May Chin was telling me how the word “emerging” suddenly popped out more and more in the news lately. I found it amusing because when I use the words “emerging”, “emergent” and “emergence” they draw out quite interesting and even contrasting responses – some connect it with how the early church was emerging, others may see another “trend” lurking or equate it with a phase, one or two might not know what to do with it. At times, it can be frustrating but I guess it’s important to allow “new” & “unfamiliar” words to get our lazy brains sending more signals (i.e. thinking) and I think it’s also important to look at “old” & “familiar” words like “Evangelism” (which I’ll be doing later at 5pm with a bunch of university students) and recapture is lost essence. Mental pictures always helps … like this section from the chapter “Why am I Emergent” in A Generous Orthodoxy (p. 276)
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Also about this time Steven Johnson’s bestselling Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software was published. The book explored how a community (of ants, of slime mold spores, of city dwellers) can be smarter than its consituents, how new levels of intelligience emerge from the interaction of lesser intelligiences:
Emergence is what happens when the whole is smarter than the sum of its partts. It’s what happens when you have a system of relatively simple-minded component parts — often there are thousands or millions of them — and they interact in relatively simple ways. and yet somehow out of all this intercation some higher-level structure or intelligience appears, usually without any master planner calling the shots. These kinds of systems tend to evolve from the ground up.
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You will have to really keep up with your explanations, because I still have trouble grasping how it should be applied in BLC- Not that I think it has no place, but aren’t we already ’emergent’ within the wider context?
Yes, it may be a sign of a lazy brain- I do want to understand better. You will have to be very clear and patient with me…
My comment was very much in the same direction. What do the words ’emerging’ and ’emergent’ mean in that context?