Ring Around the Rosey Blah Blah Blah

Reading this conversation is like reading about the plague. As opposed to getting into the lab and running cell targeting experiments.

I wrote the last thing I wrote about this topic a long time ago.

I feel like everything that is being said is just long-winded versions of what I said there a year and a half ago:

That culture is different than US culture (really, wow, I didn’t know that).

…Those of us exploring these ideas in the US will likely never enjoy much of either. For every 100 still digging the hole deeper, there is only 1 of us trying to bury the rest alive. If you feel some dirt falling on your head from above, count yourself lucky, and climb up out of there!

…The US is the biggest, baddest game in town, in many respects, culture being one of them. Our culture is like a train: really hard to stop and not planning on doing so until it reaches the end of the tracks. Alt.worship grew up in a car: the passenger is free to grab the steering wheel and give it a hard turn at any moment, driver or no. We cannot really hope to redirect the train, we just have to find the empty freight car where the hobos hang out.

I feel like asking, “What did you expect?” It was a conference, after all. A programatic event for people who expect programs. You presented on alt.worship programs and disliked the programmatic worship. If it looked like UK alt.worship would you have liked it more? Because it still wouldn’t have worked because it would have been out of context. We simply need to be creative within our own contexts, but the overpowering context of programmatic worship has not yet been shed, and that paradigm is antithetical to the ethos of alt.worship. Stop showing US evan’s how to loop video and start convincing them that there is no reproducible method for authentic worship. (Yet alone a sustainable model for the same anywhere in our near future. “…setting up an emerging church for a maximum of 50-100 people for not very much salary or working part-time in Pizza Hut does appeal very much at all to pastors.” So why are we still talking to pastors?)

If I sound frustrated it is because I am. And this frustration is the reason I gave up on this conversation a year and a half ago. Re-entering it for one morning it seems like all the words are the same, just the people saying them are different (save the full-time people). And so I will again exit stage left and get back into the alley.

Steve: i guess the other thing is that in england alt w got a very public kick-start from NOS…

Me: well i guess if what we need to make it over here is a good sex scandal, we all need to move into the catholic church!

Riddell did say at Greenbelt last year (paraphrasing), “They’re not ‘post-evangelical,’ they’re just ‘pre-Catholic.’”

all…talk and no do.

it is getting words around this discontent that i am finding difficult. perhaps, it is simply that i am impatient with the places people choose to settle.

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