Today is the day I have been mentioning for a while. Encontro Global is the grandest emerging church event on the calender this year and it starts today in Uberlandia, Brazil. Sorry I cant be there everyone!!!! But I will be praying for you all today. Great to see how this movement, which goes by many names, has grown since we all met up ten years ago.
A little global emerging church history. In April 2000, a number of us gathered in Sheffield, UK for a meeting of emerging church leaders from around the world. We all realized something much bigger was happening. Bigger than any of our ministries and bigger than any of our countries. It was a global move of God among the counterculture. And we were all caught up it. Most of us are still involved, although we seem like a more respectable lot now – less punk-rock, less hair, and some of us no longer use the EC word to describe ourselves.
That historic event in Sheffield was the first time we all met. Wolfgang Fernandez had rounded up friends from all over. I was fresh from USA and shared about the various movements that were happening there. Olgalvaro Bastos Jnr told us of counterculture youth sharing Jesus through the arts in Brazil. Hengke Hartolo and a few Indonesians from Abbalove shared how punks on the streets of Jakarta were giving their lives to Jesus. A scruffy English guy named Pete Grieg had started a prayer room 6 months earlier and the bloody thing was still going, and, in fact, was now spreading to other countries under the name 24-7 Prayer. Mal Calladine told the story of St Thomas Crookes [where the meeting was taking place] from the time of revival under John Wimber to the new move of young students to God, Wolfgang Simson talked about the house church movement, and so on. There was some funding from DAWN Ministries and we started a website and chose the name “tribal generation” to tag the movement. Although the website never moved far from Sheffield so most countries (Brazil excluded) dropped the name. Within a year, I was working for DAWN Ministries and traveling the globe to resource the leaders and discover new ones.
That meeting led to a number of events that have gathering leaders in Japan, Czech Republic, USA, Colombia, Poland [last year] and of course Brazil. In fact, Olgalvaro and the Brazilians have been the most consistent and probably have more video footage of this movement than anyone. Its been a fantastic ten years!!!!! Really. Again, really sorry I cant make this event. Please pray for our roundtable in the Balkans next week.
Andrew, I thought you might be interested in Allen Yeh’s posts on the Edinburgh 2010 conference now underway. Allen is going to all four centenary conferences commemorating Edinburgh 1910 and has already blogged on the first one – Tokyo 2010. The link is
http://www.scriptoriumdaily.com/2010/06/02/four-conferences-on-four-continents-edinburgh-2010-prologue/
Wanted to post this in your “About that pact with the Debil in Haiti: Apparently we were DUPED!” Jan 2010 blog…but comments were closed. I thought you might find interesting, even though it misses the point of the blog post.
Quoting my brother-in-law
Thanks for forwarding. As for no. 1, I knew that was an urban legend, though Ted Nugent did once say, “I don’t know what happened to that Phil Keaggy. He could’ve saved the world with his guitar.” (Or something close to that.)
No. 2 was something that was planned but never happened. In a recent interview, Michael Sweet said, “We would really like to do the infamous ‘heaven and hell tour.’ There was talk about that way back in the ’80’s with us and Motley Crue, or Stryper and WASP, Stryper and Slayer – there are all these different possibilities and it never came to pass. But that would be really cool, something that we’ve never accomplished that we’d love to accomplish. It would be really cool to do something with a modern day band that’s really cutting edge right now. Avenged Sevenfold or Slipknot, Marilyn Manson, something that’s the extreme opposite of what we are. Our objective is to reach the people that support and follow a band just like those bands that I named. I mean those are the people that we tried to reach out to in the beginning and those are the people that we’ll continue to reach out to in the end.”
Won’t bother with no. 3. They got the rumor wrong anyway (it was that Petra ripped off a Kiss song -“Heaven’s On Fire”- and re-made it as their own -“Seen and Not Heard”- without properly crediting Kiss, so Kiss blatantly ripped off “God Gave Rock-N-Roll To You” and re-did it with different lyrics. Whatever, Kiss sucks, and Petra aint much better. (And they did rip off “God Gave Rock-N-Roll To You”, from whoever wrote it.)