Wednesday’s New York Times featured an article on emerging churches. This picture is from the accompanying slide show and is of Doug Pagitt, lead pastor at Solomon’s Porch in Minneapolis and author of Reimagining Spiritual Formation. I’ll be writing a lot more about that book (I just finished my first reading of it and have a lot of thoughts to unpack) in the near future.

The picture is of Doug teaching on what appears to be a normal Sunday gathering at SP. Their worship space is flat (no raised platform) and in the round. Instead of having a microphone for He Who Is Speaking (creating distance/separation between the speaker and the community), SP has a series of microphones hanging from the ceiling all around the room. This also means that the rest of the community is as mic’ed up as the pastor, which is essential for SP’s discussion time at the end of each message.