Re:Gen - Copenhagen

My host, Thomas Willer, collected me at the airport and we dropped off my bags at the convent/hospital where I'm staying for my first two nights in Scandinavia. He and I then joined three of his church-planting colleagues for lunch at The Laundromat Cafe, owned, they tell me, by some Icelanders. Over lunch, we talked of church planting, differences between the U.S., the U.K., and Scandinavia, and the strange marriage in their church plant of Baptist, emergent, and charismatic sensibilities. We also had a fairly in-depth theological/philosophical discussion on human ontology, in which they said, basically, a human being is more than what s/he does and I argued the opposite. (Don't read too much into that -- there was some devil's advocacy going on.)

We then walked to the loft bar/cafe where their church, Re:Gen, meets on Sundays at 3pm. After about an hour of set-up, the folks started to flow in -- mostly university students and people in their 20s. Worship went almost 2 hours, with some music, lots of discussion, and a coffee break in the middle (which I think is a fantastic idea!). My friend, Simon Willer, who visited Minnesota last summer, led the sermon/discussion time on materialism and tied it in with a Lenten practice.

After worship, I was taken to dinner by Ivan, lovingly known as "The Godfather" at Re:Gen. A long-time Baptist children's pastor, Ivan now works at a Catholic preschool and volunteers his time with Re:Gen. His children are grown, and one of his boys joined us at dinner, along with another friend. We had a great dinner with lots of laughs, talk of the Bush Administration (uniformly despised in every country I visit) and global economics. My big question here is: Can liberal socialism compete in the global economy as emergent free markets (like India, and maybe someday, China) embrace liberal democracy...