Exile=good

>Between Len's post and Jonny's (below),

and my recent experiences teaching and preaching
(or whatever I call what I do on Sunday in wikichurch...probably haven't 'preached' for years)..

...I can find a place of encouragement that finally we entering into a season where folks that didn't "get" the church/culture shift we are in are forced to get it..

Maybe it's because (per Jonny below, read his full post) we are at "the end of the beginning" of the shift/Great Emergence, and it cannot be as easily dismissed as "oh, it's just a fad" (some of it has been);

there has been a lot of discussion and blogging around emerging church recently. is it over? is the term a problem? is it just a phase? i confess to being pretty bemused by the whole discussion...phyllis tickle in her new book the great emergence says that we are looking at the biggest cultural change for 500 years. it's not just a generational shift, it's much bigger than that. when these kinds of shifts take place it can take 50-100 years to know what we are looking at. and in the meantime it can feel very chaotic and uncertain. i referred recently to the bell curve of change. if anything is over, maybe it is the end of the pioneering phase for some people who are restless and want to do something new (or at least use a different label) and maybe generally there is much wider acceptance of the need to change - i.e. we're in phase two of the curve in some places
jonnybaker

or (read Len's link, excerpted below) the place we are in economically..

...Given the meltdown in the US economy, and the reverberations throughout the world, one wonders at our current location. This morning on CBC on the way to breakfast I caught part of an interview with Margaret Atwood on her new book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. Margaret is a respected Canadian author who has always had a fascination with debt. It began, she relates, when she prayed the Lord’s Prayer as a child. She noticed that some versions of the prayer asked for forgiveness from sin, others from debt. It turns out that this theme is common in the great faiths. What great faith could really claim to be comprehensive in human affairs that says nothing about economics in human communities?

What really caught me today, however, was how we are all in the same boat. On the one hand a millionaire may stare in the face of the credit crunch and wonder if he can access the resources he needs for his business; on the other hand those of us with ordinary mortgages wonder if they will be sustainable by 2009.

The result of all this uncertainty: fear. And that is where the resources of the Gospel become relevant.
Len Hjalmarson

and our western world at last being poised to realize exile (In addition to being the pits) is a wonderful and strategic place to be (the following flow out of Frost's "Exiles"):

a)Yay! Finally, we can embrace and celebrate "dislocation, uncertainty and irrelevance!" (p.8)

Shouldn't that elict a Yaconelli "Whooo Hoo!"!?

b)Finally, even folk embedded in modernity are realizing the bankruptcy of simulcra and inauthenticity , the "substituting the signs for the real" (84) .

c)Finally , we can be known for a critique of Empire which speaks to all injustice and not just those that everyone has heard we are against...we have been obsexxed (203ff) and coopted by the culture wars..

d)Finally, we can get out of the church and buzzard-meetings and into the Third Places (they are limimal wardrobes) ...and especially the bars where we belong (see 63-65)!
NOW I hear the whooo hooos..