Tom and Christine Sine are hosting a conference next year called New Conspirators 08 and they are running a New Conspirator theme on their blog right now. Even my previous blog banner makes an appearance.
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New Conspirators in the Emerging Church
I’m delighted to finally hear something newsworthy from the Sines. 😉 It’s been what seems like forever since MS vs. McWorld, and I’ve been itching for an up-to-date treatment of Tom’s thesis. The book revolutionized my view of the church, introduced me to missional community (though I didn’t think and speak of it in that jargon at the time), and inspired a variety of changes in my wife’s and my lifestyle, including our choice of residence and ministry for 2 years. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen anything published in the last 8 years that rivals MS v. MW with regard to its futuristic outlook, its statistical thoroughness, and practical guidance. In a sense, I’ve taken MS and ‘tried it out’ and am ready for a debriefing of sorts. I only hope that their new focus on the EC doesn’t become just another attempt to make a buck off of a recently well-worn hot topic. People wanna talk EC talk a lot, but when it comes to lifestyle change and sacrificial devotion to incarnational community and whole-life stewardship, the voices aren’t so prominent. O, that we would get over talking about labels and definitions and devote our energies to equipping the Church to live out the missional Gospel.
Andy,
We appreciate you mentioning the mustard seed journey blog & the conference. And let me assure Matt that Tom & I have not given up our commitment to lifestyle change and to calling people to a radical commitment to the gospel. In fact that is part of what Tom is (once again) talking about in his upcoming book and it will certainly be an emphasis at the conference.
One of the discussions we have had as a preliminary to the conference is “How can we live out our values in the way that we run this conference?” – it has lead to further discussions about “How can we make it environmentally friendly when we are hoping that people will fly in from other places? and particularly “How can we be advocates for the poor and the marginalized this this kind of a setting? Not easy I can tell you and we would appreciate any suggestions that you may have that can help us as we wrestle with these questions
hard to talk about planting trees and conserving water to make up for your flight when you live in the rainy, foresty NW.
hope it goes really well. Sorry i cant make it up there.I will be in Seattle next month though.
Well, if you want to go the whole nine, green yards, have the conference all online, or have it via videocasting. But then you lose the humanness of it all. It’s always a lose-lose when we try to do anything large-scale. On the optimistic side, it’s a win-win as well. We just have to choose our losses wisely, according to priority, right?
The ideal world is not a globally interconnected one. Rather, it’s one that looks pretty much like it did when God created it. We would do well to learn from Babel.
I’d say flying is the most environmentally friendly form of long distance transportation available to us. Trains aren’t much better, and cars… no comment. Now as soon as teleportation is available for the masses and not just the sci-fi movie stars, we’ll be making some progress. 😉
Grace,