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[Back to index of June 2007 articles] Envisioning a church for the 21st century By Paul Donnelly "Tear down the tabernacle, baby!" That is how Tony Jones, national coordinator of Emergent Village, summed up the message of the Church for the 21st Century conference held at Washington National Cathedral on May 10-12. It seemed a provocative thing to say under the nave's massive stone piers with a brilliant spring sun behind the high stained glass. But the two day discussion, including "theology and beer" sessions held in the evenings at a local Tex-Mex restaurant, was full of intentional provocations. Inspired by the work of Diana Butler Bass, notably her most recent book Christianity for the Rest of Us, the congregation-focused conference featured three popular authors, Marcus Borg, a distinguished professor of religion and culture at Oregon State University, Barbara Brown Taylor, chair of religion and philosophy at Piedmont College in rural Georgia, and Phyllis Tickle, the mother of seven children in west Tennessee and author of nearly as many books. The conference, attend by some 150 people from as far as far away as Minnesota and California, sparked conversations about sharing best practices and how healing and reflection, diversity and testimony are embodied in different circumstances. "I remember when I was growing up, parishes just seemed to be bursting at the seams,” the Rev. Preston Hannibal, the Diocese of Washington's canon for academic ministries, told a small group discussing African-American congregations on the Crypt level. "I remember when I was growing up, parishes just seemed to be bursting at the seams. My wife lived in Mount Pleasant, in a segregated D.C. But it was a vibrant community, parishes like St. Luke's, Trinity, with generations worshiping together. When integration came along, families just moved out to the suburbs, because they could. Maybe the first generation drove back in, the second a little, but what had been bursting churches are half-empty." Richard Miller, who has served on the Executive Committee of the Office of Black Ministries, said: "All you need is to change the names of the subdivisions and the parishes, and the stories are the same all over the country. There aren't enough congregational development activities." Jones' breakout session featured a heavy helping of encouragement mixed with practical insights into generational issues: "In the mid to late 90s, many Christian denominations found we had a problem, even the evangelicals, because Gen-Xers weren't coming to their mega-churches. So that's where we're coming from. "Lowest common denominator ecumenism failed. For example, we'd say 'We can't talk to the Jews about Jesus, so let's talk to them about justice and peace.' But why do we talk about justice and peace? It's because of Jesus." "Emergent churches is all about taking postmodernism seriously," Jones said. "The question is always, how do we deal with the other?" Jesus Reyes led the Community Conversation Circle focusing on Hispanic issues with the Rev. Carmen Guerrero-Stamp, a national officer for Jubilee Ministry. Robert Harvey, of Our Saviour in Silver Spring, noted: "In our parish, there are worshipers from 51 countries. It's not just Salvadorans and Guatemalans; it's people from Sierra Leone and South Africa. We have services and development activities in the basement, but we don't want it to be just what Father Roberto is doing; we want ownership by the whole congregation." Reyes and Guerrero-Stamp agreed, but noted the difficulties of both recognizing the common difficulties facing native speakers of Spanish in the U.S., as well as the distinctions within a rapidly growing community: "We are divided by nationalities," Guerrero-Stamp noted. "There are Mexicans, Bolivians, Salvadorans, Puerto Ricans. It's like Hispanic, vs. Latino. I was in Spain, and I thought, well here, surely, they are 'Hispanic.' But they said, 'no, we are European'." "How do you connect with the realities of the recently arrived?" asked Reyes. "There was a prayer book in the 50s," Guerrero-Stamp observed, "the rationale of it was to Americanize newcomers to Christian practice in the U.S.;" for example a national holiday like Thanksgiving. "In the end, to me, it is about Jesus Christ, not about any nationality." [Back to index of June 2007 articles]
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