Are you hyphenated?

Interesting article from Phyllis Tickle on what she called the "Hyphenated", those communities that seek to reflect both the historic and the emerging , the ancient and the future... these communities see themselves less as the evolution of Christendom, nor simply in reaction to Christendom, rather they seem to say that in the death of modern Christendom we can discover a way of being that embraces all of the riches of the past - the liturgical, the symbolic, the mystical, the monastic, the traditions of their ancestors and sets in it in a new, contextualised context - culturally, theological, missiologically etc.  Many of these communities want to acknowledge their ancestors but to work out afresh what it means in the now... Tickle calls them they "Hyphenated" because in describing themselves they reference both their tradition and their emergence.  Tickle writes...

In all of this reshuffling and reconstituting, there are also other parishes, however, other churches and congregations that are moving to embrace emergent Christian thought while melding it with extant and/or historic expressions of the faith. They are known as the hyphenateds. They are the presbymergents and methomergents, the luthermergents, and the baptimergents, the submergents and the anglimergents, etc. They fascinate me more even than do completely emergent congregations, because they seem to me to be engaged in the more difficult task of bringing to the party the best of two worlds, the ancient and the future. They are hyphenated, in other words, because they seek to meld the DNA and passion and post-modern theology of a new form of Christianity with the extant body and operative history of an established tradition. Among them all, none is so absorbing or compelling to me as are the anglimergents, of whom there is no better example than the Church of the Apostles in Seattle.

I think we have to be careful of creating new divisions where we are discovering a new sense of ecumenism, but I would want to join with them/Tickle in celebrating our place within the whole panoply (across the ages and the continents) of Christian spirituality and wisdom.  In some ways there is a maturity in this exploration, it isn't simply rebelling against what went before nor is it believing "we" have it right and everyone in the past had it wrong, or was primitive (a symptom of much modernist thinking).  Is this a truly post-modern church, one that sees a bigger picture? Can we learn to embrace the riches of the past, move beyond our personal hurts, & step into a world that has/is changing, one which needs us to embody the Gospel at it's heart?  And, yes, I guess I'd consider myself an Anglimergent amongst other things!

And it's good to read encouraging words about our friends in Seattle and Karen Ward in-particular.

Hyphenate Emergents (God's Politics Blog - Beliefnet)

Technorati Tags: Community: Culture: Emerging Church: Missional: new-monasticism: Spirituality: theology