Emergent – Malaysia?

I once asked Jason Clark, “Who’s the Emergent contact in Malaysia?” and he said (I can imagine the smile on his face), “You Are!” … “Oh! I am? …. ok!”

After an interesting and encouraging conversation with a more senior and also wiser pastor who’s serving and leading a presbyterian church, I suddenly felt the fresh urgency to maybe take steps to be more intentional about this. He even found me in the Emergent Village website whcih needs to update my contact *grin*!

Apparently, there are others like Messy Christian who has some thoughts aboutt the emerging church. I wonder whether there are more in Malaysia

Some of us are already planning to meet up on in a couple of weeks time just to get acquianted face to face better. The four of us has been in email contact, and some of us have been in touch in some other way. The common link humorously speaking is reading Brian McLaren books… 🙂 and the pastor I mentioned above was excited and challenged by the Church on the other side (which I think is a fabulous book and a great !) We’ve been sturggling for some time to try to get a kind of Emergent Malaysia co-hort get jump started :-).

So whatever it’s worth … allow me to try again …and do a JUMP FIRST, FEAR LATER move. If there’s any Malaysians overseas or here locally who’s interested in the kind of conversations about how we can “be”, “do” and “think about” church in our Malaysian context today and also get connected with other voices globally, please contact me..

I don’t really know what to expect … apart from surprises … but deep down my passion and interest is to see these reflective conversations help us in constructive living, ministry and engagement wherever we are – especially in and through the church. We can all start from where we are 🙂

Here are some of my sketchy scribblings and links (or just type emerging or emergent ans search the site *grin*), like all the stuff posted up in this blog … all thoughts and feelings and reflections are not final but as always are works in progress:

We want to go far … together!
In the church, but not of it …
Is emerging only Western?
the new face of global christianity
Emerging Church ~ Thinking from Malaysia
Better late than never

So it’s not about starting another organization …. but it’s about creating “space” for us to take the first step or maybe a second step to where we believe God is leading us in the days ahead … Emergent is about “A Generative Friendship Among Missional Christians Around The World” I like that, and I’ve experienced it personally especially through new relationships through the internet and more so face to face. So, I guess, what we’ll do is what the following paragraph tries to explain …

Emergent is a friendship. Becoming a part of a friendship is a quite different from being part of an organization. It’s more like joining a conversation.

To join a conversation, you need to hang around and get a feeling for what’s been said before you arrived. This involves listening, maybe asking a few questions (doing a little homework) at the sidelines of the main conversation. Then you wait for a good place to contribute to the conversation-with an apt question, an observation, a story, whatever. A friendship is always mutual: you contribute to influence and enrich others, and you listen and learn and are influenced and enriched too.”