When I was in junior high there were about six or seven categories of music. There was rock, pop, country, soul, jazz and orchestra. I’m sure I’m missing a few but the point is that the large portion of music was in neat little categories. And then in the 80’s rap and punk began to emerge. And then Run DMC covered Walk this Way by Aerosmith. I remember the first time I heard this song. I was completely blown away by the idea of covering a song in this way. Someone had the audacity to cross over. It felt strange and weird, and wrong in so many ways but right in so many new ways. People were asking, “Can you do that?” And with that…the cross over was born.
In the 90’s musicians began to experiment with cross over in a huge way. There was country-pop, rap-rock, jazz fusion, house, trip-hop, grunge. The lines between categories began to seriously blur and new music was born. You name the category and someone had mashed it up with some other type of music. I remember the first time I heard Linkin Park, which wasn’t new but musically was so fresh. I loved it. NuMetal didn’t exist even a decade ago. And this blending of music produced some incredibly creative expressions of music. Not all of it was good, but a lot of it was.
Well then I read the Tall Skinny Kiwi post, and he says,
“i am in london. staying the night on jonny baker’s couch. again. the ‘small missional communities’ conference went well in northampton and it was great to see the various streams (cell church, base ecclesial communities, savlos, emerging church, anglican cell, post-YWAM, etc) come together. came home with jonny, which is why i am here.”
His description of the various group, all of which are emerging expression, caught my attention. Post-YWAM? Then I started thinking about presbymergent, submergent, anglimergent, Luthermergent, Reformergent and so on. And I realize that we’re experiencing the mash up of Christianity. We’re experimenting with new expressions that can feel strange at the same time bringing something new that we’ve never seen before. And for some this must feel so strange. What are they doing? Can they do that?
I like it.
Missio Dei 