I spoke about Sanctus1 yesterday at CPAS's emerging church tour, 'the shape of things to come.' I enjoyed being there and sharing the story of Sanctus with a wider group of people. Michael Moynagh and George Lings provided the majority of the input and were excellent.
However, I was slightly concerned that all the input was from white men, and both Michael and George, whilst excellent in this field, are not of my generation but of my parents. What implicit message does this give of the emerging church scene? I have no gripes with with George or Michael but would really appeal to the organisers of these and similiar events to take a few more risks and showcase the emerging theologians and church planters rather than the established 'experts'. Granted, I was there, but only as a 15 minute slot in a 6 hour day...
1 comment:
I heard Steve Hollinghurst talk about this a bit at the GB04 session on women in emerging church leadership, where I thought that the discussion ranged more on to why more women aren't recognised as/ interested in leading emerging churches and therefore weren't invited onto panels, conferences etc as well.
His theory seemed to be (apologies if this is a misquote) that this was more of an issue around women being less likely to get jobs within that emerging church sphere that gave them visibility, status or profile (eg researchers, directors, project managers, professors, etc., rather than church leadership roles/ duties). Their lack of these jobs would mean that they would less often have the required profile to be invited to speak/ contribute at these sorts of conferences. And that that is not an issue that could be summed up as being the result of one factor alone - eg child-bearing/ rearing, academic qualifications, partiarchy, gender-defined ways of working/ being, etc.
So maybe it's less that women, younger men, people from the BME communities, and so on, aren't doing these things (leading emerging churches), but that they don't have the profile (job titles, published books, etc.) for them to be draws to conference/ seminar attendees?
Post a Comment