New Conspirators

Two weeks ago, Joel Shenk, Matt Krabill and I headed up to Seattle for the New Conspirators conference. It was a great experience and extremely worthwhile!

I attended the conference for several reasons: 1) I have heard the buzzwords, “missional” and “emergent”, bandied about with great frequency. And while I have a slapdash academic understanding of the terms, I sure didn’t have any faces or experiences to associate with the terminology (good elementary books are Missional Church and Emerging Churches). 2) Additionally, I was keen to meet up with fellow Anabaptist types and become better acquainted with the Submergent (emergent-Anabaptist) conversation taking place. 3) Plus, it seemed like a great excuse to hang in Seattle with some friends and do some serious conspiring.

The New Conspirators: What in the World is God Doing was organized around the premise that “God is doing something new through a new generation of emerging, missional, mosaic (multi-cultural) and monastic conspirators,” and philosophically based on the book, The New Conspirators: The Future One Mustard Seed at a Time. The streams, as defined by conference material:

eMerging: The emerging stream had its origins in the UK in the late 80s. Young Christians recognized that many of their postmodern peers had a keen interest in spirituality, but were not interested in what was being offered in traditional churches. Emergent leaders started creating cafés and art centers that engaged specific populations of the un-churched and de-churched. Emerging churches tend to be more relational and experiential.

Missional: The missional stream began with the publication of The Missional Church in 1998. While the emerging stream began with practitioners, this movement began in the academy with scholars like Darrell Guder. Many churches use the missional language, but what seems to distinguish young church planters in this stream is that they are creating outwardly-focused models that address the needs to those outside the church instead of those inside the building.

Mosiac: The mosaic stream seems to have its origins with young people from ethnic churches who want to be a part of richly multicultural congregations that reflect God’s Kingdom. Typically, like missional church plants, they tend to invest more of their resources outward in mission, but they experience much more of the richness of God’s new order by sharing cultural practices in their lives, congregations and communities.

Monastic: The monastic stream began twenty years ago with new monastic orders that moved into tough urban communities to work with the poor and practice spiritual disciplines together. Early groups included InnerChange, Servants Partners, Servants to Asia’s Urban Poor, Word Made Flesh and Urban Neighbors of Hope (UNOH). New Monasticism, a movement within the monastic stream, began at a gathering in Raleigh-Durham, NC, in 2005. Unlike the other three streams, most monastic have no interest in church planting, and they offer a much more robust critique of the dominant culture.

While there are differences between these four streams, they flow together. These new conspirators all share a strong common passion to create new forms of more authentic faith in their lives, families and communities, and to creat congregations that are more outwardly focused in local and global mission.

The “festival” was organized to be an opportunity to communicate, connect and create. The highlights for me were the people. We had some amazing speakers like Shane Claiborne and Efrem Smith and I got into some great conversations with folks like Mark Van Steenwyk (Jesus Manifesto) and Elician Rosario-Cruz (Kingdom Praxis). With all of its good intentions to include times of question-answer, collaboration, and creativity the conference took on a familiar conferencey disposition. In the end I felt, besides all good intentions, that it was a fairly conventional conference about unconventional church. In regards to the four streams, I was most vague about the mosaic stream as a self-aware movement. The monastics impressed me the most with their sense of covenant in community, counter cultural perspective, and mission. Two issues continued to tickle my brain after conference.

Social Location: One lingering question that remains for me is about the role of social location in these emerging expressions of church. It felt like many of these ideas and innovations were borne from folks with a significant degree of social mobility. They could choose where to live, what traditions to draw from, and what social contexts/neighborhoods/communities to enter. That is not the case for every social class and ethnic group. (For example, the majority of Christians around the world do not live in this state of choice and occupy this degree of social location.)

I spent a lot of time thinking about how much the issue of social location will play in these expressions and their influence on the contemporary context of the global church. Most people in the world live lives perhaps "confined" by their limited social mobility, culture, religious contexts. It is not simply a matter of choice. One cannot always choose which community to belong to, which neighborhood to live in, which social customs to adopt, or how to shape their own identity. I, like many of the people at the conference, represent people with a high degree of choice and social mobility. This is an age old question in mission and still is tangible, even in these new discussions about church. I hope that Christians in our day, in our participation in the mission of God, can find ways to transcend our social location and social mobility as we explore new ways of doing church.

Tradition and Streams: Over the weekend I kept trying to wrap my head around the question of how does my tradition interact and connect with these new expressions? I didn't come to any good place and hope to explore that further. It will be interesting to see how these fluid streams will interact with the rigidity or institutional concerns present in denominations. How will ideas from the perspective of choice interact with the context of confinement of established tradition? Coming from a denomination, the Mennonite Church, I don’t always feel like I have the same choice. I am rooted in a history, identity, culture and a tradition. To me having community and culture, is not something that one can just always pick and choose from. That encompasses my greatest tensions on the one hand and also gives me rootedness and sense of belonging on the other. Part of being church is living in that tension of experiencing confinement as a reality in where we are located and who we do community with. However, the Church also includes discovering and nurturing a new rootedness, new identity and a new people in Christ. I do believe that is exactly what these streams are exploring and discovering. Hopefully, traditions, like mine, can find points of renewal through the new expressions of church.

I am glad I went to this conference. I made some new friends. I learned more about the potential interaction between Anabaptism and the new expressions of church. The conference definitely gave me some new vocabulary and new food for thought. I am very excited about the developments and hope to continue exploring what these ideas can mean in my own context. I look forward to more conversations and insight.