Susan
and I have been to all four Wild Goose Festivals; it’s become the keystone of
both our vacation and professional development each year. For those who don’t know, we refer to
the festival as “Progressive Christian Woodstock,” to give the feel of both the
offerings in creative worship, social justice practices, and Christian
teaching, as well as the fact that we camp out in the North Carolina woods
during the whole thing.
When
we arrive, after claiming a campsite and setting up the tents, there is this
annual ritual of figuring out the program guide. I realize it must be difficult to organize so many venues
and presenters, but every year the program guide is only barely intelligible. This time I had to literally rip out
pages and rearrange them so that all the events for each half-day appeared on
the same spread of open pages.
What I couldn’t fix was the listing of presenters by category, and then
not telling you in the calendar what category each presented was, which made is
very tedious to actually find out who some of these people were. Why they don’t just list them all
alphabetically is a mystery to me.
Last
year’s festival included appearances by Krista Tippett, and for months she
featured interviews from the festival on her NPR show, “On Being.” Therefore, with this jolt of publicity,
I expected a larger festival, and was right. I noticed considerably more people around this year. Perhaps half of the attendees were
first-timers.
Also,
in the past year the festival lost one of its founders, civil rights legend
Vincent Harding. We made a point
of remembering him by singing his words to the tune of “We Are Climbing Jacob’s
Ladder:” “We are building up a new world, we are building up a new world, we
are building up a new world, builders must be strong.” Sometimes this kind of language makes
me nervous. The worlds built by
people have all been prisons of injustice. But in the context of this festival and Vincent’s life
dedicated to justice and peace, that verse is a calling to participate in the
new world God is building.
Brian McLaren.
The
star of the festival this year, as every year so far, was Brian McLaren. Most of the venues he appeared at were
overflowing with people… which is fine.
Brian is still the godfather of Emergence Christianity, and his message
is the essential grounding of the festival. The more people hear him the better.
Brian’s
new book is We Make the Road By Walking,
a catechetical summary of Christian faith through 50+ short chapters based on
passages from Scripture. It is
like a new lectionary, bringing the reader through a year of Bible readings
viewed from the emergence perspective.
For instance, I heard him talk about how he dealt with Holy Week and
Lent. Too often we treat the
events of Good Friday like some kind of protection racket: convincing people
they have a problem then presenting them with our solution. A forgiveness racket, he called it, in
which we attempt to solve problems people don’t yet know they have. Wouldn’t we be more effective
evangelists if we started with the problems people actually have, and showing
how being a disciple of Jesus Christ brings redemption and healing?
Brian
noted that he focused during Lent on the Sermon on the Mount, how Jesus comes
not to abolish the Law but to fulfill it by extending it beyond the written
code. For, as Jesus himself noted,
it is easy for people to twist the literal observance of the written words of
Scripture into just the opposite of what God intended.
We Make the Road By Walking is a very
good intro to Emergence Christianity through Scripture. Hopefully it will silence the critics
who complain that Emergence is somehow contrary to the Bible. It is only contrary to the ways the
Bible has been misused for centuries in the service of Empire.
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