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08292 April 16, 2008
Diana Bass to keynote Montreat's preaching conference
by Kim Hayes Director of Marketing Montreat Conference Center
MONTREAT, NC - Diana Butler Bass, author of six books on American religious practice, including Christianity for the Rest of Us and The Practicing Congregation: Imagining a New Old Church, will head the slate of preachers and teachers at this year's "Reclaiming the Text" conference, May 26-30, at Montreat Conference Center.
The conference theme for 2008, "New Life Emerging from Ancient Texts: Breathing New Life Into the Lectionary," will focus on connections between ancient texts and emerging contexts.
"An emergent church is a congregation that is trying to speak to a new set of cultural conditions," Bass said. "It's not any longer assuming that American culture is a Christian culture or a protestant culture. Instead it's trying to speak the old truths of the Gospel in new ways that respond to a post-Christian setting."
Bass says "a quiet revival" is happening in American religion today among moderate and liberal mainstream Christian congregations. "These Christians practice their faith with renewed enthusiasm, are experimenting with new forms of worship and service, and are, by their insistence on friendship, justice, and diversity, reforming the structures and traditions in which they find themselves."
Aligned with neither the religious right nor the religious left, Bass calls the emergent church "a new, generous, practicing sort of postmodern Christianity, a kind of Christianity that is embracing and redefining tradition while enacting justice in the world."
Other conference speakers are the Rev. Brian Blount, president of Union Theological Seminary-Presbyterian School of Christian Education (UTS-PSCE) in Richmond, VA; the Rev. Robert Brawley from McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago; the Rev. Thomas Currie, dean of UTS-PSCE's campus in Charlotte, NC; Jaqueline Lapsley from Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, NJ; the Rev. Jaqui Lewis, a pastor at Middle Collegiate Church, New York, NY; Ched Myers, co-founder and program director of Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries, Oak View, CA; the Rev. Agnes Norfleet, pastor of Shandon Presbyterian Church in Columbia, SC; the Rev. Nora Tubbs Tisdale from Yale Divinity School in New Haven, CT; the Rev. Edna Banes from UTS-PSCE; and Barry Oliver, director of music ministries at Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church, Asheville, NC.
For more information about the conference, visit the Montreat Web site or call 800.572.2257 or 828.669.2911, x339.
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