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Friday, April 01, 2005

Worldwide Emergent, Pagittvision, & the nature of emergent

Messy Christian, my favorite Malaysian blogger, blogs about Emergent Malaysia here. Yeah, that's right, it's global. Some good cultural stuff here as well.

Doug Pagitt blogs on the emertgent blog about some future directions for emergent here. It's some good stuff.

If you are wonderingwhat emergent is, then click here for some good links.

So, in this blog I have shown how emergent is global and local. Pagitt is an emergent leader, but he is not THE emrgent leader. No one is the emergent leader. Emergent has no Pope. Furthermore, emergent has no offical anything. There are a bunch of unoffical people networked together. Messy Christian says emergent is in Malaysia. Great! How many emergent leaders been to Malaysia? Some yes, but few I am sure. How many emergent leaders are from Malaysia? Aha! Malaysia has and will have its own leadership, networked with other international leaders, groups, and cohorts.

This is really cool. Various pieces of emergent are mutually influential, but not dependent upon each other. If emergent suddenly vanished everywhere in the world except in Malaysia, could Malaysian emrgent live? YES! Certainly it would suffer from lack of cross-pollinization, but it would not wither and die either.

So, how does a movement appear in Malaysia, UK, and US and in literally hundreds of places all over the world? How could it be the same movement? Would Malaysian emergents and UK emergents sit well at a table with US emergents? I do not know any of this, but what I do know is that emergent is not appearing in one place and then being exported so much as it is showing up everywhere and people are finding out about each other.

This is a fundamental change is movements, at least in my limited knowledge.

From linear to ecological.
From hierarchy to friendship.
From one source to open source.
From centralized to diffuse.
From harnessed power to unharnessed power.
From uniform agreement to unified hope.
From one right thing to a really good way.

You see, emergent is different than past movements. It is really the first wave of postmodern Christian movements. More waves will come - and more quickly. Emergent (or whatever it will be called) will obsolete itself as it evolves, like really good software.

7 comments:

Sivin Kit said...

as an Malaysian, and part of the emergent conversation before it's become what it is now (of course now a little bit more actively involved).. I find reading this post facinating.

Fajita said...

Sivin Kit,

I would love to hear about the history of the emergent conversation in Malaysia. A comment here or perhaps a post on your blog woudl be a real treat.

Anonymous said...

It's quite fascinating how it begun ... a couple of leaders and ordinary folk got together and decided to talk about a common thing. Eventually, more people joined. ;) But Sivin will be the best person to tell you the full story ...

Fajita said...

Messy Christian & Sivin Kit,

Is there a website capturing the history of Emergent Malaysia? Is there anything written and accessible? Blog? Book? Saved E-mail conversations?

I ask in curiosity, but also because it is exciting to know that something is bigger than one corner of this planet. Somehow knowing that Emergent is happening in Malaysia strengthens me here in the US.

Sivin Kit said...

Hi there, well ... we're working on the website so that would be a more communal thing. I do plan to write something more personal as far as my connection is of course two names are immediately important (1) Brian McLaren, (2) Jason Clark from UK.

I do have some saved email conversations (thanks to Gmail!)

if you are a little impatient then there should be some stuff here http://sivinkit.net/archives/cat_emergent.html

Hope that helps.

Fajita said...

Sivin Kit, Thanks for the link to your archives.

Messy Christian said...

It's quite fascinating how it begun ... a couple of leaders and ordinary folk got together and decided to talk about a common thing. Eventually, more people joined. ;) But Sivin will be the best person to tell you the full story ...