Sunday, September 11, 2005

Converging Traffic and the Emerging Church—Watch Your Step!

As I was crossing the intersection of Faith and Culture the other day, I narrowly avoided being run over by a truck belonging to the Society for Polysyllabic Advanced Missional Development (SPAMD). The guy walking next to me, however, was not so fortunate. I tried to warn him, but he was so absorbed in whatever he was listening to on his headphones that he didn’t hear me. (It turned out to be a book-on-tape edition of Calvin's Institutes.) At first I thought the truck driver didn’t notice the loud thud produced by the collision. But when I called SPAMD headquarters they advised me it was actually a part of a planned “worship experience” conducted by an “emerging church” that meets at that particular intersection, which it considers its ceremonial cross, and that the guy who got hit simply failed to adequately contextualize his own mission in that cultural setting. I guess now they have their representation of the corpus Christi. I hope the chalk lasts.