e~mergent kiwi

the context of storytelling

Stories are the stuff of human experience. Yet all stories have a context.

Tell us a story. Tell us about your church. Blog reading. Book reading.

All these questions and activities require some sort of ability to understand both story and the context in which it emerges. When you hear my story (read this blog, ask me a question) to truly understand, you need to be able to place story within context. You also need to be aware that in reading and asking, you are bringing your assumptions about life and church and emerging church and life to the table.

The emerging church suffers from this. People make photocopies rather than re-contextualise the contextualisation. The emerging church seems (IMHO) to be a shared conversation among people, groups and churches, about life and faith in a changing contemporary context. But it is so easy to objectify the stories and to read the conversation as monolithic, as "this is the emerging church." In doing so, the stories have been stripped of context. They are then in danger of commodification, as books, websites, podcasts etc.

This week I have been a a storyteller in a new context. This has focused for me what has been a recurring question; Does this task of contextualisation belong to the reader/listener or to the communicator? Are there ways to tell stories, or frame stories, that allow context to be laid alongside story?

this quote goes out to my auckland church and society class

Engage with communities and the new generation of consumers or risk losing market share. Full BBC article here.

consume the body

jez commented "the biggest pity is that Borders is such a bad model if you're concerned about justice, muliplicity and diversity or the local and the specific. I won't bleat on about Borders' purchasing policies nor about the impact of Borders on small business and local community but whatever Borders might be it is hardly the kind of organic, local, just community i'm looking for to nourish my spirit"

We all consume. We can't live without consumption. Some then become aware of the impact of their consuming on the third world, on the local, on the diverse. But we are all still enmeshed in a web of consumption. We need a third way, a theology of consumer resistance.

We need the 10 commandments of a healthy consumption
consume no logo
consume fair trade
consume adbusters
consume organic
consume no meat
consume shade coffee
consume 5 loaves, 2 fish and have 12 bags of waste
consume the body of Christ ...

stone in my shoe

One of the big arguments of my PhD, and of the book I am working on for emergentYS, is that people "make do"; that in the face of cultural change, people are creative, transformative, adapting the bits from the world around them to create their own unique mixes. It is based on the work of French Jesuit Michel de Certeau.

The only flaw in the argument is this article on the disappearance of languages from around the world, via they blinked

How many languages have disappeared in the last century? About 60 or 70 per cent of linguistic diversity in the north-western region of Brazil has gone in the last 100 years. On the Atlantic coast of Brazil it's worse - about 99 per cent - and around the world the figure is 60 to 70 per cent. It has been very rapid.

Being brought up in Papua New Guinea, a country of over 600 languages, the loss of even one language saddens me.