The Wild Goose pt. 1
This is part one, to a two part reflection on the Wild Goose Festival. I ask the reader for grace as this is just my emerging church story.
I have spent a couple weeks since attendng the Wild Goose Festival to take time to reflect, read other reviews and stories from the festival and discern where I land on what was experienced. My long-time friend and someone I count as closer than a brother, Kevin Rains, and I made a last minute decision to hop in the car and drive 8 1/2 hours to North Carolina for a weekend where we weren't sure what to expect. We kept an eye on the twitter hashtag conversation and the press releases leading up to the event, it was going to be interesting to be sure. I've known others who have attended the UK Greenbelt in the past that this was modeled after, it seemed to be a kind of Christian Woodstock with a larger push into areas of social justice. The nail in the coffin for us was that our friends Bill and Cherie Cummings from Lemonade International would be there with a tent to share the needs of the work in Guatemala that we partner with.
Our Emerging Story
Rains and I have been leading networks of house church communities in Cincinnati for over ten years, Vineyard Central and Ordinary Community have been like sister-communities to one another. We actually met one another because a blogger in New Zealand, Paul Fromont, introduced us and we lived 20 minutes from one another. We met at Starbucks within a day and found that together we wanted to live in Cincinnati for the rest of our lives and ask God for his Kingdom to come. That covenant together has never changed though we do it in different contexts, his urban and mine suburban. We have found incredible value in deepening our friendships together for mutual encouragement, admonishment and sharing like ecclesial journeys. Going back to the late 1990's, there was a surge of thinking/blogging that linked many of us who were hurt, confused, disappointed and questioning church as we knew it in places like the message boards of The Ooze . We were all wondering how the constructs of church as we knew it could translate itself into the murky waters of the future known as "postmodernism". Through those relationships, there were streams of networks that evolved and at some point became lumped together as some phenomenon termed the Emerging Church. The terms for the tribes were hard to keep up with: simple/organic/missional/emerging/neo-reformed/neo-monastic/celtic/progressive/ancient-future/epic/communal etc. Most notably was the group known as Emergent , made known most by speaker/author/pastor Brian McLaren, but also Tony Jones, Doug Pagitt and others in the U.S. but also in the UK, Europe, New Zealand and Austrailia that I tried to keep up with. What has always been true is the the Emerging Church is not any one thing, it is a broad conversation across many camps, tribes and streams.
I had the privelege of working with Brian on several occasions while working with my friend, Jim Henderson, producing Off the Map events. Those events were good fun asking hard questions about how to give away our faith without being a jerk about it. Brian seemed to quickly become the face not only of Emergent, but the voice of the Emerging Church movement within the U.S. McLaren gave me some personal words of encouragement and belief in my heart and vision for a communal model of church back in 1999 or so that literally fueled my soul at a time when the church structures I grew up in were painfully dismissive of where I was discerning my calling to be going. To put it bluntly, Brian believed in me when it felt like few others did and for that I have been fiercely protective of Brian "the person" as those on the religious right have dehumanized him at times in writing as they reacted to his writing/speaking.
In 2003, Rains and I with our friends hosted an event called "Mayhem" in Cincinnati at the beloved St. Elizabeth's in Norwood. (picture above). We had no budget, no denominational backing (most of us had chosen bi-vocational models of ministry) but the blog world was vibrant with conversation and the need for deeper connection to at least tell one another we weren't alone. The tagline was Community-Mission-Mayhem. The only marketing we had for this meeting was through our blogs at the time, we weren't prepared for what for what followed. We were committed to this not being your typical christian conference, we shared meals together and found housing for all the attenders in host homes within the city network of missional communities. Without a budget, without marketing, some 300+ people traveled from each coast, from across boarders, from various ecclesiastical traditions for what was a rich gathering. It was a somewhat underground gathering of Christians and leaders who were yet raw in emotion and clarity about what was happening all around us in ministry contexts. Our annointed friend, Beth Keck, led us in worship and Brian McLaren agreed to come and lead our conversation at a fee that I'm sure was far reduced from his market value at the time. He was as he still is, a gracious and thoughtful host.
There was a lot of energy in the early 2000's to try and organize these new energies and conversations into central places and relational attachments. Allelon was one of those attempts. I believe in 2003 was the first gathering in Eagle, Idaho of like-minded thinkers and doers to try and bring some definiton to these ecclesiastical experiences. The central figure who had offered the invitation to many of us was Todd Hunter, through his connections as the former head of the Vineyard churches and then as a spiritual father to many of us in this time. I do not have a roster for those whom gathered for this initial event but it was an international contingent and I remember being shocked in our like thinking. It was at this event that I met Jason Clark for the first time, someone who has become deeply influential to me as a spiritual brother, friend and doctorate mentor for my present ecclesiastical study. The following year this was followed by another gathering in Idaho with Dallas Willard speaking to us in a retreat-like setting about theology and the Kingdom (pictured above). We lived communally, ate together and had countless hours of deep conversation under the stars together in this gathering. There was great opportunity to use these relationships to help encourage others with like struggles, but that would not come to fruition. This wasn't a time to centralize these bands, tribes and seekers, it was a time for continued diaspora. We were to go back to our contexts in the local and figure it out and work it out in praxis.
Many communities did not survive this time. I personally entered into a time of deep loss. . .
Mayhem, Allelon and the blog world began to form a tribe of communities and friendships for me that have become fictive family. God was clearly moving in the midwest, we formed a great relational connection with like-faith communities in Cincinnati, Columbus, Oxford, Indianapolis, Lexington, St. Louis, Michigan and then extended to places like San Diego, South Florida, Idaho and then Vermont. We kept meeting as often as we could to just encourage each other, dialogue, pray, worship, teach . . . spurring each other on. Locally: Rains, myself, Glenn Johnson and Chad Canipe formed what we called "Fight Club". We tried to meet weekly for just mutual encouragement, theological ponderings and to pray for one another. These meeetings quite literally became the air I breathed, they were central to my calling and my nourishment. We all worked jobs that kept us from being part of conferences, events and the larger discussion of Emerging Church, we were just trying to figure it out in our local contexts. Out of these regional relationships as well I formed a deep friendship with Mark Palmer (pictured above) and the Landing Place kids. I took this photo of Mark while we were backpacking in the UK on Cuthbert Island in Northumbria off the north coast of England. We stayed at Northumbria Community, the home of Celtic Daily Prayer, something Palmer, myself and many of our friends found incredibly helpful and spiritually nurturing.
Why were we there? I invited Palmer to come with me to teach in the Ukraine on an invitation I had received to train pastors but more specifically, the younger urban generations that were meeting in small apartment communities. On the way home we planned some UK backpacking because Palmer needed an adventure for healing. His wife Jennifer had just died of stomach cancer at the age of 26 that year, leaving behind Mark, their toddler son, Micah and a hurting community of LP kids. This was a blow to us as a larger community that was hard to comprehend. We prayed, we fasted, we asked, we longed for healing. Within a few short months, she weakened and passed before our eyes. It didn't make sense. A couple weeks after Jennifer's passing was the gathering in Idaho with Dallas Willard. I will never forget being on the patio at night under the stars when Palmer cornered Dallas in his raw pain and with Rains and I at his flanks, said, "Dallas, you said in your books about being absent from the body is to be present with the Lord, what the hell do you mean by that?" Willard, the seasoned pastor that he is, walked us through a Kingdom theology of grief that I am so thankful for. Without it, I may have never weathered the storm that was yet to come.
Palmer re-married to Amy the year after we returned from the UK. She was an incredible blessing and gift to him, Micah and the LP community. Their wedding that Fall helped all of our healing through our questions. In January of 2005, I got a call from Palmer that felt like a shotgun blast through my chest, he had just been diagnosed with aggressive colon cancer. To top it off, his insurance coverage would not cover it whilst he was still buried in bills from Jennifer's treatments. 2005 through 2006 are a bit of a blur to me. I became singularly focused on one task, the complete healing of my friend Palmer. I believed the gospels, I believed the stories, I followed the Spirit in prophetic imagination, I longed for a resurrection within his cells. We fasted, we prayed, we raised money, we worshipped our God, we worked really really hard . . . Palmer detoriated. But he wasn't alone.
On December 22, 2005, early in the mroning I received a phone call that my 18 month old niece, Kate, and a part of my house church community had stopped breathing in the middle of the night due to a rare strand of pneumonia. I rushed to the hospital with one prayer in mind, a resurrection. I layed hands on Kate, still in Becky's arms (my sister in law) and wanted to raise her but the Spirit said no. Such deep, deep loss for our community. Kate is ever a central part to the story of Ordinary Community, never forgotten.
March 5, 2006, my "Fight Club" friend/brother, Chad Canipe was admitted into the hospital with pneumonia symptoms. The prognosis got worse, his lungs were hemmoraging and he fell into a coma. He had an auto-immune disease that was not known. We fasted, we longed, we prayed, we asked, we worked so very hard . . . on March 10 my brother Chad Canipe passed to Kingdom fullness. Standing over his dead body, my hand on his head, with my brothers Kevin Rains/Mike Bishop/Eric Keck, in that hospital room, we said goodbye to our friend. I asked Chad to help us yet, help us to know how to pray, help us know how to move on, help us in his new perspective. Mike said it best in his book "What is Church?", we weren't just smoking cigars anymore, we were at war.
On this same day as we began to make plans for Chad's wake, I received a call from Amy Palmer, Mark was readmitted into the hospital where they found the tumors were overwhelming. Here is my blog excerpt from the next day:
Saturday, March 11, 2006
To Columbus, and to War
By divine appointment, we have a Regional Gathering of Missional Community folk who have been journeying together for the past 4 years or so. People representing communities of faith in Oxford, Vermont, Florida, San Diego, Indianapolis, Lexington, Norwood, West Chester, Pleasant Ridge and anywhere else I can't remember. We had a planned gathering, and now we are all here to mourn and to grieve with and for the Canipe family. Last night we shared a meal and shared hours of community time, just as Chad would tell us to. However, none of this is over. Palmer went into the hospital as well yesterday morning with pain. It turns out that there are more tumors causing him extreme pain in and near his bowels. They started a new round of chemo in the morning and it couples with a severe drug with side effects. Palmer was unable to come down and be with us last night, he's quite sick. So, unless he makes an incredible recovery overnight, we are going to him today. The community is mobile and not boxed in to times and places, we go where the Spirit tells us to. Chemo is no longer able to heal Palmer, only trying to manage the tumors. It is God who heals. This morning, I am quite numb with the tragedies. But. War lives in my body. It carries me on. We go to Columbus to meet our enemy head on. We are not intimidated and we don't know fear. We are His people and He is the source of all life. Just one touch and the news of Palmer's resurrection will ring across the earth. So God, we ride out and meet the one who opposes your Kingdom on earth. We go to Columbus, and we go to War.Wherever you are, whoever you are . . . you can War with us too. Its time for a Resurrection.peace,
In Columbus, some of my brothers helped the LP kids in 64 King ave. process and make sense of so much suffering for such an earnest and faithful community, none of it made sense. I leaned over the body of my friend in his bedroom with Eric Keck and Kevin Rains and we went deep into the Spirit. With the tongues of heaven, the groans of our heart, we prayed . . . I have felt the heat of healing in my hands in the past and I was convinced it would yet again manifest in the power of the Spirit for the tumors to go back to the hell they came from. The manifestation didn't happen, the healing was not to be, our prayers turned to mourning. 10 days after the loss of Chad, we lost Palmer. I still never believed he would die, I refused to see his sickness with my physical eyes, but only with spiritual eyes and what God could and would do. He didn't. On March 27, 2006, as I drove to Columbus to help make plans for Palmer's funeral, I prayed a simple prayer, "God, you broke my heart.". Jennifer, Kate, Chad and Mark . . . all gone. None of them resurrected in the way I hoped for, the loss was devastating. I fell into a period of darkness and hung onto faith and community with desperation. We would never be the same.
This is the story of my tribe. This is our Emerging Church story. We were tempted to disband, we were tempted to lose hope. The stench of death, loss and despair was palatable. The Enemy whispered into my ear the taunts of failure, I labored through countless dark nights of the soul in a kind of isolation. God allowed it, perhaps even willed it, who's to know anymore.
And I would have given over to darkness with the exception of one thing, I follow the Resurrector of which there is only one. In trouble, in suffering, even in death, I swear singular allegiance to the King and his name is Jesus. I yield to some of Palmer's last words from his blog:
"And when it seems that hopefulness is the least appropriate response in this situation, let it rise up even more. Whisper your hope when you lie down at night; scream your hope when you wake in the morning. Live your hope as if it is the one and only thing that sustains you in this ravaged world. You will not be disappointed." - Mark Palmer
And so this morning I awake with the fellowship of the saints all around me who have gone before me. The beauty of Kate in my heart, the faithfulness of Chad on my mind, the hope of Mark and Jennifer in my soul. In the mystery of the Kingdom, they yet pray for me and cheer me on. I'm not dying, I'm living. The One I follow is the singular source of life and death has lost it's sting.
And so it is in this context, in my Emerging Church story, that I reflect on the liberal theology of the Wild Goose festival and it makes no sense to me. But to be fair to the organizers, speakers and participants, I will post a follow-up blog with specifics for I seek only peace with fellow warriors. However, for ELPIDA, hope and life is our rebellion in the spirit of Christ. Anything less, anything short will be shown for what it is and be found wanting. We are yet at war and our King is still handing out orders. We have lost friends in this war, it has to be more than self-indulgent festivals. I will partner with any who reflect that banner, but there is Truth in that banner. To deny truth is to dabble at the table of the Enemy and it's a stream we will not go down. We swear singular allegiance to the King and will partner will all who do.
