Amahoro

Amahoro means peace. It is a word of Bantu origin used widely across Africa. It has special meaning in places like Rwanda, Burundi, and Congo, where violence and genocide have inflicted such pain and suffering. When people from various tribes embrace, shake hands or kiss, and say "amahoro," they are expressing a deep hope for a better future.

Amahoro my friends. This is a post I'm very passionate about and it has been simmering under the surface for some time while I was busy with so many church creation difficulties on the surface.

There are moments when things find their tipping point, the tip over and all this stuff flows out and starts a whole new reality.

Here is a prophetic statement that I have been feeling for some time - in terms of the emerging church "conversation" evolving from it's early conversation stage to its full blown movement stage - I feel that in a spiritual way and a body of Christ being prepared and ready kind of way - that this big meeting taking place in Uganda in May of 2007 will be one of the biggest, if not the actual moment when this thing tips over and just blows up in so many awesome ways into full fledged movement. You won't see it in April, but a year or two later when you look back, there will be evidence that this was the moment. End of prophetic statment.

What is this big meeting.? It is when disoriented westerners like us, trying to find our way forward in the aftermath of modernity, and stumbling into postmodernity and whatever that becomes, have a chance to get together with the folks at the center of God's movement on the earth - African church leaders.

As we are emerging from modernity, they are emerging from colonialism. Both of us are in this total space of emergence from the old and into the new. It is time now for us to meet, make friendships and fellowship with a sense that we have much to learn from one another. And probably we from the west will have the most to learn.

There's a lot of wonderful details about how it is going to be held - three segments, first a series of meetings together, then a time of travelling in smaller teams back to their home bases and churches and seeing their world, then a time together with just the westerners at the end to bring it all together and see what we're learning.

There are still openings for westerners, and they also need funds to help cover the expenses of the Africans. I have been longing to go to this since it was first announced a while ago. I want to be there when everyone is gathered at the table and the Lord brings down the hammer (which crashes through all the confusion and listlessness of transitional moments) and moves us to the next phase. Wow, what a historic moment.

Check it out www.amahoro-africa.com

Cota goes Academic

This week we had a seminarian from Union Theological Seminary (The Seminary connected to Columbia University, and where Dietrich Bonhoeffer taught before returning to Germany to help the church oppose the Nazi's) visit with us. We discovered that we are now listed on Union's list of churches to visit for first year seminarians.

Here's how he described the listing....."a list of what our professors are calling "post-denominational" churches, the short description for Commuion of the Arts is "post-evangelical, with active artistic participation. Experimentally Eucharistic"

The class is called "Christianities in the City" and it is meant to introduce us to the diversity of Christianity through the unique perspective of the city, in particular New York."

Yes, I like that very much..."post-evangelical, with active artistic participation. Experimentally Eucharistic" Very spot on description of us.

Emergence

When the seed bursts, the plant then suddenly spreads asunder. At that instant it feels that it is being dissolved, after lying so long narrowly folded in the seed. On the contrary it gains a new world.... Birth must seem to the new-born babe what death seems to us--the annihilation of all the conditions which had hitherto made life possible in the womb of its mother, but proved to be its emergence into a wider life.

Gustave Fechner
Life After Death (1836)

This was todays "daily asterisk" the daily email I enjoy from "culture is not optional" (cino)

Surfing For a Story and a Home

People inhabit stories – surfer, political type, artist, jock….

The Modern era had a few big stories that gave coherence to everyone, that everybody kind of bought into – for example, even though a surfer, you were also an American and listened to the same music as the politico and the jock. Fashion had the big look of the season, and you had it or didn’t.

But now in the post-modern era there are so many stories flying all around everywhere, that ultimately the confusion leads to nobody having a story. You can wear whatever you want, the music industry is segmented unbelievably – there are just so many channels to choose from, that you end up “story surfing” so much that you never really have one story to call home and come out of the streets and into.

This leads to weariness.

The church needs to be the place that people can go to experience a coherent story that gives meaning to their life and a place to rest from their weariness.

The community of the church needs to live out its story in two ways – in relational lifestyle – making and keeping promises to be there for one another over the long term. And in the liturgy; the liturgy is the place where we will literally create a habitable reality – a story which people can inhabit with coherence leading to rest.

Your life’s reality is the story you inhabit. The surfer dude spends ten years of his life wearing clothes, talking with a specific language and hanging out with others just like him. The story of “surfer dude” is the actual reality he lived.

The liturgy needs to be so artistically moving that it pulls us in and tells a story we can be inspired by - just as we are at a rock concert or football game.

The liturgy has to have the artistic depth to draw us in with desire every week. We have to want to keep coming back for more.

If we can tell a powerful story in the liturgy that creates a habitable world, and make it legitimate by the way we live our lives communally, by making promises to be there for one another and keeping them – then the church will be a welcome haven for the weary souls “surfing” through life without a story or warm bed to come home to.

– Most of the ideas here were inspired by Robert W. Jensen in his article, “How the World Lost its Story” published in First Things.

Cota Website Down

Sorry to report we've had some communication problems with our website and the email connected to it - cotanyc.com

Our Sunday gathering is at 11am
Lamb's Theater
130 W 44th St.
(between 6th & 7th Ave.)
5th Floor

My email is jkursonis@yahoo.com
cell phone 917-553-6843

"the words of your heart..."

We had this big Brian Mclaren meeting which you can read about in the early posts of this blog. When I got up to talk for a few minutes about our hopes for this new faith gathering, I blurted out something which I had thought about a number of times, but had never planned on saying in public quite so straighforwardly.

"I'm starting this church because I'm lonely and I don't have enough love in my life"

Everyone including myself was kind of stunned by those words.

But it turned out to be a really wonderful thing that made a lot of people listen, and feel something real was happening. My team remembers it like a moment frozen in history.

My motivation remains the same.

My "summer absent" community is now reconverging on NYC, and all I am looking forward to doing is to spending time with them, loving and being loved. We made a good start in the spring, but we have so far to go in discovering one another.

Bon Voyage, social isolation! And good riddance, don't let the door slam your a** on the way out!

Social Isolation Growing in U.S., Study Says

"Americans are far more socially isolated today than they were two decades ago, and a sharply growing number of people say they have no one in whom they can confide, according to a comprehensive new evaluation of the decline of social ties in the United States.

The comprehensive new study paints a sobering picture of an increasingly fragmented America, where intimate social ties -- once seen as an integral part of daily life and associated with a host of psychological and civic benefits -- are shrinking or nonexistent. In bad times, far more people appear to suffer alone."

Wow, a friend brought this Washington Post article from June 23rd to my attention. This is a big part of what motivates me to build a community of people - to bring people together in deeply bonded relationships.

I'm constantly using the word, "fragmented" to describe our social reality, and this study proves what we already observe on our own.

This is such a time for the church to reform aspects of itself that lead away from community forming, and to do the opposite. For example, a few leaders holding all the spiritual responsibility and running programs just kills the opportunity for gifted folks to use their spiritual gifts to serve and bless others and build relationships.

Sitting next to someone mutually experiencing a performance or program is not the same as engaging with the person side by side in a project together that gets you both involved serving others and allows you to build the bonds of working side by side. But we just deny that over and over again when we invite people to attend a service, and they sit there and watch it, and go home just as fragmented as they arrived.

Blessed Relief

Thanks to all who have prayed for me during this "brutal" time as in the post below. I am glad to announce that the Lord has brought me out of that and shown me that I was going through a 40 day time in the desert - from late June through all of July.

In the midst of it, I had a few oasis of respite, and I was about to write a new post a number of times, but then I was right back into the desert before I could get to the post. Then I was glad I hadn't posted because it would have been...I'm back...now I'm not...wait, I'm better...crap, I still am going through this....

But finally after some good time out of it, the Lord showed me that it was over. I look forward to some more posts on what I learned, but I thought I would get this up here for now.

Thanks for your many prayers and encouragements.

As I told some of my people now and previously - the blessing of a pastor that walks beside you as a fellow journeyer is that he is real, and your friend, and treats you with respect like an equal, and really teaches you the way to walk with Christ. The way through suffering to blessing...but the downside is that you don't get the "role model" to give you a false sense of hope that someday you also could live in a trouble free world and be a super Christian with no problems or struggles and only enjoy increasing prosperity of heart and pocketbook.

The first is real and really equips you for life, the second only sets you up for disappointment and creates community where upward mobility in leadership is sought after for the social benefits and perceived spiritual benefits. And when it is discovered that neither exist, fakeness is created so that all who have become leaders can at least pretend that they got all that they wanted so those below will still look up to them at least and they will have that benefit. The fakeness is perpetuated from one disillusioned generation to the next, until reform comes.

The main thing God has been doing in my heart during this time is centering me. Helping me to become truly and fully just me before him. When I am simply myself, it helps me to seek simply him, and to have a simple faith in the simple him. Fortunately the simple Him is the huge loving God of the universe that he is, who wants to lavish love on all who come to him and to make them right and through them to make the world right.

Awesome to walk through pain and suffering and find God.

Brutal

This blog is supposed to be about the journey of starting a church within the NYC art community, but it also goes into general emerging stuff also. This post is very much about our journey.

We are on a bumpy part of the road, rather than a boat in a storm, we are a sailboat in the doldrums. No wind, really hot.

70% of our congregation is gone for the whole summer - and when you have 20 people and only 5 are left, it's quite hard to hold a meeting. After two and a half years of struggling and battling, with amazing miracles and signs of growth, to suddenly hit this wall of nothingness has been brutal. The only word is brutal.

To make it worse, the building that I live in, and that the church meets in has just been sold and we need to vacate by Sept. 1st. Finding space in NYC is very difficult, and with human and other resources so low this summer, it adds it right into the brutal category.

I'm going to God for my strength, but I have been quite depressed for two weeks now. So, there you have the journey...brutal and depressed. If anyone in the future ever gives me any grief about taking a salary or having too much power in the churches decisions, I am going to just remember this brutal, hot, dry doldrums and ignore them completely. They weren't here.

I'm not despairing, but I am depressed. I know God is with me, but it's still brutal.

By the way, I knew this was coming, I just didn't think it would be this bad. The other ministry I used to be a part of here with NYC artists, would just take the whole summer off because of this same thing. I'm hoping next year we have 50 people going into the summer, so then we can carry on with 20...that would be fine.

The Cohort Table

We had our first NYC Emergent Village Cohort gathering last week. It was a great group of people, and as we expect here in NYC white males were in the minority!!

Brian McLaren is often asked whether EC is just a conversation, or a movement. He says that he does not want to see it become a movement until all the parties are at the table - that we need to hear from the leaders of the churches in postcolonial countries and from more groups other than white suburban evangelical males in the US.

Well, here in NYC we are urban, we are from pentecostal, mainline and evangelical churches (hoping for some Catholic's soon), we are decidedly multi-ethnic and of both genders, we are even multi-national - we are all here.

I've heard people say it's important to invite others to the table...that is true for those in the institutional center...the ones with power....but for us on the fringes, we have to build our own table.

So, we're all here in NYC, and we are going to build the table together and sit at it. No one's inviting anyone to this table, we're building it together like the Amish. It's a barn raising.

So, come meet your Amish neighbors once a month at the Cohort if you live in NYC. You may need a barn one day.

The DaChristy Code

What is the secret that links these three men together, and the conspiracy that through them is controlling a major portion of the emergent churches that are being planted in major U.S. cities?

New York, Los Angeles, Minneapolis…These three emergent church pastors barely know one another, yet a single influence has surreptiously worked among them to keep them all on a similar path of personal warmth and kindness to strangers.

What clues can be found in this photograph (look closely)…something about Christ….about loving Christ…NO! Wait!...Not Christ – that’s too obvious….Christy…Yes!...loving Christy!!!

But what is the connection between Christ and Christmas and this purported Christy figure???

Hmmm...Merry…a commonly used word around Christmas time…it’s coming together…if I could just understand the connection between the word Merry and this Christy figure…???

Wait, I’m looking at it backwards! If I just take the words….and change their positions…Merry….Christy…now…Christy…Merry…That’s it! Christy Merry!!!

That is what I see buried in the photograph…They are all connected to and love Christy...see, it says We Love Christy, who is one and the same with this Christy Merry!

Mystery solved…one woman, named Christy Merry helped plant each of these emergent churches. That’s right, she lived in Minneapolis and planted Bluer, pastored by John Musick (in the middle), then she moved to Los Angeles and planted Kairos with JR Woodward (on the right side), and then she moved to New York City and planted Communion of the Arts (Cota) with Jeff Kursonis (on the left).

Wow, one woman is really at the center of this whole emerging church conspiracy, she single handedly helped plant three of the most well known emergent churches in the USA. Her name is Christy Merry, and we all thank her for her warmth, and hard work, and especially for her gift of gathering people in, especially, “the other”, the stranger.

We Love You Christy, see, our shirts say so.

The Crack

I just read a long series of comments following this post, the main thrust of which was trying to understand the emerging church movement in light of a whole series of criteria, all of them current or modern ways of thinking, and trying to make sense of emergent within those modes of thinking. I was overwhelmed by a sense that they would never get it if they didn’t realize that they couldn’t analyze it from a modern perspective. Such a perspective rigidity would fundamentally lead to misunderstanding…here is my comment:

I really enjoyed reading all your comments, what a wise and charitable group you are.

The one biggest feeling that emerges within me after reading all these is that indeed there is a difficulty in trying to explain or in trying to understand what the emerging church movement is.

I think it is because it is something billowing up from the innards of a wide and diverse group of people that have for the first time been freed from thinking in only a modern milieu, that through the crack that this little postmodernity thing has ripped open in the massive backside of modernity, a new perspective has been achieved; actually for the first time in a really long time, a totally new perspective has been found. It is the one afforded to those who look out the crack.

Some people are peeping out that crack and things are billowing up within them. They are trying to describe it, but even they themselves do not really understand what it is they are seeing, they only know they are drawn to it forcefully, and that they have a new ability to think and feel things they never imagined.

Others are looking at them and what they are saying, and sometimes without also sharing that view out the crack, are unable to process their comments because they simply are not experiencing this totally new perspective offered.

Many are now climbing up to the crack, to take a look, others are just too busy with their good lives and responsibilities to have the time to take a look. Not to say they wouldn't if they had a few minutes respite from their responsibilities.

Truly this crack has afforded a totally original view, a perspective that cannot be understood from prior categories.

I'm trying to actually climb out of the crack and get to the other side (emerge). Many will prefer to stay where they are, and that is fine, and many will be very curious and get up there and peer out the crack and talk to the others who are doing so and who are feeling something billowing up within them. There's a big feeling component to it, you can't necessarily understand it all now, it's more that you have to feel it.

I totally understand the consternation this kind of language might bring to some, and I just smile humbly to myself as I pitch my axe head a few feet higher and continue to climb. I am going to figure out how I have become more socially liberal and yet more deeply pious at the same time. I am going to find out why I am becoming more concerned about loving people in general than I am about converting them.

I'm hoping to find some clue as to why these things are billowing up within me like when I sense within myself a total dedication to God’s Kingdom and the drawing of others into it, yet I feel more and more like a universalist because of Jesus. How does my great belief in Jesus the Word, the Word is God exist at the same time that I am losing my inerrant view of scripture and replacing it with a sense of wonder at its humanness; and a feeling that that very humanness and its inherent mistakes and missteps causes me to believe even more in a God who's so interested in me a human, that he not only became a human but spoke forth his Word through human frailty.

How is it that I’m becoming far more interested in my humanness and in the greater community of humans I live with the more I try to walk in the Spirit? How did I, a lover of Keith Green and imbiber of his anti-Catholic views become so fascinated with liturgy and Eucharist and Pope JPII and the complete sense that I have no more need to protest?

I’m not sure I totally understand how a Southern California Republican lover of Reagan like me become a sojourner of the new religious left; partly it’s because I wanted to be in solidarity with my New York City community and because post 9/11 the word fundamentalist viscerally scares me, but I still don’t totally understand how this happened to me.

I'm definitely a new kind of Christian and all my old kind of Christian’s friends’ attempts to understand these changes in me all seem to lack any awareness of, or sense of, my totally new and original perspective out the crack. Somehow looking out the crack has changed me.