The Emergent Central Valley Cohort is meeting this coming Wednesday, October 22, 7:00 PM at Mark and Brenda Royce's home (1726 El Paso Ave, Clovis 93611). map

We will be watching and talking about the 45 minute video of Bill Hybels interview with U2’s Bono from the Willowcreek 2006 Leadership Summit – good stuff. Feel free to invite people who may resonate with our purpose of providing a safe venue for conversation about robust theological topics.

Please RSVP so we can plan accordingly.

Last, as a special Halloween treat here is a link for Bono’s keynote address at the 54th National Prayer Breakfast February, 2006.
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/bononationalprayerbreakfast.htm

Shalom,
Tom and Bet
t.cotter(at)sbcglobal.net

Central Valley Cohort is meeting Wednesday, September 24, 7:00 PM at Mark and Brenda Royce's home (1726 El Paso Ave, Clovis 93611). map

Please RSVP so we can plan accordingly

Tom Cotter
t(dot)cotter@sbcglobal.net

Central Valley Cohort is meeting Wednesday, August 27, 7:00 PM at Mark and Brenda Royce's home (1726 El Paso Ave, Clovis 93611). map

Please RSVP so we can plan accordingly

Tom Cotter
t(dot)cotter@sbcglobal.net

What does our church offer the community. In our world of church consumerism, who has the best band, best Children's ministry, cleverest preacher, best small groups, best lattes, etc. what is our goal? Lives transformed. How do we do that, the right amount of foam or baddest music? I don't think that is it. Church baristas will not have the skills of the neighborhood barista and may lack the warmth of my barista John as well. Music will be rock but for what.

I was reminded of the goal by Simon Tugwell, "We had thought of God as the dispenser of all good things we could possibly desire; but in a very real sense, God has nothing to offer but himself."
Wow.

Our task as a church is to point, promote, lift up Jesus. If we can be the good news, share the good news, be like Christ, and make communion with Jesus our primary goal then we are doing the right thing. Without Jesus, we are just people with crappy coffee and jammin' music that changed lyrics from sex to God without changing hearts.

May our churches, the communities we build, bring Jesus closer to the world. That can be done without a latte, right?

original post found at lines from a servant

Emergent Central Valley Cohort is meeting Wednesday, July 23, 7:00 PM at Mark and Brenda Royce's home (1726 El Paso Ave, Clovis 93611). map

Please RSVP... so we can tell the clown how many balloon animals he will need to make. Am I kidding? Yes.

Needs:

• Some simple snacks
• Friends of yours who could benefit from the cohort’s purpose of a safe place for robust theological conversations and connection with other of the same mindset
• If you have a topic you are dying to discuss please let me know

Websites: We have a kinda new cohort site and I’ve redone our family website that has lots of resources as well...if you want to take either for a spin. Hope to see you Wednesday.

Shalom,
Tom & Bet
t(dot)cotter(at)sbcglobal(dot)net
www.centralvalleycohort.blogspot.com
www.cotterhome.com

7 pm
July 12
Cornerstone Youth Center
1517 L Street
(it's free too!)

-- Shane Claiborne, Chris Haw, and friends are coming to town July 12 - and it promises to be a phenomenal time of reimagining the Christian 'good news' as we know it.

-- These guys are all about provoking the political imagination, subverting the empire, living in community, taking politics beyond what we think they are capable of, making our own clothes, rethinking the way we understand justice, learning how to create peace creatively, eating locally and organically, running on veggie oil, getting into a Christianity that is more about peace, justice, and living simply than it is about telling smokers and gay people that the kingdom of God does not belong to them, and befriending our enemies while we do it.

-- It's not about how we vote on November 4, but how we live on November 3 and 5.

-- All people of all faiths, or no faith at all, are welcome to join us as we figure out how to be a prophetic voice in this mixed up, muddled up world.

-- Check out www. jesusforpresident. org, and talk to Jessica Mast if you have questions - jlm9@fpu.edu or 559-304-3652.

-- Peace!

Bill Mallonee will be playing a concert at casa de climero in Visalia on July 8 at 7:00 PM (home of Guido and Amy Climer)

Bill played one of the first Leadership Network mega conferences at Mt. Hermon.

Bill is great song writer and this will be small venue, my front living room. So, enjoy the opportunity to hang out with other fans of indie music, emergent thinkers, or people who have no clue why they are in my house.

Anyhow, as they say in the black church experience, "We will have a good time."

Fearless Joy,
Guido

Hello friends!

I stumbled across this trailer the other day and nearly wept for joy.
Jamie Moffett's upcoming documentary takes a look at exploring a peculiar kind of Christianity being born in homes and playgrounds and homeless shelters and gardens across the empire.

Please note the soundtrack, if you're into that kind of thing.
Anybody else get the shivers?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNYgwNYf6Ok

• A missional church is a collection of missional believers acting in concert together in fulfillment of the missio dei
• A missional church is one where people are exploring and rediscovering what it means to be Jesus' sent people as their identity and vocation.
• A missional church is individuals willing and ready to be Christ's people in their own situation and place.
• A missional church knows that they must be a cross-cultural missionary (contextual) people and adopt a missionary stance in relation to their community.
• A missional church will be engaged with the culture (in the world) without being absorbed by the culture (not of the world). They will become intentionally indigenous.
• A missional church understands that God is already present in the culture where it finds itself. Therefore, a missional church doesn't view its purpose as bringing God into the culture or taking individuals out of the culture to a sacred space.
• A missional church is about more than just being contextual, it is also about the nature of the church and how it relates to God.
• A missional church is about being -- being conformed to the image of God.
• A missional church will seek to plant all types of missional communities.
• A missional church is evangelistic and faithfully proclaims the gospel through word and deed. Words alone are not sufficient; how the gospel is embodied in our community and service is as important as what we say.
• A missional church understands the power of the gospel and does not lose confidence in it.
• A missional church will align all their activities around the missio dei -- the mission of God.
• A missional church seeks to put the good of their neighbor over their own.
• A missional church will give integrity, morality, good character and conduct, compassion, love and a resurrection life filled with hope preeminence to give credence to their reasoned verbal witness.
• A missional church practices hospitality by welcoming the stranger into the midst of the community.
• A missional church will see themselves as a community or family on a mission together. There are no "Lone Ranger" Christians in a missional church.
• A missional church will see themselves as representatives of Jesus and will do nothing to dishonor his name.
• # A missional church will be totally reliant on God in all it does. It will move beyond superficial faith to a life of supernatural living.
• A missional church will be desperately dependent on prayer.
• A missional church gathered will be for the purpose of worship, encouragement, supplemental teaching, training, and to seek God's presence and to be realigned with God's missionary purpose.
• A missional church is orthodox in its view of the gospel and scripture, but culturally relevant in its methods and practice so that it can engage the world view of the hearers.
• A missional church will feed deeply on the scriptures throughout the week.
• A missional church will be a community where all members are involved in learning "the way of Jesus." Spiritual development is an expectation.
• A missional church will help people discover and develop their spiritual gifts and will rely on gifted people for ministry instead of talented people.
• A missional church is a healing community where people carry each other's burdens and help restore gently.
• A missional church will requires that its leaders be missiologists.

Source: Friend of Missional

I've been pondering church design for quite some time. There are many models out there to pick and choose from in the buffet of the modern ministry paradigm. I wonder what it would look like to design a church like something alive in our world. This talk by William McDonough (one of my favorite thinkers) is shared in the hopes that some windows of imagination might be opened up in how we think about faith communities and their design.

Buildings Like Trees, Cities Like Forests
By William McDonough
Source
When the architect and theorist Le Corbusier imagined the future of cities from the vantage of the early 20th century, he foresaw a new industrial aesthetic that would free design from the constraints of the natural world. For Le Corbusier, the city was "a human operation directed against nature" and the house was "a machine for living in." He imagined architecture worldwide shaped by a "mass production spirit." The ideal: "One single building for all nations and climates." Le Corbusier's friends dismissed his futuristic ideas. "All this is for the year 2000," they said.

It seems they were right. In many ways, our world is LeCorbusier's world: From Rangoon to Reykjavik one-size-fits-all buildings employ the "engineer's aesthetic" to overcomethe rules of the natural world. As uplifting as that might be for the spirit of LeCorbusier, it is becoming more apparent all the time that buildings conceived as mass-produced machines impoverish cultural diversity and leave their inhabitants cut-off from the wonders and delights of nature.

But what if buildings were alive? What if our homes and workplaces were like trees, living organisms participating productively in their surroundings? Imagine a building, enmeshed in the landscape, that harvests the energy of the sun, sequesters carbon and makes oxygen. Imagine on-site wetlands and botanical gardens recovering nutrients from circulating water. Fresh air, flowering plants, and daylight everywhere. Beauty and comfort for every inhabitant. A roof covered in soil and sedum to absorb the falling rain. Birds nesting and feeding in the building's verdant footprint. In short, a life-support system in harmony with energy flows, human souls, and other living things. Hardly a machine at all.

This is not science fiction. Buildings like trees, though few in number, already exist. So when we survey the future-the prospects for buildings and cities, settled and unsettled lands-we see a new sensibility emerging, one in which inhabiting a place becomes a mindful, delightful participation in landscape. This perspective is both rigorous and poetic. It is built on design principles inspired by nature's laws. It is enacted by immersing oneself in the life of a place to discover the most fitting and beautiful materials and forms. It is a design aesthetic that draws equally on the poetics of science and the poetics of space. We hope it is the design strategy of the future.

The Human Leaf
If one unpacks the compressed verse of Einstein-E=MC2-one finds poetry, beauty, the dynamic structure of the universe. Following Einstein's inimitable lead, we see in E=MC2 a kind of design koan. E is the energy of the sun-physics and planetary motion. M is the mass of the earth-chemistry. When the two interact at the speed of light, biology flourishes and we celebrate its increase-the growth of trees, plants, food, biodiversity and all the cycles of nature that run on the sun. Good growth. And when human systems support ecological health, that's good growth too.

Applied to design, the laws of nature give architects, designers and planners a set of principles that allow them to articulate in form a building's or a town's connection to a particular place. They allow us to create buildings that make the energy of the sun a part of our metabolism and apply it to positive human purpose-the building as "human leaf." The principles, illustrated by the life of a tree, are:

Waste=Food. The processes of each organism in a living system contribute to the health of the whole. A fruit tree's blossoms fall to the ground and decompose into food for other living things. Bacteria and fungi feed on the organic waste of both the tree and the animals that eat its fruit, depositing nutrients in the soil in a form ready for the tree to take up and convert into growth. One organism's waste becomes food for another. Applied to architecture, these cradle-to-cradle nutrient cycles can serve as models for the design of materials and building systems that eliminate the concept of waste. Materials designed for use in cradle-to-cradle cycles, for example, can be either safely returned to the soil or re-utilized as high-quality materials for new products.

Use current solar income. Living things thrive on the energy of the sun. Simply put, a tree manufactures food from sunlight, an elegant, effective system that uses the earth's only perpetual source of energy income. Buildings that tap into solar income-using direct solar energy collection; passive solar processes such as daylighting; and wind power, which is created by thermal flows fueled by sunlight-make productive and profitable use of local energy flows.

Celebrate diversity. "The tree" provides not just one design model but many. Around the world, photosynthesis and nutrient cycling, adapted to locale, yield an astonishing diversity of forms. Bald cypress, desert palm, and Douglas fir suggest a range of niches. The hundreds of tree species within a single acre of Southern Appalachian forest suggest the diversity of a single region. Architects and planners, applying a diversity of design solutions, can create buildings and cities that fit elegantly and effectively into their own niches.

Kinship with All Life
As architects and planners explore these principles-what amounts to a new conception of design-they will become more adept at creating fit and fitting spaces for human habitation. New benchmarks will emerge. Rather than overpowering nature or limiting human impact, good design will affirm the possibility of developing healthy and creatively interactive relationships between human settlements and the natural world

With new benchmarks will come new practices, and a design process that is now rare will, we hope, become the norm. Design teams in many regions would begin with an assessment of the natural systems of a place-its landforms, hydrology, vegetation, and climate. They would tap into natural and cultural history; investigate local energy sources; explore the cycles of sunlight, shade and water; study the vernacular architecture of the region and the lives of local fauna, flowers and grasses.

Combining an understanding of building and energy systems with this emerging "essay of clues," designers would discover appropriate patterns for the development of the landscape. Building materials would be selected with the same care, chosen only after a careful assessment of a variety of characteristics, ranging from their chemistry to the impacts of their use, harvesting and manufacture. We might also expect to see the industry-wide pooling of architectural products as builders begin to create closed-loop recycling systems to effectively manage the flow of materials.

With this emphasis on sustaining and enhancing the qualities of the landscape, architectural and community designs would begin to create beneficial ecological footprints-more habitat, wetlands and clean water, not fewer negative emissions. We would see buildings like trees, alive to their surroundings and inhabitants, and cities like forests, in which nature and design create a living, breathing habitat. Vital threads of landscape would provide connectivity between communities, linking urban forests to downtown neighborhoods to riparian corridors to distant wilds. Cities and towns would be shaped and cultivated by an understanding of their singular evolutionary matrix, a new sense of natural and cultural identity that would grow health, diversity and delight, and set the stage for long-term prosperity.

Changes such as these, many already afoot, signal a hopeful new era. Ultimately, they will lead to ever more places that honor not just human ingenuity but harmony with the exquisite intelligence of nature. And when that becomes the hallmark of good design, we will have left behind the century of the machine and begun to celebrate our kinship with all of life.

Central Valley Cohort is meeting this month on Wednesday, June 25, 7:00 PM at Mark and Brenda Royce's home (1726 El Paso Ave, Clovis 93611). map

Meet others who are exploring what it means to be the Church in our emerging culture. This is a place of refuge for anyone wondering, "Am I the only one who thinks like this?" The answer is, No.

Please contact me for any questions.

Shalom,
Tom Cotter
559-681-8256
t(dot)cotter(at)sbcglobal(dot)net

Upcoming Emergent Events in Central Valley

The Church Basement Roadshow
Speakers: Tony Jones, Doug Pagitt, Mark Scandrette
June 17 at 7pm
University Presbyterian Church - Fresno, CA
Contact: Chris Erdman, erdmanc(at)gmail(dot)com
http://churchbasementroadshow.com/

Jesus for President Tour
Speaker: Shane Claiborne
July 12 at 7pm
Cornerstone Church Youth Center, 1545 Fulton St., Fresno, CA 93721, 559-442-0122
Contact: Jessica Mast, jlm9(at)fpu(dot)edu
559-304-3652
http://www.jesusforpresident.org

Emergent Central Valley Cohort's next meeting is Wednesday, May 28, 7:00 PM at Mark and Brenda Royce's home (1726 El Paso Ave, Clovis 93611). map

Please RSVP to tom(at)sbcglobal(dot)net so we can plan accordingly. Also, let me know if you would like to bring your children and their ages so we can enough wild animals to watch over them :).

Contact me for any questions.

Shalom,
Tom Cotter
559-681-8256
t(dot)cotter(at)sbcglobal(dot)net

Wednesday, April 30, 7:00 PM
Mark and Brenda Royce's home (1726 El Paso Ave, Clovis 93611) map

Please contact Tom Cotter for questions - t(dot)cotter(at)sbcglobal(dot)net

The Central Valley Emergent Cohort will meet Wednesday, March 26 at 7:00 p.m. We are trying a new venue out this time - New Stars Vegetarian Restaurant at Champlain & Perrin (1134 East Champlain Drive, Suite 108, Fresno CA 93720 | map). I have reserved the back party room. I need you to please RSVP to me so that I can let them know how many to prepare for.
You don't need to buy food but it would be nice if you did :). Christi, Allison and I eat there
and the food is reasonably priced and very good.

March Cohort Meeting Plan

-Visit & Order Food/Drinks

-Practice: Lectio Divina
Scripture Reading & Silent Contemplation

-Discussion Questions to Prepare For: (work in progress)
1) If you had 1,000 pounds of tofu popsicles what would you do with them?
(Oops, that ice breaker always pops up. Forget this question.)
2) What are the core beliefs (non-negotiables) that you hold?
3) How have your experiences shaped these?
4) In what ways can we be gracious and learn from those who have a different
set of non-negotiables?
5) Is #4 important? If so, why?
6) What about those tofu popsicles?

Please feel free to suggest changes and new questions.
I'd really like some feedback here.

If you know of anyone that may be interested in this group please send me
their email and I will add them to our list.

Hope you can join us this month!

Tom Cotter
t(dot)cotter(at)sbcglobal(dot)net
www.cotterhome.com

Hi Cohort Friends!

The Central Valley Emergent Cohort will meet on Wednesday, February 27 at 7:00 p.m. Once again we have the back room at Sequoia Brewing Company, 777 E. Olive in the Tower.

Some of our time will be just catching up and meeting any new people, but here's a proposed topic for conversation beyond that:

If you were going to be a part of starting up a new missional/emergent church community in the Central Valley, what would be the most important considerations? Is a focus on a particular sociological or theological niche important, and if so, what niches might interest you? What would you emphasize or de-emphasize? How might you make decisions about things like meeting space, worship style(s), missional aims, structure, etc.? What would the leadership look like or how would it be structured? What are the pros & cons of some sort of denominational or mother-church connection? What would evangelism in a non-attactional, incarnational community look like?

Some of us have already (or are now) involved in starting new communities -- what have you learned from this experience? What would you try to do in a similar way another time? What would you do (or hope would happen differently?

If you know of anyone that may be interested in this group please forward me their email and I will add them to our list. If for any reason you would like to be removed from our email list please let me know.

Hope you can join us on Feb. 27

Shalom,
Tom Cotter & Bet Hannon