So, in light of Tony’s posts, some of the comments, and also the beautiful thing that is happening this weekend at the TransFORM East Coast Gathering (which you can follow on Twitter) I want to reflect upon what I think Emergent has offered, is offering, and will offer to the church.

For the purposes of this post, I’m not strictly referring to Emergent Village, though I’m using the word Emergent as Tony did in his posts. I’m referring to networks and movements like Emergent Village, TransFORM, The Underground Railroad and broader counterculture movements, the new monastics, the Jesus Freaks, 24-7 Prayer, the lovely new Anabaptists that are influencing so many of us, and various other networks and groups around the world that I’d love to meet, just to name a few.

I think there are deep gifts that these movements have offered, are offering, and will offer to the church and world. A deep sense of mission, learned to a large extent from folks who lived and developed their theology outside the Western world (Newbigin and Bosch, among others), is a (the most?) significant one in my mind as it seems to be in Tony’s, and though it bugs me to no end that missional and other similar words have become buzzwords for churches that don’t know the thought behind them and thus continue with what they were already doing while relabeling it, the emerging church as a whole has resisted doing that.

In my experience, the emerging church has deeply and authentically sought to learn what missional living and missional church look like. Once it has learned that a missional life is an incarnational life, it has sought to learn how these things relate to the world, and specifically to cultures and subcultures in which it finds itself.

It has tried to create indigenous ways of experiencing and communicating with God and with those cultures in a deep desire to live lives after the heart of Jesus, and allowed these things to shape its communities from the ground up (in worship, spiritual practices, leadership, location, and any number of other factors). It has tried to integrate activism on local, national, and global scales (I passionately disagree with those who say that we, as a whole, haven’t done any justice work beyond talk, as many of us have joined movements that already existed¹, were started independently of us², or that folks in this movement started themselves³) without being colonialist about it, and that is a deeply significant thing.

Certainly it hasn’t done any of these things perfectly, and no similar thing ever will. But it truly has tried to holistically live what it has learned about mission in its spirituality, in its ecclesiology, and in its desire for justice; and I really think this has shaped the overall trajectory of the movement like none of the other factors. Different folks come to different understandings of where that desire to be incarnational should lead, and I don’t agree with all of those understandings and expect that not everyone would agree with my understandings, but I trust that people do come from that place and that desire.

I’ll continue to follow the TransFORM conference as it continues this weekend and I wish I could have been there; I’ve already seen so many thoughts pass across Twitter that demonstrate this gift of mission and incarnation that Emergent offers to the church, and it’s a beautiful thing. Much love to all of you who are there, and I hope to be at the next gathering like this one.

1. Such as Sojourners, Christian Peacemakers, the Christian Community Development Association, and many other beautiful things related to disease, war, slavery, poverty, and politics.
2. Like Invisible Children, Not For Sale, Falling Whistles, charity: water, for just a few.
3. Advent Conspiracy and One Day’s Wages are beautiful examples; though there are countless small and local things that have broad, under-the-radar reach into deep issues of justice.

The episode also talks of his band, The Black Peppercorns, a group that played in pubs and bars and sang songs that blurred the lines between sacred and secular and saw folks in those bars have genuine encounters with the Spirit. Many of us who listened to the episode are interested in this blurring of the lines as it is a passion we have inherited from folks like him and others before him throughout the history of spiritual music. Sadly, though, there doesn’t seem to be anywhere to find this music as it wasn’t accepted by the Pentecostal and charismatic scenes from which he came.

Now, if you’ve spent time in Pentecostal circles this won’t come as a surprise to you. It doesn’t come as one to me, but it does sadden me, both because I have a deep passion for the work of God in the real world, and also because I think it’s one of the biggest weaknesses of the Pentecostal movement throughout the majority of its history. Especially in recent months, it has become clear to me that the Pentecostal and charismatic movements are like this because they have a weak missiology.

Mission, if you attend a typical Pentecostal church or university, consists of foreign missions. Missionaries study culture, study languages, and so on. But you, as an attendee or typical Western minister, don’t learn to think of your own culture as a place in which you are to do mission (including but not limited to the study of language and culture, real contextualization, and so on), and you don’t learn to think of mission as a participation in what God is already doing in the world, unconfined by the walls of the church, walls which are themselves not pleasing to God. Sadly this movement does not have a Lesslie Newbigin or David Bosch to say these things, at least not yet.

This is one of the main reasons that I haven’t been part of a Pentecostal church in several years, both in a direct sense as I could no longer support the ecclesiology and missiology that is present there, and in an indirect sense as I found what I was looking for within the underground and emerging church on its better days, and a desperate desire for it even on its bad days.

But having said that, as Mike mentions in this podcast episode, many of us who came from Pentecostal or charismatic circles and into the emerging church miss the days of intense encounters with the Spirit of God. Focus on this is somewhat uncommon within the emerging church. This is sometimes because folks come from backgrounds that don’t have an active theology of the supernatural, and sometimes because folks have had really bad experiences in Pentecostal or charismatic settings. I can’t blame them for this. There are awful, dangerous things that can be said and done there.

But in spite of that, Mike asked Kevin Prosch how he would advise folks like us who want genuine supernatural experience with God, but have found a home in the mission and ecclesiology of the emerging church. This was the weakest of Kevin’s answers, I thought, and I felt like an opportunity was missed. It may be that he doesn’t have answers for this, and I can respect that as I don’t feel like I have solid ones either.

I have no interest in excesses of the Pentecostal movement, and even when I was there I wasn’t a particularly demonstrative person. But there are things I miss. I was encouraged when Tony Jones presented a paper and a couple of other posts discussing what Pentecostals and Emergents can learn from each other a couple of months ago, and I’m also encouraged by this podcast episode and conversations that I’ve had with Mike along these lines. In writing about it, I’m hoping to continue these thoughts and see if there are genuine things we can begin to do with them.

There were a few comments and Tweets that indicate that folks are at least somewhat interested in this, and I’ve spent a great deal of time learning and thinking about the ways in which design affects other disciplines – both in a professional sense as I relate to technology and marketing folks on a daily basis, and in a theological and spiritual sense as I care about the ways in which we think and talk about God, the kingdom of God, and the church and its mission in the world; so I want to start some thinking about this.

This conversation as a whole started when folks sought to learn from the language of programming and the language of social networking as we do theology, do church and community, and seek justice, among other things. As we’ve looked at these symbols, we have (rightly, I think) been looking at Google as an archetype of the kind of thinking we are seeing and how it applies to the things we do, so I think it’s appropriate to start this conversation about design along those lines, as well. There’s enough in that conversation for several posts, hopefully from others as well as me.

Folks in these talks are considering the things that Google does really well, and the ways in which it has changed and is changing culture. However skilled Google is at certain things (engineering, finding and organizing information, and serving monstrous amounts of data, among other things), it is notoriously bad at allowing design to influence the way it does things.² If you’re curious about when this will begin to hurt, consider the failures of Wave and Buzz.

These are two products that were created to solve problems, but it turns out that no one has the problems they were trying to solve. This is bad design, and it is bad design thinking. Though Android is experiencing a bit more success than Wave or Buzz, it, too, suffers from bad design and you can see it when you observe how the users of the phones, the operating systems, and the apps feel compared to users of the iPhone, iPhone OS, and its apps (from an objective business standpoint, also observe that Android phones are often buy-one-get-one-free these days).

It’s really easy for those of us in the web 2.0 world to succumb to the hype and excitement of products like these that are not designed well, thinking that they’ll revolutionize email, for example. The products are shiny, we know they’re created by really talented folks, and we know they have cool videos that people have created to describe them. But this isn’t enough. They’re not serving people, they’re not helping to shape the narratives that folks live within, and they’re not helping people solve problems.³

It is here that we can begin a designer’s theological method. When we create theology, we can ask ourselves: does it serve people, help shape the narratives they live within and tell the narratives of God, and does it help people solve problems that they really have? Said another way, does it preach the good news to the poor,⁴ release the oppressed, and proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor?⁵

I think the folks who have started this conversation about Theology After Google want theology to be this way and they’ve been clear about this. I want to be a part of imagining how theology looks in this age, and I think it’s essential to include and further develop both of these metaphors, and probably several other ones.⁶ Again, this is only (what I hope will be) the start of this conversation, even as we’ve also only begun to look at theology from the perspective of programming, engineering, and beta.

1. If you are curious about why I feel strongly about this, I’ll start by stating that I have a degree in Biblical studies, and another one in Interactive Media, and am constantly observing and seeking ways in which the two have things to say to one another and can be linked as essential parts of a holistic way of life for me.
2. A quick summary of the linked post is this: Google’s lead Visual Designer left Google for Twitter, after realizing that he couldn’t use design to shape the company and solve big problems when it was necessary to do analytical tests to decide between 41 shades of blue.
3. That’s not to say that Apple, for example, is interested in serving people. But clearly the company is shaping narratives and helping people to solve problems, though people are more than capable of creating new ones from the remnants of the solved ones.
4. When we were in Minneapolis recently, we heard a talk that said, “If you share the gospel with someone and they don’t hear it as good news, you’re doing it wrong.” That speaker, who does a great deal of work both among the poor and oppressed in Africa and among the addicted and broken in suburbia, for example, said that he’s a Christian because he wants to give food and water to the hungry and thirsty, come alongside folks to break their addictions, and tell everyone that God loves them.
5. Luke 4 and Isaiah 61
6. The design metaphor needs to further develop to deal with simplicity, complexity, and of course the links between design and consumerism, for example.

This, of course, was right after the Theology After Google conference, which I’ve read was a fantastic time. In light of all this, it’s worth mentioning that I’m not so much reflecting on the event, though I’ve enjoyed reading about it before and after it occurred, but instead am reflecting upon the concept, especially as it was discussed in the podcast episode I mentioned above.

The concept is a fabulous thing. It reflects the reality that folks outside the ivory towers of academia can be as knowledgeable of theological issues as they want to be, and that they often have no reason to trust the ivory towers to make their theological decisions. Anyone can be a theologian, to whatever extent they’d like to be. Florin Paladie has a blog series on this reality that begins here. The podcast also reflects upon these issues.

This is all great. The podcast continues by examining the concept of beta faith; whether our faith is always being programmed (the new way of understanding beta is exemplified by the fact that Gmail was in beta for some four years), whether our ways of doing church are always being programmed, and whether God is always being programmed. This, also, is all great. I love these questions, and it helps that Florin and Philip Clayton both have experience in programming that helps them reflect upon them.

Spencer Burke is also involved in the episode’s conversation, and the folks talking examine issues of what a theologian’s task is in a time like this. They talk of the similarities that beta and open source software have with these new methods. There are ideas of “creating space” and “hosting” the creation of theology, and of co-creating with other folks, and with God. The episode also discusses the conference itself, and reflects upon the fact that speakers will have the Twitter feed on a screen behind them.

Now. I mention all of these things, both to briefly summarize the podcast episode to get you to listen to it, and also to provide context for what I think is missing.

The concept, as it is presented, makes everyone a “programmer” or “engineer” of theology, to the extent that they’d like to be. The concept needs designers. Visual designers and user experience designers are asking the kind of questions that these folks need to ask, and dealing with the kind of experiences that these folks need to deal with. I’m confident that Spencer, Florin, and Philip were looking for this kind of language without mentioning it, and that it can be incredibly helpful as we move forward in this conversation.

Designers are the folks who create space for experiences to occur, and to host those experiences in ways that are pleasant to use and make people want to use them. In a business sense, designers are the ones who are able to move the focus that programmers and marketing folks often have on making themselves look awesome to the focus that makes users comfortable and helps them see themselves as being awesome¹.

In a very specific example of the need for user experience to make users comfortable, the design community erupted in the aftermath of the Web 2.0 Expo NYC this past November. I was at this event. The eruption occurred because of a presentation by Danah Boyd, a researcher at Microsoft who gave one of the keynotes. She wasn’t well advised of the setting of her talk; it went much more badly than she had hoped, and was dramatically worsened by the Twitter backstream, which showed things folks were saying about her without allowing her to see them. Danah reflected upon the experience, and there are deep insights there and in the comments.

Part of the reason I bring this up is that I often see parallels between the issues and conversations within Emergent and the issues and conversations within the web design and development community. The Web 2.0 Expo situation was created by two characteristics of web 2.0 folks: 1) they have a genuine desire for people to communicate with each other, and a realization that everyone has valuable knowledge that they can teach and learn from everyone else, and 2) they are easily distracted by shiny things. We like the excitement of beta software, untested technologies, and taking things as far as we can.

Emergent shares both of these characteristics, among others. At times, they have very real human costs. A Twitter backstream is a very simplistic example, but a very real one – the speaker herself was ignored for the benefit of the community, which went on without her. This is a real human cost. At other times, especially when they are combined with a deep concern for the experiences of all the people involved, these characteristics have incredibly beautiful effects. This is one of the reasons we all are a part of Emergent, and it is also one of the reasons that many of us are involved in web 2.0 things.

So this is my request: while we are thinking about the language of beta, the experience of programmers, and what theology looks like after Google, let’s learn the language of design – the language of created spaces for beautiful user experiences, the desire to curate these spaces so that everyone can move within them, and ways to intentionally design for generative community.

1. If you have half an hour, it is more than worth your while to watch this video from Kathy Sierra, one of the best user experience thinkers in the world today.

For most of the time that I worked there, I worked with another guy who was double majoring in religion and music at another college in Lakeland. The college where I pursued undergraduate theological education is fairly conservative, and is solidly situated in the Pentecostal movement, and more specifically in the Assemblies of God. The college where my friend pursued his undergraduate education is solidly situated in classic liberal Christianity, and has connections with the United Methodist Church.

Both of these colleges have religion departments. Sadly, there is no dialogue between the two colleges or their religion departments, which are barely two miles apart; just as there is very little dialogue between the larger worlds of conservative and liberal Christianity in the United States. In a very broad sense, though with notable exceptions, the one I attended is more focused on “church ministry,” while my friend’s is focused more on theology, and expects folks to go on to seminary to learn “church ministry.” In any case, because my friend and I worked together, for forty hours a week for roughly two years; cleaning toilets, vacuuming rooms, sweeping and mopping floors, and moving lots of heavy furniture, we spent a lot of time in this kind of dialogue.

During the time that we worked together, we impacted each other’s theological and spiritual views and thoughts in significant ways. We spent large amounts of time discussing theology, the Bible, spirituality, ministry, politics, activism, and any number of other things. We agreed, disagreed, changed each other’s minds, agreed to continue disagreeing, and knew regardless that both of us were seeking the heart of God. Later I was in his wedding. We remain close friends today.

For a year or so, I also taught the high school Sunday School class with him at that church, and loved it. I think the folks in the class benefited from dialoguing with us, as we trusted one another enough to give freedom to teach things differently than we would have taught them, even within the same lesson. Even now, four or five years after the last time we taught them, we occasionally hear from some who remember things we said and did, and were impacted by them.

Now. This all probably sounds fluffy and idealistic. But for the first several months that we worked together, at least, we didn’t do any of this. We just argued. We talked past each other, we didn’t listen to each other, we didn’t hang out with each other. As I’ve said, our colleges didn’t dialogue with each other. But they did mention each other. Students at his college thought the folks at my school were crazy, primitive conservatives in the vein of the Falwells and Robertsons of the world, maybe combined with some old-fashioned revivalism. Students at my college thought the folks at his school were crazy, overeducated liberals in the vein of the Jesus Seminar, maybe combined with a complete lack of experience of the Spirit.

Neither were true. It took us time to learn this. Time to learn that we could listen to each other’s theologies, experience each other’s spiritualities – and take on and be shaped by them to varying extents (though we did, and still, disagree on many things) – without losing our own identities, our own theologies, our own convictions. These things are important. The failure to remember this is the failure of the ecumenical movement of the 20th century.

It could potentially be the dividing factor of Emergent Village, and this is why many of us who are not saying goodbye are saddened by the goodbyes of those who are. For the last few years, I have seen this kind of dialogue happen within Emergent circles. To an extent it is continuing to happen as folks here and there state that, regardless of whatever theological differences they might have with whomever they might have them they don’t need to say goodbye. I’m with them on that.

Mike Clawson‘s to that effect is especially relevant in the context here, as he reflects upon the accusation that Brian McLaren (in light of the controversy around his new book) and other folks are too liberal, while in the setting of a mainline seminary they are not liberal at all. This is where the dialogue can end, and maybe it is unavoidable. I’m hoping it isn’t.

This is another example of us talking past one another. The friend I’ve mentioned in this post is a liberal, attending a liberal seminary (where my wife is, as well). Professors regularly call him a heretic. I occasionally think he’s really sketchy. Aside from his ecclesiology (which may in fact be part of the broader issue here, with jobs and such on the line), he thinks most Emergent theological thought is moderate to conservative.

But it’s okay. There’s a deep awareness that, regardless of disagreements, the Spirit is present. Desire for the kingdom of God and the lordship of Jesus in the lives of real people is present. And it goes back to a mop closet, a custodial cart, and a vacuum cleaner.

But I’ve continued to think about these issues over the past few days, as more and more wonderful people give comments on the discussion that range from wonderful and full of grace to insane and full of judgment, and especially after reading this thought on the next decade of the emerging church.

Now, this post is from Brother Maynard, who writes some of what I consider to be the best thoughts out there on the missional church. I greatly value his words, and of course those of the many others who speak to us about mission. Anyway, in the post I mentioned he writes this:

As for the emerging church, the need to be “relevant” to the culture that was sparked by missional concern before spending ten or fifteen years re-theologizing will return for some. The emerging church will fracture between the liberalizing theological stream and the missional stream, which is to say, the part of the emerging church that returns to the roots of why the began to be emerging. The liberalizing theological stream, on the other hand, is made up of those who didn’t enter the emerging church for primarily missional reasons, or whose emphases changed once they began redefining their theology.

I was genuinely saddened to read this. For years, I have watched these two streams move within the emerging church in general and Emergent Village in particular. In this post I’m not interested in wondering why this fracture would happen if it does. Rather, I strongly believe that there are many of us out there who love and live within both streams simultaneously, and with some hope that some of these folks might speak about this on their sites, Twitter, Facebook, and wherever else – and thus possibly avoid a fracture like this.

I came into this conversation, as I’ve said before, through churches and ministries that arose within underground subcultures – goths, punks, hippies, and so on. They were missional, emerging communities because that was the only way that church made sense to them. Worship and life together, inclusive of music, teaching, setting, and ways to engage the world among extreme metal scenes, goth scenes, punk scenes, and so on, when they are indigenously birthed, are incredibly missional things.

Many of these underground folks didn’t have the theological background to give that kind of context to these communities, but other missional streams have combined with those to bring other fantastic people into these conversations. Some of these streams brought in theologians and ministers versed in Newbigin, Bosch, Wells, etc. as well as doing their own amazing thinking and living.

These people are wonderful. I love them, and want to learn from them and be with them and be shaped by them.

Other theologians and ministers realized that there were broader cultural changes that were starting to come out from the university philosophy and English departments where they had lurked since the evils of fascism brought certainty to its knees. They started to realize that changing the ways that we did church did, by definition, change our theology of church, and they were willing to see where that led. Some of these folks came from liberal traditions, and brought those frameworks with them, and everyone found freedom in asking questions of anything and learning from various frameworks.

These people are also wonderful, and I love them and want to learn from, be with, and be shaped by them as well. So as I said, it grieves me to think about the possibility that these streams could fracture. I want these friends to stay friends, and continue to seek the kingdom of God together. I don’t care if any of us do it in “official relationships,” but I want to seek ways that we can genuinely do it.

Starting with me, maybe. I agree and disagree with lots of things that various people in these conversations say. I don’t fit in any particular stream, because I fit in several different streams. I’m quite comfortable in communities of metalheads, punks, addicts, and other outcasts who are raw and authentic before God and each other, and there is a beautiful grace there that can take folks to the heart of God. Also, I love learning about and seeking to live in the mission of God, and the deep implications that it has for theology, Christology, ecclesiology, and justice – and want to see this shape the church.

Likewise, I’m quite comfortable in deep theological conversations, especially when they are accompanied by good, deep mugs of beer. I’m certainly not officially a scholar, as my formal theological education ended when I got a bachelor’s degree, but I’m comfortable with reading and dialoguing with scholars on all levels, and read as much, and more broadly, in theological circles than I did in college. I greatly enjoy and value “re-theologizing.”

Perhaps more to the point of recent discussions, I fit on various sides of the more public debates in these conversations – those along theology, scripture, culture, morality, politics and ethics, among other things – and I’m quite convinced that many, and maybe all, of us in these conversations do as well. I think we all know this, but I fear that we may forget to remind each other of it, and that we’re in this together.

This conversation of emergence and mission is a fairly broad one. It is much more broad than the groups of underground and alternative ministries, and it probably can either become still more broad or less broad, depending on whether or not we are enclosed, either by ourselves fracturing, or by the heresy-hunters causing more who might join us to be afraid of us. We’ve seen that the heresy-hunters aren’t all that effective, though I think they’ll be much more so if we do allow ourselves to fracture.

I want to see if, by remembering that most of us flow within multiple streams, we can keep these streams – the missional folks and the theological innovation folks, as well as the underground scenes and the new monastics and the anarchists and whoever else – and other streams who are yet to join these conversations. This has been one of the biggest strengths of the emerging church for many of us. Here’s hoping we can keep it up.

I responded to one of the similar conversations earlier this year, and because this one is quite a bit different I want to respond to it as well. I do want to note, first of all, that Andrew is one of the folks I have admired the most for the longest, as a pioneer in both the underground/alternative church¹, and in the broader emerging church. His voice, and his life, is powerful and essential.

Andrew has stated that he wasn’t, in fact, announcing the death of the movement but rather its transition into a much more mainstream role, perhaps akin to that of Sanctuary International, which used to plant churches for underground folks but now is in more of an advisory role, or perhaps just as part of the broader church world.

In spite of his statement, though, the title of his post is Emerging Church Movement (1989 – 2009)?. He is certainly a smart enough man to know that, in Western culture at least, two dates separated by a dash refer to a lifetime, ended by a death. We all may be incorrectly interpreting his words as a statement of the death of the emerging church, but he has certainly framed his words for us to interpret them that way by using that kind of title.

Moving along. Tony’s post reflects upon the nature of being a radical movement, and what happens to radical movements as time passes and as mantles of leadership pass. He also reminds us that, at least in the context of Emergent Village, the controversy has not subsided (Andrew’s voice has always looked at a broader scope of the emerging church, which I greatly appreciate). The money quote from Tony, I think, is this:

If anything — and I think that TSK may agree with me on this — the question that looms over the ECM is whether it will become domesticated as the first generation of leadership passes the mantle to the second. But, the truth is, the answer to that lies not with me or TSK, but with you. Yes, you.

This is, I think, more important for folks who will be in that second generation of leadership, whoever they are. So far, I can only perceive that from a distance, but again in the context of Emergent Village it seems to be going well, as the organization moves further into decentralization and local mission. I know many of the folks who will take the mantle of leadership, as Tony says, and they are fantastic people.

The response from Danielle Shroyer is a poignant, powerful one. It compares the revolution that Andrew says is over to a marriage when the honeymoon is over, in that we move deeper, though at times it seems we just move into banality. She says, “But no revolution stays in its honeymoon period forever. At some point, you have to come home and start the hard work of actually making a life together, and you have to do it out of the banality of everyday things like grocery lists and flu season and tax day.”

This is a beautiful thing. I’ve said before that one day, what we know as the emerging church movement will no longer be a way for folks to reach the forefront of what God is doing in the world. I still strongly hold to that belief, but I still believe we have not reached that point. The various emerging church networks that I know about, and the various streams and splinters into which things have moved, from the alternative to the new monastic to the Emergent to any number of other things may or may not still seem radical and dangerous, depending on where one lives and the folks one deals with on a regular basis.

I’ll admit that the thought makes the underground part of me a bit sad. But it happens. It happened with underground subcultures, and will happen again with something else. But regardless of that, I believe that these movements are and remain brilliant places for people to build lives that seek to be on the edge of the mission of God. Lives that seek to love God and love others – the poor, the outcast, the abandoned places of empire – really are radical things that are being deeply built in these movements today.

And that’s beautiful. That’s where I want to be.

1. Andrew was working with punks and hippies in the Haight/Ashbury district of San Francisco, and continued in other places, long before Emergent Village began. This side of him, through the Underground Railroad, was how I became acquainted with him in 2002, leading in many ways to my introduction to the broader emerging church in 2003.

But the image that haunts me is his request to us, specifically as Emergent followers of Jesus and generally as the American church, to “come to the table” as equals with Native Americans, and listen to what they have to say, knowing that it should and will be, at times, painful and offensive for us. Not to come with the desire to do justice for them until we are willing and able to do justice with them.

This image haunts me because of the truth that I know is there. The injustice that has been done, and is still being done, to Native Americans is so overwhelming to me that it makes my head spin. There is so much to grieve there, and yet of course grieving won’t fix it. I desperately want to know how I can come to the table that he mentions. I wish I felt like this request of his could be a start to our desperately needed conversation, and I hope it will, but I feel like so much has to happen before I, and we, can even come to the table.

I have no desire to be anything more or less than an equal, and have no illusions that I have a right to say anything. But there are things I wish I knew. Where can we put this table? Is it virtual? Is it real? Is it metaphorical? Are there folks that I can invite to it? Will they come if I invite them? The chapter here suggests that this is his way of inviting us to this table. How can I come to it?

So in essence, I think this image is powerful. The relation that it obviously has to the Eucharist and the boundary-breaking that Jesus has always asked us to do at that table is so strong I can feel it. I have been unable to get this image out of my head, and I think that’s a good thing. I want to throw it out there that I want to come to this table, wherever and however it happens, and that I hope others will do so also.

The Justice Project is written by many different authors, and it covers very broad issues – theological, cultural, etc.. These are desperately important issues for us to consider, and again I think the book has potential to take conversations on justice within the emerging church to an entirely different level. But Everyday Justice covers our role in very specific issues – slavery, sweatshop and child labor, and so on. It also has vital importance to our conversations around justice.

The conversation around everyday issues of justice is a hard one to begin with many folks, both because it is hard for people to learn that they are complicit in systemic injustice, and because it is an overwhelming realization when it does come. Julie’s book does a great job in avoiding both of these difficulties, by making it clear that legalism and guilt are not the answers, and also by giving us specific ways to live justly.

It is additionally hard for many folks in the church to have these conversations, because there is an understanding of justice that is reduced from the expansive, holistic nature that is meant in biblical language, and Julie deals with this as well.

In a specific sense, the book deals with issues of coffee and chocolate (which are often produced by slave labor and worsened by various economic policies), clothing (which is often produced in sweatshops and also worsened by various economic policies), cars and food (which have obvious environmental issues and also human rights issues), waste (which has its own consequences but of course speaks to our desperate desire to consume things), and debt (which details our specific economic and political relationships to the debt-ridden nations in the developing world and what needs to be done, though of course our own debt is relevant as well). The chapter on each issue is well-researched both on the broad issues themselves and how we are individually involved with them, and gives specific ways we can live justly with regard to that issue.

Some folks will find the issues to be very familiar through trying to understand justice, but even in these cases it is fantastic to have the research on the issues, and the resources on living justly, together. I think most folks, though, will learn something about all of the issues, whether it is related to just how far systemic injustice reaches and how much we are complicit in it, or ways to continue moving life toward justice.

I spend a lot of time in thinking, learning, having conversations, and trying to seek justice around these issues, and I find the book to be invaluable in all of these things. I’m very familiar with most of the issues, but still learned a great deal.

This variety makes the book really hard to review, but an amazing read. The book is divided into these sections: The God of Justice (theology, postmodernism, church history, etc.), The Book of Justice (justice throughout the Torah, the prophets, the Gospels, and the epistles), Justice in the U.S.A. (issues of race, politics, etc.), A Just World (a global perspective on justice), A Just Church (how the church can seek justice), and Conclusion (just what it says). I read the book straight through, but it could easily be read out of order.

I believe that by its very existence, this book can, and should, take the conversations about justice that occur in the emerging church to an entirely different level. It has done a number on my thoughts, expanding them and deepening them on all of these issues. None of the core issues here are new to me, but the voices and perspectives are often new to me, and more experienced in these stories, than any I’ve encountered before.

I hope many outside of emerging conversations will read this, especially evangelicals and Pentecostals as many of the stories and perspectives will be new to them, and are incredibly necessary for them to know about. Often the voices are people they will trust, and that’s a valid thing. There is a sad extent, though, to which many in these circles have no understanding of a biblical vision of justice – viewing it as simply punishment, retribution, or strictly in an eschatological sense. Really getting what this book is saying will not allow that to continue.

I think many within Emergent will have similar experiences with this book to mine: we know these issues and stories, but these perspectives and experiences can shake us, if we let them. Often we so badly want to be part of justice, and this gives us incredible things – theological resources, amazing people to learn from, stories to join, and a holistic vision of what God is doing in so many areas in the world so we can be a part of it.