about

Welcome to pomomusings. I’m Adam Walker Cleaveland. I was raised in Chehalis, Washington with one sister and both parents. I attended Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington and graduated in 2002 with a BA in Religion. I spent my summers during college working in camping ministry, for two summers at Camp Sawtooth in Sun Valley, Idaho and one summer at Calvin Crest in California. While both camps were incredibly different, I found I had a real love and passion for youth ministry, especially in the camp setting.

After graduating from Whitworth, I took a job as Director of Youth Ministries in a small, rural PC(USA) church in Wendell, Idaho. I knew some of the students from the camp in Idaho and thought it would be a great chance to really try something new. I lived with an amazing family and got to know some really great people during my two years in Idaho. I learned many lessons about ministry (some the hard way), grew a lot and was challenged. Because of my experiences in Idaho, I decided to head to seminary, where I could continue to discern my calling and get a chance to focus some of my academic interests. I applied to Princeton Theological Seminary and started in the fall of 2004.

During the summer prior to seminary, I had the chance to attend a conference in Pasadena because I was a Fund for Theological Education Ministry Fellow, and it was there that I met my wife, Sarah. If you want to read more of our story, check this out. We started dating the spring of 2005 and then we both spent our summers spending our FTE money. I spent the summer in Egypt, Palestine & Israel with the Holy Land Trust; I’ve blogged some about Middle East issues on my blog, but will post a link to my trip blog in the near future.

I spent two years at Princeton Theological Seminary working toward my Dual Degree (M.Div. and MA in Youth Ministry). During my time there I made some wonderful friends and was able to study under some really great professors (including Kenda Creasy Dean, William Stacy Johnson, Mark Taylor, Wentzel van Huyssteen, Deborah van Deusen Hunsinger and others). At the end of my second year, Sarah and I got married and I moved down to Decatur, Georgia to be with Sarah as she finished up her M.Div degree at Columbia Theological Seminary, and to spend a year taking courses at Columbia. Sarah graduated in May, and we moved back to Princeton so I could complete my Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital. I am beginning my last year at Princeton while Sarah does a Th.M. in Theology of the Spirit and Spirituality.

Over the past few years, I’ve found myself more and more involved with the Emergent conversation, and I’m now part of a large team that makes up the Emergent Village Coordinating Group. If you want to know more about what Emergent is all about, check out the Emergent Village website or Wikipedia’s entry on “emerging church.” However, I am also currently in the middle of the ordination process for the Presbyterian Church (USA), so it is quite interesting to think about how I might be able to interact with both Emergent and PC(USA) folk. I started a website called Presbymergent. There are over 204 Contributors and 7 Editors of the site who are starting to create a conversation amongst those who are affiliated with the Presbyterian Church (USA) and involved in the Emergent Conversation.

As to beyond next year - we’re not sure. Sarah is thinking about possibly doing a Ph.D. in Theology of the Spirit, and we’re looking into that. She’s begun studying for the GRE and loving every minute of vocab, sentence completions, analogies and especially the math. I’d be open to a number of job possibilities. Obviously, it will depend on where we end up, but I’m open to doing youth ministry or college ministry, helping to be involved with an Emergent/PC(USA) New Church Development or work as a College Chaplain at a college/university. Of course, working part-time at an Apple store would also be very nice. I started up my own business last summer, cleave design, and so that is going to be a nice supplemental income that I’ll be able to have for a while anyway, as long as the internet stays around…

About pomomusings

As I was driving down an Idaho freeway during the summer of 2003, one of my good friends from college called up and said, “Hey, start up a blog.” I had thought about it before, and he told me, “I signed up with Typepad! Do it - they’re great.” I had never heard of Typepad before, so that night I went home, logged in and signed up for my first blog. Of course, I needed a catchy name. Following the lead of my friend (who had named his blog “PomoHomo” - I thought I’d choose “pomo”-something, because “pomo” was the very cool way of referring to postmodern back in the early 21st century (2003). We actually had recently been talking about Christianity, postmodernism and Emergent stuff, and being the overly-zealous recent college graduates, we decided we’d write a book together on Christianity & Postmodernism. We met at a monastery in Idaho for a weekend and talked about what books we’d read, wrote up a Table of Contents, we were serious. And we were going to use the blog as the basis of our writing for the project.

Well, that lasted all of a few weeks. But nevertheless, pomomusings was born.

This site was very important to me as I began reflecting about my ministry and thoughts on theology while I was living in Idaho. While I had a few friends who I could have those conversations with, the “blog-o-sphere” provided numerous ways of engaging in conversations that were very important to me. Many of those friendships because solidified at conferences where we’d actually meet, face-to-face, and continue the conversations that were started on our blogs.

I’ve come out of a theological background that is pretty consistent with Conservative Evangelicalism. What are some examples of that you might ask? I didn’t know that Catholics were Christian until I got to college…and even then they were still a little questionable. During my senior year of high school, I read “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” and thought it was a pretty good book. The summer I graduated from high school, some friends and I went to Creation Northwest: I think I recommitted my life to Jesus 4x during the festival, and I came home and poured gas over all of my secular CDs and burned them in the driveway (including some amazing albums like, Pearl Jam’s Ten, Metallica’s black album and numerous Live albums).

As you may have noticed by now - this is not where I am anymore theologically. The tagline for this blog is “journeying toward an open & progressive theology.” Amidst all the other things that I write about on this blog (web design, technology, married life, random rants and funny things I come across), I hope to begin to articulate what I think a progressive theology for the 21st century might look like for someone who comes from this background, but sees a greater hope in a more open view of God and the world, and more progressive theological leanings. I hope you feel welcome to enter into that journey with me.

Are we going to agree on everything? Probably not. Will it seem that I’m just trying to “rock the boat” at times? Sure. I like that. I think we need people to “rock the boat” sometimes. But my hope is that we might be ever seeking a theology that respects and honors the history of the Christian heritage, but does not remain stuck in the 16th century. I think we need a more open & progressive theology for our postmodern, pluralistic world. And I don’t think that means it has to be “watered down” - but I think we just need to re-think some of our theological definitions and categories.