Emerging Africa

Harry is caught between two worlds, the muggle world and the magical one. He longs for the one, the magical world because that is where he feels at home, he has a sense of belonging and outside of his love/hate/fame relationship he has with it he seems to feel like he makes some kind of sense their... yet he is safest inside of the muggle world where he is protected by a secret spell cast to watch over him. Whenever he is in the muggle world, he longs for the magical world and inside the magical he craves the safety of the muggle world. A boy caught between two world, fragmented and lonely.

The emergent conversation is a conversation of a specific generation, trying to work our how to move from one view point to another. It is in the questioning and critiquing that new idea emerge, new theological convictions are formed and ancient practice discovered. It would seem to me that most teenagers need to have the other-side of this conversation. One where practice and concept have met to create conclusion and a new idea of youth ministry is taking route.

(please read the introduction to part 1- http://www.emergentafrica.com/blog/2007/07/03/i-still-havent-found-who-i-am to understand what I am trying to do in these blogs: this is not truth but my perceptions, thinking and cynicism) I stepped out of the framework of church and into the void beyond it and as I plummeted towards what looked like nothing church became smaller and smaller until...bling...it was gone. And as it disappeared I lost my identity...who was I, what did I think, how would I find god.

(please read the introduction to part 1 to understand what I am trying to do in these blogs: this is not truth but my perceptions, thinking and cynicism) This is my struggle…I am lost, like most of my friends. My life has been pushed to a point of questing, moving in and out of being forgotten and found and; at the most honest point; asking who cares if I am either or. (As the prayer chain sings: ‘so lost, so found, so what’). All I know is that I need to find god and where I know he/she should be he/she isn’t. My friends and maybe more so myself is/are searching for a god that is truly apart of what it means to be human, connected, depressed and lost.

It is my aim (in my next few blogs) to try and loosely outline where I have reached in my spiritual journey within an emergent community. Their is no real reason why you should listen to me or even read me and I am in no way trying to claim that what I am saying or writing is in any way truth or beyond that truth of God... some of you will have written me off simply by reading my name and others my be put off because I am not a NAME. But I’ve got my coffee (all can’t be that bad)...so this is simply my struggle within an emergent community and some conclusions that I have reached in my personal narrative...

Is the act of theology merely an intellectual endeavor, set aside for a few thinkers who believe that they have the mental capability to construct, deconstruct and then reconstruct religious ideas. Have we moved beyond the idea that it is only through pure reason and, yes admittedly, honest critique that a new church will emerge? I am a drifter. I move in and out of the emergent conservation. Sometimes I am bored. sometimes lazy but mostly just frustrated. For what or who does this conversation exist? Why do I speak, why do you?

If your like me you probably love reading random thoughts on new ways of perceiving culture, g/God and the ever increasing divide between the two... but you probably also desire something abit more skeptical found inside of something a bit more coherent. I sip my coffee, doubt myself and ask...where does the emergent conversation form?

If the emergent conversation is hard, then trying to be emergent could be even harder. In my ascent (or in some views ‘decent’) into this culture and in escaping the emptiness of church a deeply profound thought grabs me... ‘Nothing is something’. The more you push into unravelling the mystery of Derida, Rorty, Jameson or Foucault the more you find that on the other-side of the critique is a haunting nothingness, a void (as Riddell would call it). I love post-modern (I am deeply uncomfortable with this label) culture, I love post-moderns, I am one and as a lost, lonely and depressed participator in this story I realize that the emergent conversation is not enough (although vitally important).