I was reminded on Wednesday night in the midst of a discussion with some friends about the wrath of God about something else Soong-Chan Rah said at CCDA during his talk.  I may not get this verbatim, but it’s close enough.

We often talk about the “greatness” of the United States.  Afterall, when you consider that we are a nation built on free land (which we robbed from the Native America people by killing and displacing them) and free labor (which we secured by enslaving Africans), it is little wonder we have managed to become so “great.”  But one wonders what happens when those sins return to visit us?  Perhaps an economic crisis?!

This quote returned to me as we were thinking through the idea of God punishing families to the third and fourth generation.  It’s the idea that just because you don’t directly reap the consequences of your actions, that doesn’t mean someone, perhaps those who mean the most to you, your family, won’t.

Biblically, it would seem that the wrath of God is precisely what we experience when we turn away from God and God’s ways.  It’s not so much God doing stuff to get even or settle the score.  It’s more like what we are left with when we choose against living in harmony with God’s design for the world.  Afterall, what could be more awful that the gradual (and for some, the eternal) distancing from the Spirit of God who constitutes the image of God in humanity?

… the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

On Saturday night at CCDA I was excited to hear from Soong-Chan Rah, a Korean-American professor at North Park University in Chicago (stinkin everybody at CCDA was from Chicago!) and he did not disappoint.

Soong’s main topic was the changing face of global Christianity. No longer a majority Western religion, Christianity is growing fastest in the global south and more than this, as the United States and other Western countries become increasingly multi-cultural, these non-Western believers are reshaping the future of the church.

What I was perhaps most interested in was Soong’s good critique of Emergent and the Emerging Church. Namely, that this group and its related conversation/movement are failing to reflect the seismic shifts of which he spoke.  This is most notable, says Soong, in that the leaders and the majority of EC supporters are white and Western educated.  Soong is right, there is little doubt about it.  However, I would be quick to respond with 2 caveats.  First, this critique is hardly limited to the EC folk.  The vast majority of the streams of western Christianity are dominated by white, western educated folks.  Second, a huge part of the EC conversation/movement has to do with pushing past forms of Christianity held captive by narrow perspectives and traditions.  What better soil could one imagine for the changes Soong himself describes?

Interestingly, I just noticed today that Ryan Bolger and Eddie Gibbs’ book, “Emerging Churches: Creating Christian Community is Postmodern Cultures,” was just translated into Korean!  Now, it may not be Asian theology, but talk about a great avenue to really get cross-cultural dialogue started.

In another shocking bit of news, Tony Jones, the national coordinator for Emergent Village announced today that he was stepping down from the position as Emergent undergoes some changes precisely to

allow more voices into the conversation and allow the network to grow in a more organic way.

As a final sort of corrective to this critique of the EC, I’d like to point others to Brian McLaren’s article, “Church Emerging,” (pdf) and draw attention to this quote

More importantly, though, I’ve become convinced that the conversation about modernity and postmodernity is the ‘tails’ side of the coin, and the ‘heads’ side is a related but different conversation. So I am hereby giving notice that I’m not interested in arguing with anyone about modernity and postmodernity, but I would very much like to engage in honest conversation about colonialism and postcolonialism.

As he goes on he draws from and quotes the work of Dr. Mabiala Kenzo, a Twa theologian from the Congo – a great example of one of the foremost leaders of the EC discussion seeking to listen and learn from those outside our own context in an effort to provide a corrective.

Soong was great – he made me wat to go back to school and take his courses.  More than this, his critique of the EC was a good one, but could have been levied against a larger population.  This was just the sort of talk that seemed unique to the CCDA confernece and I was glad to have been a part of it.

OK, I need to start getting some reflections on CCDA out there before they go cold.

This was the title of a workshop I attended.  The main theme of the conference was Shalom: Seeking the Peace of the city.  This workshop sought to explore the relationship between justice and shalom.

The main component of the presentation was about various stages at which people and communities address issues of injustice.  The stages move along a scale from, Acknowledgment, to Awareness, to Addressing, to Betterment, to Empowerment, to System Changing.  The presenters were most interested in addressing this final stage, System Changing.  I believe what they has in mind were things like lobbying, legislating, demonstrating, and other things of this sort to, for instance, help to change a court system which seems to treat a certain segment of people unjustly.

Combined with this powerful quote from the session,

It’s not that doing justice will help the church, it’s that we are not the church until we do justice.

I thought they made a compelling case for what makes for a meaningful witness in the world.  However, this sort of prophetic critique against the unjust systems of the world, only holds sway insofar as the church is fulfilling its primary calling of embodying the inbreaking of a new world order, the Kingdom of God.

It’s a crying shame that the inability of the church in the West to embrace a holistic sense of the gospel has led to the creation of churches (centers for individual spirituality) on the one hand and para-church organizations (Christian special interest groups) on the other.  I am of the mind that a missional ecclesiology helps to overcome this unfortunate divide, but that’s another post.

A few other noteable tidbits from the workshop…

If you are not failing regularly, it’s a sure sign that you are not doing much that requires great amounts of faith.

In the Bible, entire nations are destroyed because of their failure to act justly.

Charity offends nobody, but justice offends everybody.

In being here at CCDA I have had a personal insight, not really directly related to any of the topics that have been addressed, but emerging in the midst of the presentations and workshops.  The insight is this, I listen to different people for different reasons now than I did 5 years ago.

5 years ago I tended to listen to people based on their beliefs — tell me what you believe, then I’ll listen to what you have to say.  Today I tend to listen to people based on their character — show me how you live, what kind of person you are, then I’ll listen to you.

So, yeah, there ya go.

We’re about 1/2 way through CCDA on Friday morning.  I feel like I have gleaned some great nuggetts of thoughts and ideas through the main sessions and workshops.

Wayne Gordon spoke in the morning yesterday.  Quipped that

charisma w/o character is catastrophic and

success w/o spiritual depth is superficial.

He also held up those in the conference who were willing to “go to places that others aren’t willing to go to.”  Of course this made me think about my own (quite cooshy) situation – one plenty of others would flock to.  And I was compelled to add to his thought in my notes… “some go to places that others are unwilling to go.  Others go to places that are easy for others to go, but refuse to be there in the same manner.”  I hope this is true of me.

Yesterday I attended a networking event that centered around a discussion of the centrality of the church in God’s mission.  As this topic is near and dear to my heart, I was disappointed that we didn’t have a lot of time, given the nuber of folks that showed up, to really dig into it, but it was valuable to hear perspectives nonetheless.  If the 20 or so people in the room were any sort of adequate representation of CCDA, it would seem that CCDA would do well to but a spotlight on this conversation.

The first worshop I attended was on the relationship of justice and shalom (shalom being the main theme of the conference).  The presentation centered mainly around the movement of the people of God (in terms of issues of justice) from Acknowledgment, to Awareness, to Addressing, to Betterment, to Empowerment, to System Changing.  There was good disscussion from the people who atteded the workshop about how they or their church communities were at these various stages.  Again, not enough time, but I would love to have gotten more into the way in which the Kingdom of God goes about “System Changing,” not by fixing what is broken, but by being something different altogether.

The 2nd workshop I attended was entitled “Becoming the Answer to Our Prayers,” and was led by Shane Claiborne and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove.  It was a packed house as one might expect.  Shane did a great job of sharing illustrative stories and Jonathan spoke about the centrality of prayer in seeking to change the world – not in a disembodied sense, but in the sense that when we diligently commune with God in prayer, we become the sorts of people capable of living and acting out God’s dream.  2 quotes from this workshop, the first from Shane and the 2nd from Jonathan…

Jesus wants to give us a new economy of sharing and distribution… where the world calls us poor, but we experience having more than enough.

It is dehumanizing to always be on the receiving end of things.

Though he only spoke for a short time, Pete Scazzero was brilliant in the evening session.  One of his central points was, “It is not possible to be spiritually mature while remaining emotionally immature.”  He also talked about the ways in which most people live off of the spirituality of others – which begs us to consider an entirely different dimension of consumer christianity besides mere marketing and advertising.

For a conference filled with people acute social awareness, there has been a lot of great talk about the need to remember our first love and being mindful of being so socially engaged that we burn ourselves out.  Superb topics to be sure, but my hope is that people would be able to escape the dichotomy of “either I focus on loving God (a personal matter) or I focus on loving others (a public matter)” and embrace a more holistic spirituality – one in which we learn to love both God and others well by living in rhythms of contemplation and action.

More later – peace.

Just real quick cause I don’t have much time.

The conference so far has been great – unlike any I have ever been to before.  Everyone has great stories of major stuff they are a part of and what they see God doing.  There are an insane number of great workshops – tough to choose from.

This is a great venue to connect with others and have your perspectives broadened.  There is a great mix of races, cultures, and of course perspectives and view points.

OK, off to hear about the place of prayer in Kingdom living.

See this page for twitter updates and links to some pictures I snapped quick.

Leaving this afternoon for Miami along with some other friends for the CCDA conference.  I have been looking forward to this conference for quite some time and plan on blogging and twittering some of my thoughts and experiences through the week as I am able.

There is a Facebook group if you are intereted in joining.

Tomorrow I’ll be in a workshop that has to do with creating urban/suburban partnerships and here’s a list of the speakers for the week.