Emergent Village: Home on the Twittersphere.
Due to my campus life involvements at MVNU and requirements for my current M.A.M.L. course, Community, Context, and Transition , I was unable to attend the Emergent Village gathering in D.C. (EVDC09) this last weekend. I was hoping to stay somewhat informed about the conversations and happenings through updates on Twitter tagged #evdc09 . Emergent Village tweeted, "Search #evdc09 on Twitter for updates from the ‘future of Emergent’ gathering this weekend in D.C. … There will be some but not a lot …" and "@makeesha " said, "tell us what you want emergent village to be – we convene this weekend in DC. email, dm or reply tweet #evdc09"
There were not enough tweets during the gathering to post any responses but I did reply tweet about what Emergent Village should be:
"@traviskeller : oh yeah. hey #evdc09 … EV needs to be defined by… LOVE. i’m sure we don’t know what all that means except that the self must be executed"
I received a couple of direct replies from @makeesha and @soupiset that noted that the self was, indeed, executed. I’ll be looking forward to blog posts about that. Some notable words I’ve heard/read that really stick out on Twitter in response to EVDC09 now that it has ended are artifact, gratitude, clarity, hope, resolve, consensus, energized, drained, stories, beautiful, processing, honesty, inclusivity, and outcome.
Additionally and more centrally I’ve heard/read statements about being "home." Home. Home. Home. Prior to the gathering tweets mentioned the acts of packing, traveling, and attending. Following the gathering everyone updating seemed relieved and/or excited to be "home." If Emergent Village is really a generative friendship should the gathering have felt more like home? If I am at my physical residence with friends, family or myself, I feel at home. If I am at the house of a friend, I feel at home. When I arrive home from a Sunday morning gathering of Christians I have feelings of tiredness and exhaustion. I didn’t feel like I was at home. Why is that? Am I not connected with the 100-1,500 other people? Is it even possible to connect with that many people? Should Emergent Village cease to seek national and global "friendship" and rather function in the same manner as Twitter and Facebook, as an online tool for resourcing, networking, and collaborating? Or… am I wrong? Do church gatherings feel like home? Did EVDC09 feel like home? Is an online relationship really a relationship at all? What is the value of our networking for our local and proximal communities? Do I have any place to speak a thought into an Emergent gathering?
5 Responses to “Emergent Village: Home on the Twittersphere.”
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I’m not sure I fully understand your post but I’ll try to give some feedback.
evdc09 felt like family … in a way. it felt like friends …. in a way. but it was also different than and more than that.
i think though that perhaps you’re reading more into our relief to be “home”. What we did this weekend could not be sustained by any human being for a long period of time. We had a short time to dig through a lot and it was way too intense to sustain. We were literally tired from lack of sleep and emotional drained from the effort of the process…I imagine some more than others for a variety of reasons – for me it’s because I’m an introvert.
The times when we were chatting, hanging out for lunch, etc. definitely felt more “familiar” but home is home. My family is my family.
I have always rebelled against the “church as family” metaphor and I guess i’d push back against the thought of EV as family in the same way.
I’m an introvert – any time with people is tiring for me…even my kids and my husband (although admittedly to a lesser degree). I don’t think my exhaustion is indicative of some sort of inherent flaw in the system but rather my own personality.
I do appreciate your thoughtful engagement and the feedback and much of what you said resonates with what we shared over the weekend – of what we think EV should be. also, we weren’t allowed to twitter during the weekend so that’s what that is all about.
[...] from the EV gathering. Read about Moff’s experience here, which offers a great metaphor; and Travis Keller’s post which asks some good questions about feeling at home in the Emergent Village. Possibly related [...]
Seeking a working definition of home…
If home is a place we go to “be oursleves” or relax or rest, then is home just where we are comfortable?
If not, then what is the difference between comfortable and home?
If so, then should we be at home at all or take the comfort out of what we are calling home?
(I am operating this thought on an assumption that comfortable is a place or a thing that Christians aren’t called to be.)
As Makeesha said, we were asked not to Twitter/Facebook during the weekend so that we could be present with the group there. And as one of those who tweeted about returning home – I admit there is a divided world. Part of the relief of home was a return to the creature comforts like my own bed, a decent cup of coffee, and a cushioned place to sit. Simple as that. And given that this weekend was my first time away from my infant son, it was nice to return to family. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t feel “at home” or comfortable with the group there. The process of trusting each other was intense and could not have happened unless we felt utterly comfortable and willing to trust completely in each other. Outside of my husband, I don’t have that with anyone in my geographic region. It took travel and perhaps leaving the normalcy of life to gather with scattered friends to make that happen. Will I ever be friends or able to trust every person in emergent – of course not. But I’ve found relationships there that I can be myself with. And that to me is what it means to belong. You can call it feeling “at home” if you want, and I did feel at home there. But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t divided missing the other home with family. And as nice as it would have been to have my husband be part of the gathering, I would have never been able to be “at home” there if my kids had been with me. And this totally didn’t address the nuances of your post, but it’s what my first reaction was…
Julie said it well.
I think I’m still struggling with your questions/points – I think perhaps your rhetorical style is lost on me (not a bad thing, just admitting the limitation of communicating here).
I don’t think we need to be fully “at home” or conversely, fully “uncomfortable” in a setting to make it good. I have never experienced the level of trust present in that space outside my immediate family – like Julie said, we couldn’t have done what we did if we weren’t comfortable with one another. And how was that level of trust created? I honestly don’t know. Part Spirit, part familiarity, part commitment, part sacrifice. I didn’t even know many of those people before the weekend and most of them I didn’t know outside of the internet and a couple face to face connections over the past few years.
I honestly think that we came to that space with a commitment to the whole – not just commitment to one another as individuals but to the whole that extends world-wide.
I think what we did (which was a sample of the broader community) was an example of the mystery and also the predictability of truly organic, generative, dynamic emergence (and by that I mean emergence in the science/nature sense, not in the purely xian sense). The people in that room were chosen by friends of EV who, with thoughtful prayer, selected their friends and friends of friends. That’s EV.