Initially, I began this blog in an attempt to contribute to the online conversation that was beginning to take place online among self proclaimed progressive (of which I consider myself to be) Seventh-day Adventist’s.
Of particular interest to me were questions that addressed issues like:
What does the future of the Seventh-day Adventist Church look like? Will we merely survive as an aging denomination or will we re-envision what we can become? Will we maintain the same tired structures and ways of expressing faith or will we have dare to express faith in new and experiential ways?
How has emerging Christianity affected the SDA Church? Can the SDA church emerge? And if it does what would it emerge into?
Is there a need to re-interpret our theological statements for a new time?
I kept up with this dialogue of emergence (a word I use reluctantly because it means something different to everyone) primarily through books like
Dallas Willard’s “The Divine Conspiracy”,
Brian McLaren’s “A New Kind of Christian”,
Rob Bell’s “Velvet Elvis” (and many many others, I think I have read everything’s emergent village has published in the last three years) and blogs like
Ryan Bell’s “Intersections",
“Johnny’s Cache”,
Julius Nam’s “Progressive Adventism” ,
Reinventing the Adventist Wheel among others.
So this was the situation I found myself in. However, over the last year and half that I have been blogging I don’t feel that I have contributed anything substantive through this blog. It’s almost as though my blog has needed to find its own identity (we must be living in the 21st century). What was supposed to be a blog about the future of the church where I serve – has instead turned into an eclectic mix of surface level post’s about comic sketches, poems and the occasional quote (hardly anything worth reading).
I have realized that in trying to talk about the future I was betraying a fundamental principle that I live by. I was neglecting the present. I have decided that I don’t want to write about the emergent books I have read, or what I want the future of the church to look like (though these topics do have an appropriate time and place). Instead I realized that I need to write not about the postmodern context or about the emeregent church - but rather I must write from a postmodern experience and as one who continues to emerge – only as long as emergence means that that I continually keep asking the hard questions of my beliefs.
It is my hope that this blog would be a place of meaningful interaction. A place where the right questions are asked and honest answers are presented. A place of deeper reflection about these things we call faith, life, God.