Emerging Spirit @ The United Church of Canada Emerging Spirit @ The United Church of Canada

Sojourners has posted a provocative article from their May 2010 issue asking, "Is the Emerging Church for Whites Only?" The discussion about this article on Sojourners' website, as well as on several other blogs, raises important questions and insights about diversity and the emerging church. Through these conversations, roiling at times, some potential new directions and areas of growth are beginning to emerge. And as they do, more attention is being given to the reality that the emerging church is much bigger than just what is happening in North America or the handful of well-known writers and speakers who are associated with the movement.

"Is the Emerging Church for Whites Only?"
By Soong-Chan Rah and Jason Mach, with responses by Julie Clawson, Brian McLaren, and Debbie Blue.

Sojourners has also posted a number of additional responses on their God's Politics blog, including Shane Claiborne, Soong-Chan Rah, Jarrod McKenna, and Julie Clawson.

Other blogs dicussing the article:

Tony Jones: Emergent's White Problem.

Tall Skinny Kiwi: The Future

On the Faith & Leadership website, writer Lynn Gosnell offers a report on The Loft coffeehouse, an innovative missional community near San Antonio, Texas.

The Loft isn't just a coffeehouse, of course. It is also a church. The Loft is a core ministry of Riverside, a church community planted six years ago by San Antonio's Alamo Heights United Methodist Church. The church plant started with the coffeehouse, and eventually grew to include a food bank, thrift store, and a resource centre for the needy - and this was all before it held its first Sunday worship service. Now Riverside holds two services each Sunday with about 500 people, but there is no formal membership, and it owns no buildings, preferring to rent.

"Customers might not know that this is a church," said Tami Piatnik, who works on Saturdays. Indeed, The Loft displays few crosses or other signs of its affiliation with the United Methodist Church.

The Loft officially opened in early 2004, and it wasn't long before it became the meeting place the planters had envisioned, playing host to all sorts of people from the community. It was more than a year after the founding that they began Sunday services. "What we've found is what works best is a more organic way of life, where things are birthed spontaneously within the community," said Linda Marceau, a prayer leader with the church plant. "We're a very close-knit community, very familial."

Rev. David McNitzky, one of the original church planters of Riverside, says this set up "speaks to our point that accountability is through relationship more than rules and policies.... There's a longing here for transition for the church as a whole. From traditional, to contemporary Bible churches, to all these structures that are an organic way of doing church."

Rev. Scott Heare, the leader of the initiative, says the challenge "is how to lead during a dramatic transition in the church's history. How do you lead from the ideas of the traditional church that are so comfortable into an entirely new way of being churched?"

Read the full article on "The Coffeehouse Church" here.

As we travel across the country offering the Living the Hope events we hear stories. Some provide kindling for hope; others fall into the category of "Things that can't be that bad, but are."

A woman in her late thirties came for a job interview. The interview was held in the Christian Education building of a United Church. As it happened, the congregation was the one in which she had been raised but no longer attended.

As she passed time waiting for the interview she toured. Later she commented that everything was the same as when she was 10 years old, including the paint colour and the posters on the walls.

We live in a visual age. Sight, sound and sensation are more important than linear written text. For those between the ages of 30 and 45, meaning arises through experience and encounter. As we have heard thousands of times, people seek an experience of God, not information about God.