Stations - Friday, April 7 [community dinner and alt worship]

On Friday, April 7 Peacemeal, an emerging missional community in Scranton, will be offering a free community dinner and alt worship at St. Luke's Episcopal Church in downtown Scranton (on Wyoming Avenue between St. Peter's Cathedral and the Steamtown Mall).

St. Luke's has graciously allowed us to turn their parish hall into a food & worship space for the evening. We are inviting everyone in the community to come join us. The dinner will run from 5:30 to 6:30 with worship from 7:00-8:30. You may come to one or both parts of the evening. Our intent with the dinner is to combine the traditional church supper (where we gather family and friends for fellowship and conversation) with a meal for the homeless of Scranton. We are seeking to live into our name and explore ways of being/hosting/creating Peacemeal.

This will be the Friday before Holy Week, so in preparation for walking with Jesus in his final days, we will be experiencing "stations of the cross" within a creative, alternative liturgy. Our goal is to to explore what some are calling "ancient-future" worship--blending the best traditions of the past with music, media, and ambience that speak to postmodern culture. We hope you will come, bring a friend, and experience Christ's gift to us in a fresh and compelling way.

If you are interested in volunteering to help with the meal or the worship gathering please contact Scott (badersayes2@scranton.edu) or Josh (iamjoshfrank@gmail.com).

|peacemeal, stations of the cross, alternative worship|

Now Listed on Emergent

We're thrilled to announce that we have been added to the Emergent-US list of cohorts! Our addition was announced through Emergent Village's mass e-mail update called Emergent/C. The word is getting out, and I am excited about more people getting connected in the Scranton/NEPA area. Please keep checking in (or better yet, add our syndication/RSS/XML/Atom feed to your feed reader and be updated automatically whenever we post!) as we are making plans for our first conversation. We are planning to have one during this season of Lent, most likely at Cafe Aroma on Mulberry in Scranton, right across the street from the University of Scranton.

Also on the list of new cohorts, I was pleased to find that there is one now listed in the Lehigh Valley! I have added them to our list of Regional Cohorts in the sidebar. They are working on their first gathering for conversation, and are hoping to plan it around Brian McLaren's free talk at Moravian Seminary on April 21, 2006. Jillian and I have signed up to go to the morning/early afternoon lecture as has Scott or Demery (one of them has to be with the kids). I'm hoping that now we'll also be able to meet the people putting together the LeHigh Valley cohort.

Technorati Tags: cohort, emergent, emerging church, Brian McLaren, Moravian Seminary, scranton, NEPA, Lehigh Valley

Getting Started

Inspired by conversations between just a few people in the Scranton area, we are excited to announce the formation of an Emergent Cohort for the Northeast Pennsylvania area!

What is a Cohort? It is a local/regional learning community concerned with the state of the Church in today's world and is interested in gathering people together from various backgrounds to explore and discuss emerging forms of the Church. From the Emergent website:

• While being a place of connection and support, an Emergent learning community (cohort) is primarily a place of communal exploration, theological and professional reflection, honest connection, and strategic collaboration. These learning communities are geared toward post-critical, constructive conversation, rather than deconstructive rants about the current state of the Church.

Why Emergent? Emergent is a grassroots, national, collective effort to bring into contact people who are interested in exploring, belonging, and communicating with one another while sharing resources, all in an effort to participate in furthering God's Kingdom in our present world. From the Emergent website:

• Emergent is a growing generative friendship among missional Christian leaders seeking to love our world in the Spirit of Jesus Christ.
  
  Our dream is to join in the activity of God in the world wherever we are able, so that God’s dreams for our world come true. In the process, the world can be healed and changed, and so can we.
  
  In English, the word “emergent” is normally an adjective meaning coming into view, arising from, occurring unexpectedly, requiring immediate action (hence its relation to “emergency”), characterized by evolutionary emergence, or crossing a boundary (as between water and air). All of these meanings resonate with the spirit and vision of emergent. In other languages, names for regional networks will be chosen with similarly evocative meanings.

Announcements of our first conversation will be made soon. In the meantime, subscribe to our RSS/Atom/XML feed to stay informed of updates. Contact us, leave comments, and let the discussion in the Scranton area begin!

Technorati Tags: emergent, emerging church, cohort, scranton, nepa