Evolving Church conference takes a look at money
TORONTO, ON—How do you keep an eternal perspective in the face of immediate financial challenges? This year's incarnation of the Evolving Church conference is titled "Kingdom Economy" and aims to help young Christian leaders put their money where their faith is.
Brennan Manning, William Cavanaugh, Loren Wilkinson and Joyce Rees—who helped found the Jacob's Well ministry in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside—will headline the April 10 event at The Peoples Church in Toronto.
The Evolving Church conference series was founded four years ago Epiphaneia—a group of four friends committed to creating a forum to discuss pressing current issues from a variety of Christian perspectives. Past conference topics have included authority and justice.
One of the four, Stephen Cox, says this year's conference takes a look at "how we as Christians step outside of our culture and live kingdom values when it comes to ordering the priorities of our lives—from long-term investments to practical day to day decisions.
"Maybe as Christians we have things upside down," says Cox, associate pastor of Niagara United Mennonite Church. "[Maybe] God needs to right our priorities in terms of our money."
William Cavanaugh is the author of Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire. Cavanaugh has written extensively about the dichotomy between meaningful worship and consumerist culture. He says most people in today's culture feel disconnected from what they own.
"I think we're too detached from our stuff," he says. "We've been trained by marketing not to be content with what we have and view everything as replaceable and dispensable. We're taught to relativize our attachment to things, people and places."
Cavanaugh, a professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, says current economic instabilities were caused by a "deeply fantastical" sense that many people had about the economy, including banking on unrealistic growth in the housing market.
"The Christian answer to that is not becoming attached to our stuff either," he says, "but to foster a certain type of detachment which brings us a deeper and healthy attachment closer to God and to other people."
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