in the little reading that i've done about the emerging church, with the exception of andrew jones and a few others, there seems to little talk of actual emergent theory and how it applies to what's occuring. if you're unfamiliar with emergent theory i highly recommend reading steve johnson's book Emergence.
Onto the point - in the case of slime molds when certain conditions are met each slime mold slug will emit a "scent" and leave a trail and when other slugs run into that "scent" or trail they will either coalesce or diverge. So given the right conditions/environment a huge amount of slime mold slugs will aggregate to form this huge mass. Every slug emits this "scent" not a few select leaders. so i wonder what is the "scent" the we humans emit? what trail do we leave behind that allows for the emergence of certain communities. Conversation to me seems like a very logical "scent" that we could leave behind or transmit to one another. think about conversations you've had and how one conversation you had might spark you to bring that same conversation to another person. and so on. and if the conversation is intriguing enough then a group might form to carry it further. i think
this is what we've seen with the emerging church.
introduce now this idea i've been having about opening up a very unique lounge. in my mind i think it could act as 1) an environment for the transmittal of these conversations, a place where the feeling of a particular converstaion would lingere. 2) a hub for the conversations that take place "out there", somewhere that people could come and gather. a natural meeting place. one tagline i've thought of is "an offline gathering". are those reasons the same? hmm.
what conversations? i think mainly conversations that circle around our musings of life, us, God and others. granted i know to some degree these 3rd places already exist, but there is something inside me, this feeling i have that what is out there is just inadequate. that it can be done better - and i think with some help i can pull that off.
comments/suggestions?
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