Emerging Women

Emerging Women are at it again! East Coast Emerging Women invite you to take a seat at the Table of word and sacrament, worship and service. Building on the metaphor of many different tables (i.e., picnic tables, card tables, kitchen tables, boardroom tables, pottery tables, changing tables, coffee tables, lego tables, banquet tables, Tiki bar tables, snack tables, even multiplication and periodic tables!), we each come to the feast table of the family of faith in turn as guest and then as host. This is your “place card” – your invitation requesting “the honour of your presence”. Our hopes and dreams, stories and struggles, theology and community, presence and voices will be the ‘menu’ for two days feasting on conversation, challenge, commitment, and companioning as rightful participants at “the grown-ups’ table”.
WHEN: Monday-Tuesday, oct. 2-3 with an optional Sunday, Oct. 1, evening gathering at Generation Quest
WHERE: The conferencing will be located at Virginia Beach United Methodist Church in Virginia Beach, VA; Generation Quest is a house church in Virginia Beach.
COST: $50 per participants; $25 for seminarians; housing to be arranged**. Additionally, if you can and wish, you may contribute $10 to an Assistance Fund for those whose voices won’t be heard unless and until we dedicate the resources God has provided to see that as many voices as possible find a seat at the table.
HOUSING: Not quite ready to receive your calls until next week, but we are finishing arrangements with the Fairfield Inn and Suites, right across from the church site, for a block of rooms at a discounted rate [$109 - choice of king single or two doubles].
SCHEDULE: see following post
WORKSHOPS/TOPICS: see post following “Schedule”
DAYCARE POSSIBILITY: if this is an issue for you, let us know and we will do something creative and caring for the wee ones of God!
NEED MORE INFO: Contact Rev. Liz Buxton [mizliz00725@hotmail.com] or Sherri Story [SHERACE@aol.com]

Send this on to everyone you know who might be interested or curious.

Hello, dear women.

Even though I have never met you face to face, reading your posts is causing me to grow great affection for all of you. Thank you for your words.

My name is Caroline, and I do live in a suburb of Atlanta. After college, I moved to South Central Los Angeles to participate in urban ministry there. Returning home brought me to the realization that so much had changed here. My ministry experience in California prepared me for my return to a transitioning community.

So, this spurred me to begin ministry in my own home town. It has been thrilling.

I do work in ministry full time, and I write a column for the religious section of our local paper. Most of my articles are posted on my blog.

My connection with Emergent began about two years ago when I began participating in our local Emergent cohort. Those friends from the cohort have carried me literally through transitions, questions, and the birth of new dreams. They helped me find my voice. I am so thankful.

When I hear so many people comment on Emergent, they seem to be drawing their opinions from books read or blogs posted. My idea of Emergent is contrary to that experience. “Emergent” to me means conversation with friends around a table in a dive in Atlanta. We talk about the things we believe God is dreaming for our city. It has changed my life.

Yes, for an entire year, I was the only female. However, those guys made me feel so welcomed and their influence has been crucial in my life. We thankfully have several other women pull a chair up to our table lately.

Since there are so few women in the conversation, I am thankful that we can connect this way. Please pray for Atlanta and all that God is doing here. He is redeeming this city, and I am thrilled to be able to join in the party.

Wafa Sultan … an Arabic woman speaks out on Al Jazeere (sp?) with amazing courage! If you havent’ seen this 5 min video, I hope you will take the time and be inspired by this woman’s act of courage and conviction as expressed through her words of passion for valuing all humanity as people of inestimable worth! http://journals.aol.com/thefeedblog/AOLNewsTheFeed/#Entry1810 Look for “Video of the Day” on this journal site.

10. A man’s place is in the army.
9. For men who have children, their duties might distract them from the responsibilities of being a parent.
8. Their physical build indicates that men are more suited to tasks such as chopping down trees and wrestling mountain lions. It would be “unnatural” for them to do other forms of work.
7. Man was created before woman. It is therefore obvious that man was a prototype. Thus, they represent an experiment, rather than the crowning achievement of creation.
6. Men are too emotional to be priests or pastors. This is easily demonstrated by their conduct at football games and watching basketball tournaments.
5. Some men are handsome; they will distract women worshipers.
4. To be ordained pastor is to nurture the congregation. But this is not a traditional male role. Rather, throughout history, women have been considered to be not only more skilled than men at nurturing, but also more frequently attracted to it. This makes them the obvious choice for ordination.
3. Men are overly prone to violence. No really manly man wants to settle disputes by any means other than by fighting about it. Thus, they would be poor role models, as well as being dangerously unstable in positions of leadership.
2. Men can still be involved in church activities, even without being ordained. They can sweep paths, repair the church roof, and maybe even lead the singing on Father’s Day. By confining themselves to such traditional male roles, they can still be vitally important in the life of the Church.
1. In the New Testament account, the person who betrayed Jesus was a man. Thus, his lack of faith and ensuing punishment stands as a symbol of the subordinated position that all men should take.

(I thought this blog could use a little humour. )

I just wanted to say a quick hi from Ireland. I think most of the contributors on this blog are from North America. If there are any other readers from Europe, I’d love to know. I have only recently begun to explore the emergent conversation and I’m very excited. I have yet to find other women leaders of the emergent movement here in Ireland – all the people I’ve been in contact with here have been men.

By way of a short introduction, I’m currently doing the two year Local Preacher’s Course with the Methodist Church in Ireland. It’s a home study course with monthly meetings with others in my church who are also training. I belong to a multi ethnic city centre congregation in the centre of Dublin and what is most exciting about our group of trainees is that there is a high percentage of women and that there is also good representation of nationalities. It’s thrilling to me that we have such an international flavour in our group as Dublin is now home to many foreign nationals – more so now than any other time in its history. I am amazed at all I am learning from my African and Asian sisters and brothers. What a privilege!

I’m a creative – I act, write and direct sometimes for money, often for nothing. I am also married to a creative trapped in the body of an IT professional! Our dream is to be able to follow our calling in creativity and host a retreat for others who struggle with the inevitable obstacles of the creative life.

It’s great to be part of this blog, thank you for having me and I look forward from learning and sharing my experiences with you all.

Emerging Women: June 2006

I have become a Creekbank Christian.

It was an innocent day, sunny, not too warm, grass green and soft with the fresh, bright smell of late Spring. We were standing on the bank of a shallow creek that winds along a limestone ridge through miles and miles of central Pennsylvania pastures and cornfields.

Two people who attend the same congregation we have been had just been baptized. Some of the older teens were playing frisbee back where we’d parked our cars. The newly baptized (one was a surprise addition) wrapped themselves in towels while the rest of us stood around enjoying the moment, not quite ready to pile back into our cars, back into our regular routines of Sunday afternoon dinner and chores.

We were (and largely remain) a group of strangers. Some of us (ok, just us) have adult children, several are young single adults, and there were two families with young children. We chatted amiably, aimlessly, and I realized: We were, for the moment, the church. We were a group of people gathered together for the common purpose of living out our shared committment to the Christian God.

Everyone in the group was relaxed because no one had presumed authority for the spiritual well-being of the group. No one was playing the watchdog, sniffing out the least sign of less-than-full commitment. No one was on guard for another’s transgressions. We were, during those 20 perfect minutes, honoring each other’s best efforts at discipleship, recognizing that we came from a wide variety of backgrounds and carry a broad spectrum of sometimes conflicting theology. Our togetherness defined our community.

After a while someone suggested an outing for later in the summer. Someone else suggested another idea and then, another. Jody and I arranged to meet later in the day for a hike. We missed Sunday church stuff for the next two weeks, but when we met there this morning, our fellow attendees announced dates and times for get-togethers based on the conversation from two weeks earlier.

Creekbank Christianity. I’m sold on it.

I recently attended a symposium at Regent Univ. Divinity school which presented a variety of workshops on leadership in the church. The lone female presenter, Dr. Estrelda Alexander, presented an excellent critique of the lack of weight currently given to social justice issues in the Pentecostal slice of Christianity despite the fact that it was an integral part of the response to the Azuza Street revival. She argued for the need of a resurgence of female voices in leadership in order: 1. to recapture the egalitarian leadership that was integral during the whole 1906 revival and 2. to bring, once again, the needed attention to social justice issues that so very often encompass women and children. Then, a response was given by a female, divinity PhD candidate and in her prepared response, she used King David repeatedly as the example to give support to Dr. Alexander’s argument. Don’t get me wrong … I’m glad she was in agreement, but if we don’t give voice to the female biblical characters in our sermons, our examples, our conversations, our prepared responses, who will? These biblical women are our first role models and if we don’t give them their spiritual place of leadership, who will? When given a chance to preach do we give voice to the marginalized women of scripture? What are your thoughts?