The Emerging Christian Way

Session One:Group responses to the question,
How I have experienced the (ECW) emerging christian way in my life?

- as my life evolves, I celebrate that I did not have to conform as I had in the past. I experienced a new consciousness of freedom and awareness.

- the new messages I was receiving for myself were simple, trustworthy, meaningful, spiritual. They were working for me.

- I realized that what I began to claim was not new, but in a sense cyclical in nature. I could return to something important in my life, but in a new way.

- What I discerned was Good News within my own (United Church). For a long time the church I love has been maligned and strongly criticized by others. I had developed a lot of bad feelings from all this. Now I am beginning to develop a new sense of pride in my church and being part of it.

- I discovered that things that were no longer making sense to me could be discarded. We all love and need prescriptions for living, but I learned I could move past what had been holding me back and focus on what was good and freeing for me.

- this meant moving beyond the orthodoxies of the past, toward a radical, new awareness. I could go beyond a lock step belief mentality to one more adequate, experiential and open to the future.

- While definitions are elusive, I began developing a more positive tone to my faith. There were fewer dont's and more do's. I no longer needed specific and neat answers because I felt I was walking the right path.

- in these new circumstances, I realized I was more open to God's surprizes. I found resilience, flexibiility and hope.

- I now know that, over the course of a lifetime, I have had different experiences and understandings of faith - depending on the time, stage and circumstances. I feel that I am where I should be now.

- I realized that turmoil and confusion need not be a dead end.

The Emerging Christian Way has been something that has evolved and is shaped through difficult faith challenges and we now claim it for ourselves! And if as Matthew Arnold observes the tide goes out, then do remember, it comes back again.

- September 18th, 2006

Dover Beach

by Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; -on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

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Dover Beach

by Matthew Arnold

[1867]