Imposter Emerging Church Blogger
I found this cartoon recently at Tall Skinny Kiwi’s blog. Andrew said that he found it at Mixed Moss. Mixed Moss told us she found the cartoon at Charity Hamilton’s blog. Charity Hamilton found it on Johnny Baker’s blog. Johnny Baker gave us the name of the original artist: Dave Walker at Cartoon Church.
Dave explains that he’d been listed in a dissertation blog on the Emerging Church. He defines ‘Emerging Church’ as “People who are going about being ‘the church’ in a bit of a different way to the way that most people are going about it”. Dave connects the ‘Emerging Church’ scene in the UK with alternative worship, a scene he’s been involved in. He discovered a comment on Emerging Church Research from Mark Berry, a fellow blogger who says that Worship Matters, as wonderful as it is, is not a leading voice in the Emerging Church. And so the cartoon. As it turns out, Mark was critiquing the idea of listing ‘emerging church’ blogs according to the number of times they’re listed in Technorati with the Emerging Church tag.
See the rest of Dave’s explanation. See the rest of Mark’s explanation.
Whatever the case, Dave’s provided an excellent critique of the angst over who’s influencing who in the Emerging Church conversation. I was at a seminar on missional church recently when the session leader suggested that Andrew Jones was the equivalent of the Pope in the international Emerging Church conversation. Surely!? The nature of ‘emerging’ is that most people involved in the grassroots could not care less about who is blogging, publishing, speaking, or leading excellent worship experiences in high profile events.
Postkiwi Duncan Macleod posts on life, faith and culture in Australia, drawing from his involvement in the creative industry, the Uniting Church, the blogosphere, generational research, the emerging church and life on the Gold Coast.
Duncan is the editor of The Inspiration Room, a site showcasing advertising, design and other work produced by the global creative community.
2 Responses to “Imposter Emerging Church Blogger”
By Mark Berry on Aug 10, 2006 | Reply
Indeed DUncan, that was partly my point, thought the main point was to do with using Technorati, as you say… Dave misread my comment and all was cleared up in (literally) 15minutes (Dave and I have known each other for years) The problem for me was that Cartoon Blog has a good number of permanant links and he has posted on Emerging Church… the two however are not linked (in fact at the time he had only tagged ONE post ‘Emerging Church’… I was pointing out the flaws in the research method…
On another occasion I have had discussions with Andrew Jones (another friend I hasten to add) about the role of ‘significant voices’ and ‘Newbies’ my view is that although alot of the EC conversation does happen in the Blogosphere we should not fall into the same trap as the traditional Church in terms of needing/electing leaders on the basis of loudest voice (most linked to Blog) highest book sale etc. or perhaps even raising leaders at all… I made the point that often the newest and least ‘significant’ voices have the most pertinent and radical things to say!
incidentally IMHO the ‘oldest’ voices make too strong a link with Alt.Worship because that was their route into the conversation and some do not put enough emphasis on the Missional dna that seems to me to be a vital dimension of the ECC.
By Fernando on Aug 17, 2006 | Reply
Thanks for this, it clarifies a few things for me. There seems to be a few reasons around to be skeptical about the whole emerging thing, but it is good to know that critiques like this are still possible.