Emerging Church Front Page News in Austin

Emerging churches made the front page in last Sunday’s Austin Statesman in an article entitled “Austin’s ’emergent’ Christians finding a new path”. Its a good article and totally worth the read. Unfortunately, there are some key people from the 90’s that did not get mentioned in the article (Drew, Brian and Whitney, Derek and Amy, Shannon, John and Sherry, etc) as well as emerging churches that don’t look like churches, and some institutions like BGCT that have supported these works. But still, its VERY COOL to see these guys on page one of the local paper.

HT: Mike Clawson

Coincidence – Last Sunday we were driving home from a planning meeting in France for a prophetic arts event in Austin next March. This event will be called Mangola and will be led by Derek and Amy Chapman. It will be connected to the previous Austin events (Ecclesia 1999, Epicenter 2001, Wabi Sabi 2003) but will be DIFFERENT – more spectacular, better organized, more international and probably invisible to the church world. I will let you know when more info is released.

But back to that article. . .

The church Mosaic (no relation to Erwin McManus) featured in the Austin Statesman article, has just left the space that we first used in 1999. Its a very cool space. Read on for the story.

Technorati Tags: austin, baptist, emergent, emerging church

The Story of that ATTIC space

In 1999, we were given permission by Austin First Baptist Church to do a multi-media worship event in their church. We took over all levels of this church for a 3 level labyrinth experience called Ecclesia. Austin Statesman gave us a good review and recommended people go and experience it. And being at the beginning of the SXSW Festival, there were a lot of people around.

Anyway, we choose this old storage room on the fourth floor for our dance space – a mulitmedia worship experience inspired by James and the Giant Peach and the “city that I long for, very far away”. DJ’s included Austin’s Antidote (George) who also used looping Teletubby videos with his set and Chris from Dallas [cant remember his stage name). It had never been used for anything but storage before but we really liked it. Some of the church people thought we were weird for not choosing the sanctuary – which we actually didn’t use at all for that event – but we felt we were activating a space that would be used in the future. We were RIGHT!

2001 – We did another multi-media event in Austin First Baptist called Epicenter. There were 15 different worship environments all running simultaneously and one of those was the dance space in that old attic. There were a number of DJ’s and VJ’s but the main audio/visual team was Fuse Factory (known as Jimini back then) from Switzerland. [And btw they will be coming over for Mangola next March]. The event rocked and I think the crowd included some of the people who would later on start Mosaic in the same room. We also used the space for our emerging church leaders roundtable event but I think it was the more artistic use of the space that inspired others to see value in the room.

Anyway, it was good to see others use it and enjoy this space. Every blessing for Mosaic in their new space. And for the other groups mentioned in the article.

Events to be at in Austin

1. Emergence 2007, Oct 19-20 [pdf]

2. Mangola, SXSW Festival, March 2007,