Emerging Africa

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.

A photomarathon is a full day of taking photographs on particular topics. The emphasis is on fun and creativity, and anybody can participate - all you need is a digital camera.

On Nov 3rd, we'll meet at Bryanston Bible Church at 8:30am where we'll have a short introduction to the theme, "Heaven in Ordinary." Heaven can be thought of as an "out there" concept but we want to explore (through photographs) how heaven can break into the daily ordinariness of life in Jozi. There will be 12 topics (given out 4 at a time, at 9am, 1pm and 5pm) for the day and although you can shoot as many pics as you want under each topic, you can only submit a single entry - so at the end of the day you'll hand in 12 photographs.

It's about time we starting thinking about a national (or regional) weekend get-together. There are some interesting options thrown around, like getting N.T. Wright here in 2009. In Joburg we've vaguely planned a Saturday together in Diepkloof (Tom?), Fuzz Kitto is heading here in December, Stephen Murray is exploring options with Reformission/Total Church (yes, I know it's not offically an emerging thing - I just know a lot of the guys on this site would get something out of it).