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I’m in Seattle, for the last annual week on site, of my doctoral programme with my cohort. We begin today on Orcas Island with Len Sweet, and after the ramp down work from this week, enter candidacy. This is the part where our work, and papers from the past two years are assessed and we get permission or not for progressing to a doctoral disseration. I’m still shooting for a January 2006 submission.Sad that this is the last time to meet as a co-hort and some of us will stay connected as we proceed and some won’t. It’s been a wonderful time together. Now I have to turn the 50,000 words I have written into 100,000 for the disseration.
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Mealtime Habits of the Messiah, by Conrad Gempf. Buy in UK, buy in USA
With every book he wrtes, Conrad Gempf is becoming more and more one of my favourite authors.If you come to my blog frequently you’ll see I read and recommend a lots of books. Many are for research, many I have to read as part of my course work (and I enjoy so many of them), but there are a few I chose to read, cover to cover that are food for my soul. Conrad’s latest book, is one of those.
I hunger for something that gets me back into the bible in ways that are life giving, and this book, is one that gives the bible back to me. We talk about being narrative based in our apporach to theology, well come and dive into a book that explores the stories of Jesus so deeply, surpisingly and profoundly.
You can download a chapter for free here. You can also visit Conrad at his blog.
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Synopsis
It’s not exactly how one would expect God to occupy himself. Lord of space and time, newly resurrected from the dead, and what is he doing? Sitting quietly by the lakeside, cooking up breakfast and waiting for the disciples to drop by. The Gospels are full of odd quirks that most people never notice because the stories are so familiar. But Conrad Gempf notices. He uses his knowledge of Jesus’ life and times to light up the meditations in this book. The forty short encounters in this book focus on Jesus as a teacher, Jesus as a miracle worker, on Jesus’ radical spirituality and on his death and resurrection. Seasoning its unique insights with humor, Mealtime Habits of the Messiah both satisfies the hungry soul and piques the reader’s appetite for prayer.
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I flew to Geneva on thursday for just over 24 hours, to be with Josh and group of people from a community called Shema. I’d spoken to Josh on e-mail and on the phone, and in particular how they could be connected to emergent.
So I got to meet him and some of his friends from various parts of church life in Geneva, and had a great time. I found them to be fun, smart, caring, theologically sharp, and open. They were a delight.They have some great ideas for helping people in switxerl;and connect to emergent, are setting up a web site for emergent in switzerland (I’ll let you know when they get it up and running), and we talked about a possible event in Geneva in May, when we get Brian McLaren over next year for Emergent in europe.
Some early ideas are a mxiture of things over a couple of days from an general conversation/event in the catholic cathedral that has Calvin’s chair (very cool I wish I had taken a photo), a 3 person dialogue with Brian, a Philosopher and a Poet about culture and church, and a gathering for the pastors/church leaders. In fact rather than a day in London, we might encourage people to get some cheap flights and come to Geneva May 2006 when Brian is over.
So in particular Josh, Ashley, Todd, James, who were with me the whole time thanks for a great time and see you all soon.
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mmm I just moved the emergent-uk domain name to a dedicated host, and as a result am having problems with the subdomain http://jasonclark.emergent-uk.org
what that means is that until june 18th when they fix it you have to come here via the typepad link of http://emergent.typepad.com/jasonclark/.The jasonclark.emergent-uk.org link will be working by late June….sorry in the meantime.
Jase
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In case you have missed it D A Carson has a book out that critiques the emerging church. Whilst I have many criticism of the emerging church, and consider myslef part of it, I found this book to be so poorly written I am amazed it was published. We need dialogue partners who will critique us, it’s part of what the emerging church is about, imho. But this book seemed so ill informed.Anyhow it critiques Brian McLaren amongst many other things. Brian has not written a response, but recommends a paper by Dr Stanley Mills. If you buy Carson;s book, you might want this paper to hand too, it’s very helpful.
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On the bbc ‘how art made the world’ site I mentioned in my last post, there is an art and personality test. Why don’t you take the test, and post your results here?In the test it measures which images you like, and does a personality test. It predicted I would like cubism, and japanese art, and those were the styles I liked the most. They are trying to show if there is a link between personality and the art we enjoy. 18152 people have taken part in this experiment.
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My personality according to the test
High intellectualismPeople with high intellectualism scores are interested the abstract. They like thinking about things they can’t see and have creative imaginations, able to dream up whole new worlds. They like to feel they understand things and will probe deeply into a subject to get as good an insight as possible.
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This new TV series started Monday 9th May. There are a few episodes to go, and it will certainly be released on DVD by the BBC.
For anyone exploring symbols, and images in worship and communication, this series is a must watch.The BBC home page for the series is here. I’ve put an episode guide in the continuation section.
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We had a great Pentecost sunday service yesterday. We had some artists who were paiting during the service, as part of worship. We had a team who took photos and then projected the progression of the paintings during the service.
We also had a community canvas for anyone to paint and draw on.The idea was to explore the Holy Spirit as the sprit of creation and the engeriser of creativity. It really added to the exeperience.
This image above was one of my favourites. I have put some more below.
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Rex Miller, author of The Millenium Matrix mailed this paper ‘Five Centuries of the Future’ to me.
It’s a great paper, from the Scottish Parliment Future Event. Synopisis is below in continuation section.
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We are running OSX Tiger on our mac at home and the office computers, and it’s lovely. I especially love the new spotlight search facility. But I have a PC with windows XP for mine own work.I have only just discovered Googles Desktop search tool, and it’s awesome and enabled me to not feel so left out on my tablet PC. I can now find anything on my computer even from my e-mails by typing in a word…awesome.
