You say tomato... on Emerging Church and cross cultural misunderstanding

Among the plethora of e-mails and phone calls I got yesterday, several e-mails and one phone call were from the States. All very cheering. One of these bits of correspondence was directly addressing the fact that the same word can mean two different things depending upon which side of the pond you live on. My correspondent was trying to make some sense of why it is that one or two bloggers in the US keep reading my posts as negative and destructive. (Which, as anyone who knows me will testify, is not the case. I have many faults, but that's not one of them.) Along the way, she said, "here's another thing - I don't know if you know this, but when we say "campus church" we don't mean a university chaplaincy like yours, we mean a Church that has a large property and lots of buildings." I didn't know that. But I do know the difference between pants and trousers...

Anyway, that all got me thinking about Rob and Lilly Lewin, two American friends who are into all things Emerging. Lilly was one of the little crew of US Emergers that joined us at Greenbelt this year, and she and I sat about a good deal getting to know each other. (I would say we were "chewing the fat". But according to Lilly we were "shooting the breeze". That sounds faintly rude to me... ;) )

Anyway, earlier in the summer, having met quite a few UK Emergers, including Gareth and Jonny, Rob began to piece together various bits of conversation re. how the Emerging thing is panning out on either side of the pond. He wrote these up into an excellent and illuminating post . The mood of Emerging seems to be much the same wherever you go. But the cultural differences make its outworking substantially different in Europe and the US. Rob wonders out loud about the differences in political and religious histories, the relative size of US/UK and the density of population, the impact on the Church of the first and second world war, all kinds of things. There is no such thing as an established Church in the States, which alters your whole concept of civic religion, and of parish ministry and mission from a catholic/orthodox view of the world. I spent my coffee break re-visiting Rob's post and musing on it again.

So you could have knocked my socks off when, not two hours later, the phone rings. "Hi, Maggi! It's Lilly here... " Yup, Lilly Lewin herself. I love that woman. How's that for synchronicity?