I had a great last minute opportunity this weekend. I was able to attend a ground-breaking theological conference held at St. Simons Island called a January Adventure in Emerging Christianity. It is the 2nd annual event hosted by a local retired couple that have a desire to spread some theological enlightenment to the theological desert we all know as the bible-belt. The speakers were two of the most well know theologians in our time, Walter Brueggeman and Marcus Borg. Borg's lecture was entitled “Being a Christian in the age of Empire then and now” and Brueggemann's was called "Practicing an Alternative in a Culture of Seduction". The speakers were controversial and inspiring. It is ironic that the previous weekend Jerry Falwell had spoken in Augusta. That extra bit of information added to the feeling that my weekend would be a dramatic change of scenery.

I didn’t know what to expect, but what I found was exactly what I needed. It feel scary walking in all alone, but I knew this would be a big moment in my life. Most of the people had traveled from across the country to hear these speakers. I had imagined that there might even be a group of fundamentalists protesting the event, but everything went very smooth although I was told there were actually a few people that showed up the first night to criticize the event. What I found was a group of nearly 500 people that all shared, for the most part, the same theological views of scripture that have recently entered my life and energized my faith. There were people from just about every possible Christian denomination. I’m not sure how Buzzy and Carolyn (the organizers) put this together for the 2nd year, but they also managed to arrange for us to meet in the beautiful Methodist camp called Epworth at the Sea. There are probably many Methodists buried on St. Simons Island (some very famous) and I think a few were rolling over this weekend.

I met a group of people from Charlotte, NC that had been reading the same books as me in their Sunday school class. Wow, I can’t imagine that! I encouraged them to start a blog so I could participate from a distance and they seemed eager to try it. I also managed to squeeze in a round of golf with a Presbyterian pastor from Atlanta. After the round we had a couple of beers over some seafood and he talked about how his liberal views had brought him opposition in his former church and how he struggled to reconcile what he believed with what he could comfortably speak from his pulpit.

The truth is that until this weekend I’d never had a conversation with a real live person about my theological views. For the last 3 years my conversations have been confined to the Internet or I’ve been limited to reading seminary textbooks alone. I’ve had no one to talk to about it for fear of being told I was going to hell for using my brain and searching for answers outside the traditional views of my own conservative evangelical church. The idea of having “faith like a child” or “blind faith” had left me as a grown man with an immature faith that kept running into walls. After two years of study and about 20 or 30 books later I was feeling really great about my view of God and the bible but very disconnected from community. This weekend I met some great people that helped solidify what I already felt to be true and it gave me hope that I too could find a community of people excited about a realistic believable view of the Bible that focused not on believing bizarre theological doctrines, but instead focused on it’s radical anti-empire narrative.

I will post some more specific insights from the conference later this week. Hopefully a few of my new friends will comment here also.