Emergent Wednesday

I'm in the digital lounge at EC and feel I should blog... you see I'm next to Bill, Gavin, and Jonathon and we are all blogging indeed. Yesterday was wonderful. The dork that I am, I did not blog last night due to the fact I wanted to post some pictures. Yet today I am blogging about last night and am using a foreign computer without my pictures. Anyway, I will post them.

I hung out yesterday at Downtown Presbyterian and McKendree UMC. Maybe I shouldn't say "hung out". I loaded in more sound equipment and screens. Anyway, the churches are both beautiful (as you will see when I post pictures).

The only seminar I was able to attend was Dan Kimball's "They Like Jesus But Not The Church" (hey, me too sometimes!). It was a great seminar. Wonderfully depressing and yet optomistic. Dan talked about the many things the church has done to turn away emerging generations. We left with more questions than answers... a good thing. My hope, as I think is Dan's, is that those who came to the workshop will find their own answers, solutions, and remedies.

Last night Phyllis Tickle warmed us with the night blessing. I followed that with the Justin Dillon concert/forum at McKendree. Justin used to be in a band called Dimestore Prophets (I think next week's free MP3 will be their song "Hitler's Girlfriend" if I can find a legal MP3... here are the lyrics) that I loved. Matt Slocum of Sixpence and Astronaut Pushers played cello. I am a very big Slocum admirer.

I wrote down the songs Justin on the offering envelope but I can't find it. Here are some of the songs:

It Is Well With My Soul
The Wonderful Cross
Redemption Song (Bob Marley)
If It Be Your Will (Leonard Cohen)
Yahweh (U2)

There were more typical praise and worship songs, but of course they're the ones I don't remember.

Scandrette followed the songs with an interesting forum about Christians and the arts. He ruffled the feathers of some non-artistic folks who couldn't understand why an artist from San Fransisco would loathe being lumped in with Thomas Kinkade just because he is a Christian. Scandrette was called an eliteist by someone who later apologized.

So here we are in the digital lounge. The NPC is in the next room and Taylor Mason just finished up a very funny puppet routine. Now Michael W. Smith is on stage. In fact I have to go... they're showing a trailer for Steve Taylor's new movie "The Second Chance".