{"id":7915,"date":"2004-02-17T23:41:10","date_gmt":"2004-02-17T23:41:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/02\/spirit_garage.html"},"modified":"2004-02-17T23:41:10","modified_gmt":"2004-02-17T23:41:10","slug":"spirit_garage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/02\/spirit_garage.html","title":{"rendered":"Spirit Garage"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the churches profiled in this fascinating NYTimes piece on emergent Christian churches<\/a><\/p>\n

The piece puts the movement in a very interesting context that I’ve not seen before in other articles, but that strikes me as very accurate: a reaction against megachurches.<\/p>\n

Expanding his ministry, Mr. Kimball brought in candles and crosses from garage sales, and began reading long passages from the Bible, inviting people to talk back to him or discuss what the stories meant to them as a group. In contrast to the bright and cheerful big churches, he said, “younger people want it like a dusty cathedral.”<\/p>\n

“They want a sense of mystery and transcendence,” he said. “Anything that sniffs of performance turns them off.”<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I read stories like this, and I try to figure out how the Catholic Church fits into this picture. What is described here are young people who are seeking stability, strength, and, as Kimball says, mystery and transcendence. But they do not seem to be seeking that through means that are easily or initially mediated through institutions that could be identified with human authority (although, being human institutions, that will evolve as the emergent churches evolve because it always does.) And they may want mystery, but they don’t want stuffy or stiffly formal. Obviously:<\/p>\n

At Spirit Garage in Minneapolis, in a small theater, congregants can pick up earplugs at the door in case the Spirit Garage Band is too loud. At Solomon’s Porch across town, a crowd of about 300 takes weekly communion “house party”-style, chatting with plastic cups of wine and pieces of pastry before one announces, “Take and eat the body of Christ.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Don’t have any brilliant conclusions. Too tired. You do it for me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the churches profiled in this fascinating NYTimes piece on emergent Christian churches The piece puts the movement in a very interesting context that I’ve not seen before in other articles, but that strikes me as very accurate: a reaction against megachurches. Expanding his ministry, Mr. Kimball brought in candles and crosses from garage…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nSpirit Garage - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/02\/spirit_garage.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Spirit Garage - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"One of the churches profiled in this fascinating NYTimes piece on emergent Christian churches The piece puts the movement in a very interesting context that I’ve not seen before in other articles, but that strikes me as very accurate: a reaction against megachurches. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7915"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7915\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}