Adaptive Re-Use: Using Everything We've Left Behind 

As the modern world changes many old buildings, neighborhoods, and consumer products have become neglected and fallen out of use. What do we do with that old warehouse or the huge cast iron vacuum cleaner? Our neighborhood has been asking this very question. Designers, architects, and other artists are responding to this change by learning such arts as adaptive reuse, found art, folk art, and re-design.

What if we used such categories from architecture/design as metaphors to explore sustainable emergent church practices? What if we met the challenges of underutilized church boundaries, values, practices, and assets asking how they could be re-cylced faithfully into materials for the emerging work of the kingdom of God. Can we avoid the wasteful alternatives of abandonment, demolition, or sprawl? Our breakout group will play by exploring an integrated approach to church through these metaphors touching on overviews of missiology, creation theology, and aesthetics.

Bio:

Troy Bronsink is an artist and a pastor seeking the way of Jesus. He and his wife, Kelley, and daughter, Eve, live in the Capitol View neighborhood of downtown Atlanta, where they work in community organizing and public education. Troy is a Presbyterian USA minister with 10 years of experience in youth ministry and as senior pastor, a worship leadership and singer-songwriter in both the mainline and para-church worlds, co-leader of the Atlanta Emergent Cohort, contributing author to the 2007 Baker Emersion release, “An Emergent Manifesto of Hope,” and an active blogger at churchasart.com