Emerging Africa

Emerging Africa is now running off a new server. If you've visited the site in the last few days, you may have noticed it wasn't working optimally. My host had accidentally upgraded php to 5.3, and broke some sites in doing so (this site too, alas). There wasn't any way to roll that upgrade back, so I decided to do something I've wanted to do for ages anyway - migrate it to a server which I have more control on.

My apologies if you visited here in the last few days and couldn't read/post anything. We're back up and running now - if you notice anything weird, please let me know.

Richard Rohr will be in Cape Town in May 2010, organised by Sergio Milandri. Here's what you can join in.

From Wild Man To Wise Man

May 7 to May 9, 2010 at the Mizpah Retreat Centre, near Grabouw.

A wilderness retreat for men on the spiritual journey. As men, we are a pivotal influence in our family and society in bringing healing and restoration to relationships. Richard Rohr is an exceptional author, speaker, teacher and retreat director and has taught and guided retreats around the world for the past 30 years. He has a passion for developing and rooting men's spirituality. It is our hope that men will not only engage and deepen the experience of their own spirituality but also be involved in the formation and mentoring of other men. This retreat is for men who are on that journey.

Restoring Male Spirituality in family and community

May 10 to May 12, 2010 at the Schoenstatt Centre, Constantia.

A workshop for men and woman on re-affirming the male soul in social relationship. A must for anyone involved in engaging and developing masculine sprituality - especially for men, women, community leaders and pastors. Richard Rohr is an international author, speaker and retreat director and has taught and guided retreats for the past thirty years. Richard brings a wealth of experience and wisdom to the everyday issues we face as men and women.

EmergentAfrica.com is dead; long live EmergingAfrica.info.

When this site was started a few years back, we decided on the name "Emergent" not realising that this was linking us to Emergent Village, a node in the web of the global emerging church conversation, and a decidedly American node. The new site domain emergingafrica.info represents this site in a better way.

(Post content removed by admin due to the stupidity of the blogger advertisting moving to a certain city in India. The post is preserved due the humourous comments, thanks Steve!)

Hi all - remember me? Probably not, since I haven't written anything on here in like 10 years. Doh! Well, I'm sure I'll go into this in more detail later, but the big things are:
1 - spending last year at Nieu Communities in Pretoria
2 - getting married in December
3 - traveling around Canada and the UK after that until the end of Jan
4 - missing our plane back to SA (haha, my fault too - turns out the London underground is bigger - and slower - than I thought)
5 - moving to Cape Town.

I've been a little scarce over the last few months or so. It's encouraging to meet people who track my online activity and want to know when I'm next writing something - it's easy to forget that I'm able to contribute helpful things and that I'm part of a larger conversation which more and more people are drawn to.

This weekend has also been really encouraging. Nieu Communities hosted a small conversation about what goes on with us in Pretoria North - how we are a particular expression of a way of following Jesus, and how we can journey together with friends, a number of whom joined us at Pangani.

Congratulations to all involved who just made The Bible and Myth post the most commented upon one on the site, ever. I would've read all of the comments, except I don't have 5 free hours - but they all looked good, in a mini-essay-type way. Wow! We could write our own book!

This shows me that there is a need for people to flex their mental muscles and engage in some high level (sometimes difficult to follow) dialogue, which is positive because sometimes there's little space for that in the church (who can prefer to "dumb down" intellectual conversations), and it's great we can do that here. I look forward to tracking the next conversation - whatever that may be!

What books are you reading right now that help you theologically/devotionally/to improve your sense of humour/intellect/sense of rest/whatever? Or perhaps "Dating for Dummies"?! I'm reading "Deconstruction in a nutshell" by John Caputo, "Brendan" by Frederick Buechner and about to start "A spirituality of the road" by the late, great South African missiologist, David Bosch (which reminds me: all going to the South African Missiology Society's conference this weekend (Steve?) - I hope it goes well). I also listen to Abbot Christopher Jameson's "Finding Sanctuary" fairly regularly.

Now that the site is back up (sorry!) and the database is running off the local server (instead of a Media Temple grid server)...it's time to say, "Happy New Year!" (if you noticed a slight logical anomaly in that sentence, give yourself 10 points. If you find yourself annoyed by a full stop in the middle of a sentence already in brackets, subtract 5 points. You too, Linda!).

If you can, get hold of a book called "Chaos" by James Gleick. It's a history of the development of chaos theory, and reads like what the history of the emerging church will be.