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Conference Focuses on Emergent Movement

SEATTLE, WA (February 26, 2008) – Four Covenanters are among the speakers and workshop leaders scheduled to participate in the New Conspirators Conference to take place Thursday through Saturday.

The conference will bring together for the first time what organizers say are the four streams of the emergent movement.

Participating will be David Olson, director of church planting with the Department of Church Growth and Evangelism of the Evangelical Covenant Church; Eugene Cho, pastor of Quest Covenant Church in Seattle; Tim Morey, pastor of Life Covenant Church in Torrance, California; and Efrem Smith, pastor of Sanctuary Covenant Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

In addition to serving as lead pastor of Life Covenant, Morey is adjunct professor teaching practical theology at Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, California. He will speak on “Planting Missional Churches: Reproducing Local Outposts of the Kingdom.”

Smith is one of the plenary speakers and will address the “Post-Black/Post-White Church,” sharing how congregations can move to becoming multicultural.

Cho will speak on the ministry of Quest, which also operates Q Café, a local coffeehouse. Olson will address issues raised by his new book, The American Church in Crisis.

The conference draws its title from a new book by Tom Sine called The New Conspirators. In the book, Sine offers general delineations of the streams in a movement for which the river’s boundaries remain largely undefined. Sine lists the four streams as emerging, missional, mosaic, and monastic.

The emerging stream began in the late 1980s and early 1990s with young grassroots church leaders who considered themselves post-evangelical, with a passion to re-address questions some Christians had considered long settled. They also have focused on narrative theology as well as the recovery of mystery and wonder in worship.

The missional stream is more intentionally outward focused, with innovation coming from the more established denominations and the academy, such as North Park University professor Scot McKnight.

The mosaic stream stresses the planting of intentionally multicultural congregations.

The monastic movement largely involves people with backgrounds in evangelicalism who have decided to live in small communities and draw from various monastic traditions.

For more information, visit the conference website.

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