Spencer Burke, a former evangelical mega-church teaching pastor, is a dear friend and colleague. (You know someone’s a close friend when you can arrive at their house at midnight and leave by 6am to catch a plane, and they still have time to chat with you while their family is fast asleep, as happened just a few months ago.) Spencer was part of a men’s group I started in the fall of 2006, made up of a dozen amazing spiritual evolutionaries around the world who met via conference call once a month for a year.

As Spencer mentions during our call, he and I were together in Hawaii at the 2007 International Conference on the Evolution of Religion, where I was a keynote speaker. Later that same year we spent time together in the Bahamas, at an event Spencer organized  Soularize” (which is also where I first met Richard Rohr).

If you’re not familiar with Spencer and his ministry…

Spencer Burke continually integrates his passion for the Church, arts, culture and technology, sparking new thought and conversation in his audiences and clients. Whether speaking to 10,000 or dialoguing with 10, he encourages people to view their business, ministry and relationships in new ways, leaving them ablaze with the possibilities. Humorous, inspirational and surprising are words people use to describe his story-telling speaking style. Groups respond to Spencer’s pastoral heart and futurist thinking. In these times of hope and challenge, he brings a voice tempered by a wide background of learning and experience, and integrates the latest trends and technology.

For the past 10+ years, Spencer has been at the forefront of the emerging Church movement, including creating and maintaining TheOOZE.com – one of the earliest expressions of this transition in the Church. TheOOZE.com has become one of the largest relational networks where people of all Christian traditions interact in a web-based community (numbering over 150,000 users a month from over 90 different countries). He also hosts an offline gathering – a learning party called Soularize – which offers participants a safe place to experience and explore the emerging trends in theology, Church, the arts and faith.

Spencer is the author of three books: Making Sense of Church, establishes new metaphors to help define the future trajectory of the Church; Out of TheOOZE, chronicles the spiritual awakenings of members from TheOOZE.com in their own words – using articles from the site – with Spencer’s commentary; A Heretic’s Guide to Eternity, ground breaking and controversial book that explores grace and salvation beyond the confines of religion. His personal website is: http://spencerburke.com/

When I receive the transcript in a few days, I’ll post my favorite quotes of Spencer’s, and the resources we discussed.

Here’s the two quotes I shared…

“The main task of the immediate future is to assist in the intercommunion of all living and nonliving beings in the emerging ecological age of Earth’s development.  What is most needed to accomplish this task is the great art of intimacy and distance: the capacity of beings (and traditions) to be totally present to each other while further affirming and enhancing the differences and identities of each.”  — Thomas Berry

“It was not those closest to the historical Jesus who first gave the gospel its geographical breadth and theological depth.  It was Paul, who had never known him.  In addition to that, impressive achievements in biblical scholarship have, in many ways, brought our era closer to the constituent events of the Christian movement than were, say, the Gentile Christians of the second century.  If the life and death of Jesus is historically central, then people living ten thousand years from now will be in a better position to appreciate that than we are.  Furthermore, when they look back they will surely think of us as ‘early Christians’ – living as we do a scant two millennia from the mysterious events in question.  They will be right, for the Christian movement today is still in the elementary stages of working out for itself and for the world the implications of the gospel.  There isn’t the slightest doubt that the greatest and boldest credal assertions are in the future, not the past.  It may be only at rare moments that this flawed and unlikely thing we call the ‘church’ even remotely resembles something worthy of its calling, but it is nonetheless embarked on a great Christological adventure.  Even against its own institutional resistances, it is continually finding deeper and more inspiring implications to the Jesus-event.”  — Gil Bailie