It's official, you are receiving our first update after The Evolving Church: Amidst the Powers conference. To those of you who came out, we trust you had a thought provoking, action initiating kind of day and that your conference conversations spilled over into March 22 and 23 and 24... It was so nice to see you there and since then it's been great to have heard your feedback. Just this week someone emailed us saying they just left their job, explaining, "Your conference played a part in affirming for me the direction God is taking me in!"
Cool.
So what’s Epiphaneia up to and when are we going to announce anything? All in good time our friends. All in good time.
In the meantime, we have linked to many comments/reviews online about the conference, you can view those here.
Finally, a huge thank you goes out to everyone who helped us put the conference on. We especially want to thank Tyndale for supporting us and proving that they aren't simply about putting students through the academic machine; they seriously wanted to help us pull this thing off well, and we're grateful for that.
This site won't be updated anymore until we have the new conference details up, for all future announcements please go to the Epiphaneia website.
We love getting feedback, both positive and negative. It helps us run our conferences better and helps point out things we overlook. Here is some of the positive feedback we've received from Saturday so far. We'll also list all the resources we can find like notes and feedback pictures and video that is posted online, so if you have anything, please send it over to
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Last Saturday, Jared and I had the opportunity to present a workshop at the “The Evolving Church: Amidst the Powers” conference put on by Epiphaneia using the facilities of the Meeting House in Oakville, Ontario. It was great to sit in on very stimulating presentations by scholars such as Walter Wink, Stanley Hauerwas, Marva Dawn and Derek Webb. What was also encouraging was to see the creative genius and capable leadership given to this event by some young FM leaders: Nathan Colquhoun, Joe Manafo and Darryl Silvestri (from theStory, a FMCiC church plant in Sarnia) and Chris Lewis (from Wesley Chapel). - Bishop Keith Elford
Thanks for the time this past weekend. I was truly blessed. I know there were challenges to what you guys did, especially with the age and academic lingo speak of the plenary speakers. But it was worth it. I think what you're doing is important for Canada. Thanks for inviting me to be a part of it. I enjoyed all your friends and met many more. - David Fitch
I feel privileged be a part of the emerging church conference because it can bring together so many interesting and diverse thinkers within Christianity. It is really special to have the capacity to bring all these thinkers together. A big thanks to those who work so hard to organize it for everyone. - Jon Bushy
The content is very academic, I'm used to evangelical preachers. - Anonymous
June Wink, liturgical dance. Seems like it's just doing for themselves, we got into it, we realized there wasn't going to be anything. I felt a connection with the other people. I saw the ad in the guide to try something different or that I disagree with, and this was it. It was surprisingly good. - Amonymous
It seems like the advertising was for a younger generation and we felt nervous coming. I thought I was going to be the oldest guy here. But we weren't the oldest guys here, there was a large diversity of ages and people. - Anonymous
Mark Macdonald was so good to hear. I went to his workshop after reading your witty little list of suggestions, "How not to attend this conference and not leave disappointed" - clever! I appreciated the reminder to choose workshops that were not familiar to me. I know that I lack knowledge about First Nations, especially about First Nations Christians, so I took your advice. I was so grateful for the chance to learn from Mark, who is the least bishop-py person you could imagine. Mille gracie to the volunteers who staffed the info. booth, welcomed us with warm smiles, and did the hundreds of jobs such a gathering requires. You could have just sat and enjoyed the conference as I did but instead you gave us the great gift of your time. The plenary speakers were so clearly expert thinkers in their specialties and it was a joy to listen to faith teaching on a high intellectual level. You may have noticed that this is not always the case in evangelical circles;-) - Donna-Jean
Thank you for the inspirational day - thank you for the affirmation - thank you for the spirit of kinship - thank you for the common vision - thank you for the lighthouse - to see and hear in this modern sea - you need to belong - this is what this conference has done for me - both Marva Dawn and their finale were both the icing on the cake of understanding, hope and promise - thank you. - Jake Bosch
However, I wanted to send a quick note to say thank you to you, and your team, for another GREAT conference! I was able to catch quite a bit of it and was thoroughly appreciative of this opportunity for growth and challenge. What you fellows are doing for the broader church and, thus for the broader community, is so keenly important and valuable. We all need you to do what you are doing!! - Darrell Winger
Registration is closed online. Please show up Saturday the 21st and register at the door if you haven't registered yet, we still have room. If you are a group and haven't registered yet, that is ok, we will still let you in.
If you are interested in following the conference via twitter feed, you can follow that here. Stay tuned for lots of links and resources from the conference when its over and we start collecting it all.
We really couldn't make the following announcement any better than our friends at Knox Presbyterian, so we'll let them say it for us....
"This is the event of the year. Headlining this conference are Stanley Hauerwas, Walter Wink, and Marva Dawn, three of the most insightful and inspiring visionaries in the North American church today. Along with other activists, leaders, and theologians, they will be helping us to explore how we’re being called to participate in God’s coming kingdom of justice and righteousness. Is our faith relevant to what’s happening in the world – to wars and recessions, food and sex, economics and sabbath? Do we even care about justice? Or are we content to huddle in our churches and sing our songs and all that – and then go out into society and act just like everyone else? Are we willing to put our lives in the service of Jesus Christ and take up the struggle against oppressive powers in our world? Will we make a difference? These are questions that matter."
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Remember, a group of 5 or more can register for $79/ person until March 18th. To register click here.
The first deadline for early registration has passed. If you're one of the many who signed up early then congratulations! If you missed the deadline don't worry as there is still a deal out there to be had...
If you would like to register then probably, somewhere in your social network is someone else who shares your similiar interests and hence would also like to register. In that case you'll need to find just 3 more people who want to go and then tada!... you can register at the discounted group rate.
That's $79 for groups of 5 or more.
Any questions? Email us at
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In anticipation of the conference a few of us at Epiphaneia have been reading books by some of the authors who will be speaking. One such author is Stanley Hauerwas and if you haven't read him yet we encourage you to pick up some of his works, including the classic Resident Aliens, co-authored with Will Willimon. Below are two quotes from the book that will probably give you some idea of where he'll be coming from when he speaks at the conference.
"We would like a church that asserts again that God, not nations, rules the world, that the boundaries of God's kingdom transcends those of Caesar and that the main political task of the church is the formation of people who clearly see the cost of discipleship and are willing to pay the price". (48)
"The cross is not a sign of the church's quiet suffering submission to the powers-that-be, but rather the churches revolutionary participation in the victory of Christ over those powers. The cross is not a symbol for general human suffering and oppression. Rather the cross is a sign of what happens when someone takes God's account of reality more seriously than Caesar's. The cross stands as God's (and ours) eternal 'no' to the powers of death as well as God's eternal 'yes' to humanity, God's remarkable determination not to leave us to our own devices. The overriding political task of the church is to be a community of the cross". (47)
Derek Webb will be performing at The Evolving Church: Amidst the Powers. If you don't know who Derek Webb is, now you have the chance to get to know him before March 21, 2009. For those of you who do know him, we trust that you'll want to register immediately. Seriously, what are you waiting for?
You may remember Derek from the band Caedmon's Call but in recent years you may know him as the guy who gave away his politically subversive album "Mockingbird" for free online to 80 000 people. He'll be performing a mini-concert during the day at the conference as well as leading two house show style workshops.
The summer is officially over and after being separated for the whole summer doing all sorts of crazy things, Epiphaneia is back to normal and continues to plan for the upcoming Evolving Church: Amidst the Powers conference, to take place on March 21, 2009 at The Meeting House. We are well on our way with our keynote speakers lined up (Stanley Hauerwas, Marva Dawn and Walter Wink), as well as having an abundance of workshop leaders! We just updated the website with all of the new workshop leaders that are confirmed but make sure to check back often because there are some very interesting people who are on the verge of being confirmed.
Of course, we didn't just want to send you an email to let you know that- instead we wanted to make an announcement: registration is now officially open! You can reserve your seat at the next conference by going to our website. You'll want to know that we have decreased the number of people it will take to get the group rate to just 5 people so make sure you take advantage of that; in fact we encourage it. Finally, we are grateful for your participation in our previous conferences and hope that if you appreciated the last one that you would help us spread the word about the next one. Perhaps the greatest help you could be (besides bringing your entire social network!) would be to go to the The Evolving Church: Amidst the Powers event on facebook and both indicate that you will/ might attend and invite your friends to attend. Hey, thanks for the help.
Grace and Peace,
Chris, Darryl, Nathan and Steve Epiphaneia Network
Hey Evolving Church! We hope you're getting as excited for the conference as we are.
We were reflecting on a response Brian McLaren (Evolving Church, '06) gave a week ago at the 'Why Everything Must Change' conference to a question and thought we'd share it with you. As he was answering he commented on how the Church, as of late, has been great on engaging issues of 'mercy' but has not done so well engaging issues of 'justice.' Mclaren remarked how the Church often talks about justice but what we really mean is mercy. He describes mercy as caring for the hurting and oppressed. In comparison, justice is resisting the forces and powers that oppress people.
To better make his point McLaren quoted Jim Wallis (Evolving Church, '07), as he described a scenario. "Imagine yourself standing near a waterfall enjoying the view and the beauty of God's creation when suddenly you hear a voice crying for help and you see upstream there is someone floating, helpless, towards the waterfall. You and your friends grab a branch and whatever else might help and you go in and pull this person to the shore. As everyone is rejoicing at the disaster that was averted and the life that was saved, you hear another voice in the water; they too are floating helpless towards the waterfall. Once more everyone grabs the branch and links arms, eventually grabing the person and pulling them to shore. Yet a third time you hear another voice and as you look upstream you see person after person bobbing up and down, floating helplessly towards the waterfall." Mercy, as McLaren points out, is pulling these people out of the water. Justice is marching up the river and finding out who is throwing these people in the water and putting a stop to it. The Church is good at doing mercy but not as good at doing justice. We need to continue to do mercy, but it's problematic when when show mercy without justice, thereby enabling powers to continue throwing people into the river.
We'll be grappling with these issues at the Evolving Church: Amidst the Powers. How do we bring justice to the forces in our world that are using their power to oppress not liberate; to bring death not life? How does the Church bring justice to those powers of injustice?
If you have any questions or comments feel free to head over to our Facebook page and post them up on our Wall and generate some discussion about them.
The Evolving Church: Amidst the Powers March 21, 2009 Stanley Hauerwas, Marva Dawn, Walter Wink
