Deep Church

I met Tom Sine, just about 10 years ago. We’ve spoken a few times on email since, and I wrote a recommendation for the back of his latest book, ‘The New Conspirators’ for it’s UK print.

So it was a privilege to have Tom stay with us, and then speak to our church community yesterday. We were celebrating with a missions team from our church who had just got back from Sri Lanka, building a kids feeding station, amongst many other things.

It was so great to have Tom help us celebrate the nature and priority of ‘missional’ as someone who seems to embody that in his life so totally. Then Tom spoke to the current credit crunch crises and talked about ways we could imagine and live an alternative kingdom life.

You can find the MP3 from his talk yesterday at our church site, here.

With all the furore and cross linking to posts, some seem to be collapsing all the discussions about Emergent and Emerging into the “Emerging Church is Dead” sound-bite.

I want to make clear, my last post was not about the end of the emerging church. It was about my struggles with it, my gratefulness for it and the direction I am moving in as a result.

Scott McKnight has a great post, and in particular comment no.11 by Brian McLoughlin, was most helpful to me, in explaining what might be going on for some of us.

I’m aware that the move of my blogging to here, and the re-focus for my content, comes at a time when there are several other bloggers thinking about moving on/out from ‘emerging church’.

Entry & Emphasis

There have been many entry points for people into the emerging church conversation, different events, books, speakers, experiences and flavors. Mine was through the association of vineyard churches, and it’s invitation by Todd Hunter to have Dallas Willard, Stanley Grenz, & Brian McLaren, resource some of us as young leaders 10-11 years ago.

This was before Emerging church was called emerging church. Despite Todd Hunter trying to stimulate us into this area, my denomination has largely become hostile and with great antipathy towards the ‘Emerging Church’.

I often surmise that it is this group, my tribe, who I have spent the most time ‘defending’ emerging church to, which is rather tiring. My own denomination with their interactions with the more anti/post church wing of Emerging church, who seem so visible on the web and in books, has wondered how I could be a vineyard pastor and be involved with emerging church at all?

On the other hand I have often (and still have), emerging church people ask why and how can I be part of the emerging church, and be a vineyard pastor.
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So my site www.jasonclark.ws has been turned into my web 2.0 mashup, a kind of contact and front door to my flickr/fireeagle/twitter/facebook micro and nano blogging world.

My blogging that used to be there will now take place on this site.  You can search the archive at www.jasonclark.ws for old content and posts, in fact since January 2004, I posted 1,472 items with 10,359 non spam real world comments.

Why did I move my blogging to the Deep Church site?

1.  Others:  I’m collaborating with others, more so than ever within a particular focus, and doing that under ‘deep church’ instead of my name, seems more open for others to write with me.

2. New Focus:  I’m changing my focus for blogging, as I alluded previously, and will blog about that over the next few weeks.  I’ll detail why I am going to talk of my emerging church connection as something in the past, and use that language less going forward.  And I’ll explain why.

3.  Social Media Mashup & Portal:  I wanted my named site to have the micro/nano social media world, and my blog which is a bit more old school.

If you’ve made your way over here from www.jasonclark.ws welcome! We’ve had a face lift and re-design, take us for a spin.

If your already reading this site in your news reader, hopefully your old rss feed for the site is working, but to make sure you can read the site still, please note the new feeds for the www.deepchurch.org.uk site.

You can get full, excerpts and comments by RSS.  If in doubt open www.deepchurch.org.uk in you browser and all the feeds are listed on the front page.

New content and writers will be here from Monday 22nd September.