About 18 months after buying the book, I finally finished reading Reimagining Spiritual Formation by Doug Pagitt and the Solomon's Porch Community. It's an interesting look at life at Solomon's Porch, an emergent Christian community in Minneapolis, MN.
The book includes looks at how spiritual formation happens at Solomon's Porch through worship, physicality, dialogue, hospitality, belief, creativity and service. Journal entries by members of the community are combined with segments by Pagitt and others to give some insight into the experimental nature of SP that serve as snapshots of what their community is like.
I think the thing that I appreciated most about the book was the way it steered clear of the "how to" approach to writing about a ministry and focused on the "why to" look for new methods and risk failing in the pursuit of living into the Kingdom call of life together. At no point does anyone say, "All churches should look like this." or even "More churches should look like this." Topics are addressed simply as "this is how we've tried to do this and why, but there may be better methods out there." I appreciated the honesty of failed experiments and the way that success was a shared commodity.
I doubt that if I were in a position to direct the future of a church that I would choose to tap into a lot of the methods of SP, but I would certainly return to this book to be inspired to dream big and risk bigger.
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