I'm just finishing reading Tony Jones new book, "The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier" (Tony Jones) and it's raising some questions for me. Namely, to what extent can emerging faith communities operate within the institutional church? This is a live issue for me as I'd love to be part of an emerging faith community, but I'm also a part of an institutional church - The Uniting Church in Australia. I'm a minister of the UCA, I'm employed by the UCA (and by the institution itself, not a local congregation), and I have promised to come under the discipline of the UCA.

One thing which gives me comfort is a tradition within the UCA of being a 'movement' rather than a denomination, but there's still a lot of denominational apparatus, let me tell you! Anyway, I'll keep thinking about it and in the next couple of posts I might try to delineate the things I really like about the UCA and why I think the Church would be poorer if there was no UCA. Then I might look at some of the 'emergent' values I hold and then thirdly how these two lists sit somewhat in tension.

I am currently in the middle of "How (Not) to Speak of God" by Peter Rollins and "A Heretic's Guide to Eternity" by Spencer Burke, Barry Taylor (ooh, I do like the way Ecto 3's Amazon Helper makes those links up automatically!) and I must say that I am finding both books stellar! I'd love to get involved in a reading group going through them in some detail.

I've also rediscovered my Sci-fi library, after unpacking a bunch of books that have been in hiding since we went to London (ie 10 years ago), and am halfway through "Refugee (Bio of a Space Tyrant, Vol 1)" by Piers Anthony; after which I'll be tackling books (series) by Harry Harrison, Christopher Stasheff, Ursula Le Guin, E.E. 'Doc' Smith, James White, David Eddings and a ritual re-reading of all my Perry Rhodan and The Destroyer books (over 100 vols in each series!).

My wife worries that she will never see me again...

When people ask me what the 'emerging church' is, one of the resources I point them to is the book Emerging Churches by Eddie Gibbs and Ryan Bolger. In a recent email conversation I summarised the 9 common characteristics they find in emerging churches, and a number of people seemed to find my summary helpful so I thought I'd put it up here for reference.

The Cliff Notes version is this: they identify nine characteristics of emerging churchs:

1. they tend to identify heavily with the life and teaching of Jesus as much as his death and resurrection - a 'kingdom' emphasis if you will;
2. they tend to break down the secular/sacred dualism thus being generally far more optimistic about culture (seeing God at work in it) and identifying with the concept of the church joining with God the Missio Dei, rather than the Church being the sole (or main) instrument of God's work. They are also thus warm towards a sacramentalist approach.
3. they tend to emphasise the importance of community; and value family over institution.
4. they tend to value hospitality, generosity to the stranger, inclusiveness.
5. they tend to value service to others and to see that such service should be generous and transparent (without ulterior motivation).
6. they tend to emphasise full participation with God in the redemption of the world and hence worship tends to be multi-sensory, all-age, participatory, dialogical, holistic, etc.
7. related to this, there is a strong emphasis on creativity (participating with my gifts) and aesthetics.
8. leadership tends to be seen as relational, corporate, vulnerable, influential (rather than authoritarian), passionate (rather than rationally driven), facilitative.
9. there is a strong interest in learning from, and incorporating into life and worship, the 'best' of ancient thinking but more particularly *practice*, especially practices of spirituality (some refer to an emergence of a 'new monasticism').

After reading a review of it on faithCommons, I'm keen to get a hold of Brian McLaren's new book, The Secret Message of Jesus. I've enjoyed many of McLaren's books. A Generous Orthodoxy and A New KInd of Christian were both 'old' stuff for me, but A New KInd of Christian expresses some of my thoughts so nicely - it's a great book to introduce people to postmodernism and a (positive) Christian response to it. The second book in the series, The Story We Find Ourselves In is my personal favourite - probably because it's actually starting the job of retelling the Christian story for a postmodern age, not just deconstructing the previous paradigm. The Last Word and the Word After That just didn't grab me because itwas primarily centred around responding to a doctrine (eternal, conscious torment of the damned) which lost my allegiance many years ago.

P.S. I like the look of faithCommons and will be adding it to my 'check regularly' list. There's a great rant with which I wholeheartedly agree here.