The Future of Emergent Outliers
Like many online endeavors, Emergent Outliers is regretfully at the mercy of the sliding priorities of life in a way that most of the things we do in ‘real life’ are not. As such we have our seasons for and against and times of change and regrowth.
The past month has been a month of decline, but I believe we’re ready to begin growing again – with your help.
The mission of Emergent Outliers has been, since the begging, to create an online community for orphan Emergent-types (though not just Emergents). Most of us are far too aware that the spiritual engagement and conversation we might have online is not something we find in our own home communities. More to the point, and perhaps more honestly, it’s more about creating an online home for a general type of mindfully engaged Christian who are willing to knock over a few sacred cows in hoping to find some truth that has been obscured. It gives us a place to have voice in community where we are not alone in these convictions or confusions, but rather supports us. We’re weird… and even though we may have our own wonderful churches, sometimes our structures strangle more than scaffold.
But the individual is not key here, rather it is the community we commit ourselves to building. All of us. It is not centered on me or anyone else, but rather in our collective effort:we must decide if this shall be a shelter for us, a place where we may grow and challenge ourselves – or not.
So after talking with many of our members and thinking about this extensively myself, there are a few ideas I would like to suggest and ask for your suggestions. Please take the time to provide some feedback.
Book Club: We have decided to drastically slow these things down, we need to decide how much and how often we want to meet. If we decide how frequently we desire to meet we can limit the amount of reading appropriately.
Bible Study: We need to decide how we might proceed with this as well. How frequently do we want to meet and how we want to decide what we’ll cover.
Spiritual Direction: This is something we have been discussing somewhat. What if we helped people in our community find mutual spiritual direction? We pair people up to provide regular contact, advice, discernment and listening to each other.
Blogging: For a community to succeed online there must be regular activity that helps bring people together and create shared identity. A very good way to do this presently is frequent postings from multiple people and then engaging each other in the comments. I would like to see a number of us frequently offering posts to the site once a week or so.
What else? None of these are ’sacred cows’ and we change and add, subtract, as we need. What do you think? What would be ideal for you? What do you want out of this community? What do you need from this community?
We need people interested in participating to say how often they're available to meet and also what they want to participate IN. I'm up for a once-a-month bookclub meeting and a once-a-month Bible study meeting, on opposite sides of the month . . . and am up to post thoughts too, and will work on that tomorrow.
I am very interested in participating. But, since I have only done so once, I hesitated in responding. I like Marie's idea of a once-a-month book club and once-a-month Bible study at opposite ends of the month. I would even take it slightly further that if we are discussing a particularly long or dense book, we examine it over the course of a couple of sessions (two months).
As for blog posting, I absolutely agree. I really enjoy engaging one another in discussion via blog comments. Perhaps we can set up a list of blogs somewhere, so that people know where to go…and this site can feature some of the "hot" blog topics being discussed.
Thanks again for all of your efforts, Gideon.
My schedule will only allow once a month book club meetings.
I am very interested in participating. But, since I have only done so once, I hesitated in responding. I like Marie's idea of a once-a-month book club and once-a-month Bible study at opposite ends of the month. I would even take it slightly further that if we are discussing a particularly long or dense book, we examine it over the course of a couple of sessions (two months).
I would love to get involved since it seems online is one of the few ways I can connect with others. I belong to a cohort here in Phoenix but I have a hard time meeting up with them. I could definately do a once a month book club. I have to admit I get burnt out on bible study but have never done it from an emergent perspective.