourcing churches as well as catalyzing artists who design worship and art experiences. The project would be both an affiliate of Augsburg Fortress Press’ new imprint, Sparkhouse, and a sort of online resource store.

I joined up with the team as they were commissioning original content for the online resources.  Sally and a few others moved on around the same time because they were more committed to the catalyzing and collaboration than to an online resource site. I enjoyed working on a fresh collection called “God’s Grand Work of Art” with friends like Tim Omara, Aaron Strumple, Todd Fadel, Josey Stone, Margaret Ellsworth and my brother, designer Jonathan Bronsink.  The collection was one of dozens designed by artist who not only lead worship music, paint, or preach, but who design worship as formational practice of missional life.  Influenced by the work of Mark Pierson, Clayfire coined this practice as “curation.”

Then last summer I met up with Jodi-Renee Adams, Eric Heron and Lilly Lewin to plan a worship gathering at the Wild Goose Festival.  Eric had been leading a blog discussion on this for quite some time, and many of us had worked together before. But working at the goose was a chance to welcome other artists into the conversation and introduce this line of worship design thinking to pastors and missional leaders. Here’s a picture of an experience curated that included the use of yarn passed between participants as a symbol of shared  prayers.

Then, this fall I had the chance to work with Mark, Jodi, Shawna Bowman (in the pic above) and ephemeral artist and Methodist campus minister, Ted Hatten. We co-facilitated a seminar in Chicago called The Art of Curating Worship (after Mark’s book by the same name). In that space I really grew to trust the vision and focus of the Clayfire organization.  While they did need to make the business start up work (and the actual online subscription program had to roll back to beta because of so many quirks) they had carefully connected the success of the business and the online resources to the re-imagining of worship.  Not enough could be said about the courage to try that!

So, this Monday, when I learned that Clayfire would be unplugged I was sad but not surprised.  It was at once a struggling business venture and a burgeoning group of theologically nuanced creatives who could (and still might) reshape the practices of church.  For sure, these theological-artist and others were doing this before Clayfire, but nevertheless this was a rallying point and I met great people because of it.

In the art of throwing pottery, the potter often discovers that the clay just doesn’t want to become what she had in mind.  If, in the middle she forces it one way or another the entire vessel collapses and throws slag and bits of unfired clay over the potter, the wheel, and the room. Sometimes potters luck out and an unexpected work of art emerges.  And then sometimes the pot seems to be done but it just doesn’t feel right… it ends up sold at a discount because it never fits…  Sometimes its not until they are fired in the kiln that pots fail, because the slip and scoring weren’t strong enough for the handle to hold or because the glaze bled.

So the question is what do we make of Clayfire? A failed business idea, or an early iteration in a host of ways forward in congregational formation and worship arts?  I’m sure that there remains more to be seen from the world of worship curation and I hope that Clayfire’s legacy will play a significant role in whats to come.

What do you hope for the future of worship shaping, and what organizations, groups or networks have you found most supportive of this kind of work?

Check out this video: Mike Crawford and His Secret Siblings from josh franer on Vimeo.

And then here are two lead sheets to his songs that he has allowed us to share on Church As Art.  You can buy the tunes or the whole album from iTunes or Amazon.

Center My Heart Key A

These are words to build a life on

Enjoy!

Good Friday can start to feel like a civil war reenactment once death has lost its sting.  So what, then, do a resurrection people have left to discover on Good Friday?  How does the holy-day serve liturgically to “shape” us as followers in the Jesus Way?  To answer that I want to start by throwing out ways that Good Friday might misshape us, and some guesses as to why.

So, if you grew up in a popular American Christian experience like mine, Good Friday was a time to recall the miracle of the Romans Road, when the cross was laid over the pit of hell (complete with hazard cones warning drivers to beware of impending doom) delivering to safety those individuals who would accept the torture of Christ in a representative capacity for their own cosmic debt.

And if you’ve been on a similar journey as mine since, you’ve perhaps grown a bit cynical about that thoroughfare constructed 19 centuries after the fact out of 5 sentences of a 20 page letter to the Romans as well as its complimentary campaign reducing Jesus’ Good-Friday event to a rescue mission to hack into the Matrix and change God’s rules- a mission that God would have sent Jesus to do for me if, even if I were one and only human on the earth (and yes, I’m proud to say that the “I” here is me, the guy writing this post, and not necessarily you- at least that’s how I remember the shtick going).

And if you were living and breathing 7 years ago you had to have heard of or seen Gibson’s Passion of Christ.  If it did its job, you might have gotten even more eeby-geeby about the gore and agony that Holy Week culminating in Good Friday represents.   And perhaps you shake your head, like me, at those friends who watch it year after year hoping to shame the sin away by “identifying with the pain” of our savior, or hoping to leverage the cinematic shock-and-awe to drill a deeper well toward even deeper gratitude than the year before.  But death-movies like Gibson’s have lost their sting to me.

So instead of blogging through biblical, theological or historical evidence that could either make you feel more self-confident, or could lead you to throw up your hands dismissing my argument as unfounded, I want to ask you to do a little exercise.  It is a directed meditation that will require 10 minutes of your dedicated attention.  Whether you’re reading this on your Driod or iPhone or laptop, or even if your secretary prints out RSS feeds from Josh’s blog and lays it on your desk next to your morning coffee, I need you to stop for a sec and get a blank sheet of paper.

SPOILER- don’t read ahead, trust your cells to the process and give yourself 10 minutes (9½  now) to go through this exercise.  This means you too, my old friend who is scanning this because you’ve just got a minute. Go ahead and get the paper… I’ll wait:

1. Okay, now take your piece of paper and fold it in half twice to make four equal quadrants.  No need to draw any lines, the two creases should suffice.
2. Turn it horizontally and write in the bottom right quadrant the names of people and organizations that fit the following categories:
   • People you are against
   • People who have hurt members of your family and those you love
   • People who hurt you when you were young
   • Groups that insult you or your friends or your religious practice
   • Countries that mean harm to yours
   • Political parties that sabotage what you see as right and just
   • Pundits and media moguls who profit from demonizing you and people you value
   • Companies, technologies, superstars, industries, ideologies, and leaders with power who misuse their power to devour others.
   • That neighbor that you just can’t stand
3. Now on the bottom left write the names of people and groups that you self identify with:
   • Your family members
   • Those who enjoy living, shopping, eating, and working in the same places as you
   • Those who you help to get elected
   • Non profits and special interest groups you donate time or money to
   • Those who you’d take into your house when they need help.
   • Those who have given you favors, breaks, and gifted you with opportunities to progress in life.
   • Those who subscribe to and/or share your religious group’s gathering habits, styles, ideas, and language.
4. Now draw a horizontal line along the horizontal crease above the two groups.

The gospels give us a window into three years spent by Jesus re-imagining a place over that horizon in which the divisions below the horizon no longer exist.  He saw a kingdom where those who were cursed would be blessed.  He saw a world where the oppressed would carry the oppressor’s pack an extra mile.  A future where it would be possible to love your enemies, or even that forgiving others’ their trespasses would be a part of ushering in such a forgiving future. He saw a faith that would reunite the religious and irreligious.  Jesus’ mission to “proclaim freedom to the prisoner, and good news to the poor” would affect the prison guards and the wealthy as well.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  Jesus did not say every behavior, group, or ethical decision was “relative” or that grace abounded such that injustice or self-sabotage would be free from consequences. Jesus said he’d bring a sword between parent and child.  He knew that his cruciform presence, his servant leadership would exacerbate divisions.  That either side would have to fall like a seed into the ground and die to be born anew with eyes for that other horizon.

He challenged those entrusted with power to measure out consequences for injustice and self-sabotage. And this challenge would wear out those authorities (imperial and religious, as well as the public power of social media who would cry “crucify him”) until they resorted to the last resort–violent death.

5. Now, draw a cross below the horizon, between the two sides somewhere along the vertical crease (of course I have ideas for what you could draw above the horizon, but this is a Good Friday blog not an Easter Sunday one).

Here’s my beef with the Romans Road, it trains our imagination to think of ourselves first.  And when that is our primary metaphor it can pervert the power of Good Friday into a therapeutic form of asceticism. Instead of imaging this Good Friday, that it’s all about a back room deal to get you and those in your group on the bridge over troubled waters, image that the divisions of your everyday life are made physical, demonstrated in the crudest most humiliating of forms.  The cross and the torture devises of empire belong below the horizon line of the promised future. What changes the crucifixion’s cruel macabre character is Jesus’ vision for what lay beyond it’s horizon.  Empire and death are made a laughing stock on the resurrection side of that horizon. Join Christ on the road to Calvary by laying down your arms, your defenses, your revenge, your bounded sets, by daring what C.S. Lewis liked to call the “deeper magic” to happen.

No doubt, death is real.  We feel it to our bones and it is serious stuff.  But Good Friday’s glory does not come from death’s gravity. Good Friday is Good because it is the masterful cosmic foreshadowing of the prevailing community of forgiveness. The vision of the Crucified one, on Friday of Holy week, is good news to everything on this side of the horizon, it is proof that God would not want any single one to be left out of the story.  ‘Even if you or I would dream it otherwise.

Do you recall that curtain ripping in the Holy of Holies at the strike of 3pm?  Paul would later write that the dividing wall between people is also removed (Eph 2.13-16). So, what shall separate us from the fellowship forming love of God in Christ Jesus? Nothing!  There is no longer Covenanters or pagans, no longer male and female, no longer enslaved or free citizen… all things are made new.  Even that old foe, death, no longer has its stinging capacity to separate us.  The empty cross proves that corporeal threat is impotent in the face of God’s love, and the empty tomb proves that sacrificial death is empty too.  Jesus was betting on that! Good Friday is the inhaling of the deeper magic.  On Good Friday, we are invited to join Christ in letting-go of the demand we hold on others and in letting-come the power to forgive, heal, reconcile and belong within a New Creation.

Have a Good Friday!

Wildest Imagination (Bass)

Wildest Imagination (Guitar Capo2)

Oh Blessed God

Bring Forth

Here’s the link to the donate page on Neighbors Abbey’s site.

So, that says it for us!

I remembered back 3 years earlier hearing that Tony would become the coordinator a few months after hanging with him in Decatur for Brueggemann and the Bible. At that point the buzz from Darrell Guder and others was that we were on the way to becoming a denomination.

Before long, the press finally had someone to “goto” besides Brian to address the question “what is emergent?,” and not much later the culture despisers had someone to “blame” for the slippery slope into “postmodern relativism.” Then the postmodern bloggers began to blame Tony for being part of an oligarchy. And then people got frustrated at a survey asking, again, for permission to become what we dream the emergent village could be writing “Tony, when will we get the results of the survey?”

So it seems right that we need to be stripped of a “goto” person, someone to deflect responsibility upon, and someone to blame fo the whole mess. Truth be told, we are the mess, and the solution.

So I am taking responsibility. My friend Josh Case and I decided we ought to profess that Emergent could be (and is) Coordinated by any of us.

Sure this is tongue-in-cheek. We need people starting things (like the regional gatherings that have risen up, the podcasts and blogs, the churches, the community organizing, the magazine ideas… people do do stuff around here!) instead of learning to expect EV to start things. This is what we say every month at the Atlanta Cohort, “Emergent belongs to you.  Whatever you bring to the table, mixed with our four practices/values, and that equals emergent.  No more.  No less.  So lets figure out what we want to make of it…”  But why did we get so hung up with needing a coordinator anyway? Tony was (is) great (hats off to you dude!), but why do we need the “figure head?”

If, in fact, the Spirit sends gifts from a promised future to participate in the possibilities of Jesus’ kingdom, then we can operate without a named figure head, right? The “Gifts of the Spirit” are open source, they are not given to chairmen/women, elected officials, or transfered through ordination like the fair lady giving boy Arthur the permission to remove the sword from the stone.

EV was becoming what Brafman ad Beckstrom call a “spider organism” that liked having a leader to blame, defer to, or upon which we could place our hopes. But the leadership that Tony and others take are best understood as “a catalysts, a person who initiates a circle and then fades away into the background.”

A catalyst is like the architect of a house: he’s essential to the long-term structural integrity, but he doesn’t move in. In fact, when the catalyst stays around too long and becomes absorbed in his creation, the whole structure becomes more centralized.” (Starfish and Spider, pg94)

I congratulate Tony and the Board on this decision, and congratulate the Villagers who expressed this option in the vote. I even wonder if a Board of Directors, and operating as a 501c3 or a LLC or an CSA, or any official entity for that matter, will ever fully serve to facilitate an open-sourced architecture. And as we evolve into a more centralized or increasingly decentralized conversation I think this is a chance for participants of the village, no matter what neighborhood you’re in, to lean into agency. Leaning into this is taking the risk of using our gifts:

“When we deny our gifts, we blaspheme against the Holy Spirit whose action is to call forth gifts… And that same Spirit gives us the responsibility of investing [our gifts] with him in the continuing creation of the world. Our gifts are the signs of our commissioning, the conveyors of our human-divine love, the receptacles of our own transforming, creative power” (Elizabeth O’Connor).

“When the church starts to be the church it will constantly be adventuring out into places where there are no tried and tested ways. If the church in our day has few prophetic voices to sound above the noises of the street, perhaps in large part it is because the pioneering spirit has become foreign to it. It shows little willingness to explore new ways. Where it does it has often been called an experiment. We would say that the church of Christ is never an experiment, but wherever that church is true to its mission it will be experimenting, pioneering, blazing new paths, seeking how to speak the reconciling Word of God to its own age.” (O’Connor)

So, pull the sword out of your stone! Blaze a trail. Start your own Emergent neighborhood-inside-the-village. Your the people you’ve been waiting for. Get some “Mojo,” as Mark Scandrett likes to call it. Elect yourself.

I dare ya, claim your position as the next Emergent Village National Coordinator!