Your post is very well timed. I don’t know if I’m quite as scared and pressured as your sketch here, but I have definitely been effected by the constant buzz of financial crisis. (Especially the fear of not having a marketable skill to fall back on).

One of my spiritual disciplines is to spend more time with missional church pastors than denominational administrators and church-planting leadership. The pragmatism from the latter is sometimes helpful, but must be taken in very small doses lest it feed the temptations you discuss here.

Thanks for your words of wisdom.

p.s. I’m wondering if you ever responded to my question about Scot McKnight’s desire to start some new kind of post-emergent (I couldn’t resist) network of evangelically minded emergent types? Are you in conversation with Scot about this? Is anything coming of it? How has your work with LotV at developing an evangelism tool come along? I’d love to see the fruit of those conversations.

Anicius

Thank you for voicing some of the questions that have been going through my head in these last months. I especially appreciate that you pose this as a spiritual rather than just economic problem. I have been working at staying grounded amidst the anxiety, and it requires intentionality and discipline, a lot of deep breaths and the will to give up the illusion that I have any control over these matters. Thanks for sharing your struggle and your prescription.

However, by the sounds of it, you’re community might be full of pastors, they may not call themselves that or be on staff, but it sounds like they are certainly doing pastoral duties…

you as one person can only do so much, and pastor so many people.

This is what I’m trying to do.

Build economically viable communities where costs of living go down through things like free-cycling and sharing meals, child care together.

Its tough, but I really think it holds a lot of power to help things like this last.