• Archive of "postmodernity" Category

    Equippers as Environmentalists

    February 20, 2009 // No Comments »

    My friend JR (great name right?!) Woodward has recently finished up a series of blog posts on “Equippers as Environmentalists: Re-Imagining Leadership in Today’s Western Church.”  I have been following it all along and sharing each post thought my shared feeds so I hope other have been catching it.  In case you haven’t, he has provided a summary post with an outline of each individual post.

    His thesis is that

    …if the church is to faithfully rebirth herself in the Western context and cultivate a fruitful missional ethos, she must awaken the five equippers to live as environmentalists instead of master programmers.

    As one vitally concerned about the state and future of the Western church as we experience the move from Modernity to Postmodernity and Christendom to Post-Christendom, I am despearte for us to embrace this season of cultural transition as an opportunity to reconsider and rediscover the nature of the church, which is precisely what JR sets out to do.  Leadership, of course, is a major piece of that puzzle and JR has some great stuff to say on the topic.  Hope you’ll head over there and give it a read.  He is also planning on posting it in pdf form soon in his writings page.

    Posted in church, leadership, missional, modernity, postmodernity, western culture

    The Probem of Church Shopping

    December 10, 2008 // 11 Comments »

    Church shopping is an unfortunate reality of our time.  Made possible by a Church divided and disunited, and complicated by a culture of hyper-individualism and hyper-consumerism, we tend to form our ecclesiologies around what will attract those who are looking for a church home.

    We’ll put aside for a second the fact that those who are far from Jesus are the least likely to shop for a church so that I can ask your opinion on a question I have been wrestling with.

    It can be argued that Christians, at least those of the evangelical persuasion and who have been shaped by modernity, shop for churches based on whether or not they “preach the gospel,” or “believe the Bible.”  Therefore, these churches get evaluated based on peoples experience of attending a handful of worship services.

    Conversely, younger Christians, who are more shaped by postmodernity are more inclined to shop for a church based on whether or not it is actually attempting to live out the gospel and seeking to enter the story of Scripture.  The only way to evaluate a church using these criteria is to actually enter into community – to get to know, have conversations, and share life with the people who make up the community.

    To me, it seems that this is not a good postmodern strategy, but is actually more in keeping with biblical faithfulness of what it means to be the church- that we want to attract people to how we live and not what we say. Some would say, “We need modern churches to reach modern people and postmodern churches to reach postmodern people.”  It seems to me that this runs the risk of taking our cues from culture rather than from the gospel.  Incarnation, in my estimation, is not an attempt to play by the rules of culture, but to enter into culture and subvert it with the ways of Jesus.  Ok, please, your thoughts.

    Posted in christendom, church, modernity, postmodernity

    Emerging From What?

    August 1, 2007 // 7 Comments »

    I have been going crazy trying to figure out how to write a post in response to all the great conversation that was going on in the comments of this last post. Thanks Josh and Andy for having such a thoughtful and even-handed discussion. I was going crazy because I was trying to figure out how to do too much in a single post. Instead, I’ll try to break it up into a few smaller ones.

    Regarding the Emerging Church, Josh asked in his first comment, “Emerging from what?”

    I would say that the most helpful part of the Emerging Church discussion/movement sees itself as emerging from the shackles of modernity. There are people and communities popping up all over the place who are being awakened to the effects that the Enlightenment, and more broadly, modernity, have had on the church. One of the most influential features of Western modernity was Christendom – a societal state in which the identity of a nation is intertwined with the identity of the Christian church. As our culture in the United States becomes increasingly post-modern and moves toward post-christendom, we are being given an opportunity to reflect on whether or not the church’s adoption of this state of affairs has been a good thing.

    I know people in the emerging church movement for whom seemingly impassable dichotomies are being removed and replaced with profoundly liberating ways of thinking and living. Others are finding places of healing and redemption after being wounded by churches which made them feel inferior because either they didn’t conform or because their giftedness wasn’t valued (I am thinking here primarily of artisans). Many more have had a deep longing for more authentic and committed forms of community and they are discovering that in these sorts of churches. Still others had no tolerance for a form of faith that seemed to make no real difference in the way people actually lived their lives. In emerging churches, this is seldom the case. In fact, one of the ways emerging churches are defined is, “communities that practice the way of Jesus.”
    A final thing that I hope we are emerging from is colonialism. This is something Brian McLaren (someone I have sat and shared meals with and have a profound respect for – sorry Andy) addresses in a recent article. For hundreds of years we in the West have taken not just the gospel to other countries, but we have taken our imperialistic ideology with it. People were compelled not just to become Christians, but to increasingly become just like Western Christians. We sought to offer people freedom in Christ, but wound up enslaving them to a distorted version of the Christian faith. Make no mistake, it is not coincidence that the people of Rwanda, whose almost entire population had converted to (Western Christianity), could kill each other by the hundreds of thousands.

    Perhaps the single greatest feature of what Brian prefers to call “The Church Emerging,” is a state of humility in the face of what the church in the West has done and become.

    Not everything that is happening in the emerging church movement or being said in the emerging church discussion is perfect or even helpful for that matter. I am happy to be the first to confess it. But then again, it’s emerging church folks who usually are ;)

    Posted in christendom, church, colonialism, community, culture, emerging church, modernity, postmodernity, western culture

    The Theology of Linkin Park

    July 19, 2007 // 3 Comments »

    I don’t know a ton about Linkin Park, but they are a band whose name keeps coming up in various spheres of my life.  I know my brother Adam is a fan and the other day my friend JR (that’s right, “there are 2 of them,” [SB]!) was showing me one of their videos on his oh so glorious new iphone.  I provide the video for your viewing pleasure.  And you can read the lyrics here.

    I hardly know where to begin in terms of making spiritual and theological connections between the sentiment of this song and the message of the gospel.

    Posted in culture, postmodernity, songs, theology, video, youth ministry

    Jesus and (Social) Justice

    June 14, 2007 // 3 Comments »

    2 things compel me to take a stab at a post bearing this title.

    First, the other day I was listening to a message being given by a Bible teacher that I have a tremendous amount of respect for. He was seeking to share with his congregation a version of the gospel which weds the ideas of salvation and what we often refer to as social justice – things like ensuring people have access to clean drinking water, fighting the war on aids, and addressing local and international poverty. He was talking about the unfortunate reality that the church in large measure has abdicated responsibility for caring about issues like this in favor of a gnostic version (my expression not his, but the point is the same) of the gospel whereby salvation has primarily to do with where I go when I die. He talked about the way in which Christians often stop at writing checks to organizations which address issues like those mentioned above and he asks, “Why do those groups get to have all the fun?” The message seemed to be that it is these organizations and not the church who are doing the true work of God in the world. In one way I am inclined to side with this point, but in another way I don’t think he said enough.

    Second, I was reading a chapter in Kevin J. Vanhoozer’s latest book, Everyday Theology: How to Read Cultural Texts and Interpret Trends this morning which addressed “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” an ideology endorsed by the United Nations regarding things like the freedom and equality of all persons, everyone’s right to things like life, liberty, their own security, and protection against discrimination. David G. Thompson, the author of this particular chapter, goes on to note criticisms of this declaration from conservative Islamic people who “dispute the very idea of humans holding autonomous rights as contrary to Allah’s absolute authority,” postmodernists who see it as an act of “Western intellectual hegemony,” and East Asians who hold to more “communitarian values.” (108) The author then goes on to say, “Despite the UDHR greatly furthering its laudable goals of protecting the oppressed and unmasking their oppressors, the document fails to substantiate what it claims; we are not told why humans have the rights the document ascribes to them.” (108)

    In response to both the message mentioned above and David’s question just noted I want to say — The why really, really matters!

    I recognize and applaud, as I hope any follower of Jesus would, the efforts of any organization striving to meet peoples basic needs, free them from oppression, and fight things like hunger, poverty, and disease. I think it’s wonderful that countries would come together from all over the world and affirm in one voice that people cannot be treated like garbage or discriminated against. To me, things like this reassure me that God is still active in the world and that conscious or not, people still recognize that there is such a thing as right and wrong, good and evil.

    But…

    These things are not ends in and of themselves. For the Christian, these things find their end in their glorification of God in Jesus. They attain their true significance when they are understood as God’s actions (not mankind’s) in the world meant to display God’s mission of the healing, reconciliation, and restoration of all things. If we fight the war on poverty and actually get to the point where everyone’s basic needs are met, but don’t recognize and repent of the sin which got us there in the first place, that battle has not truly been won. In fact, we’re probably much worse off as we will be inclined to see ourselves as the source of all that is good and right.

    People do not posses rights because of their intrinsic worth, which is all the UN can ever say. Rather, people are valuable because they are made in the image of their creator, something only the Church can say. Justice (social and otherwise) ought to be manifest in the world not because people deserve it, which is the basic stance of secular organizations. Instead, justice ought to define our existence because a just God desires it for his creation, something only the Church can say and witness to.

    It’s not that the Church needs to take back causes of social justice – it’s that the Church needs to recapture a vision of salvation which entails the advancement of God’s justice in the world.

    It’s not that the Church needs to advocate for human rights – it’s that the Church needs to answer the why question regarding the value of humanity.

    Everything Jesus was, did, and is has to do with God’s justice in the world (by the way, we fool ourselves when we think that there’s a difference between personal and social justice – it’s one of the many false dichotomies of modernity, but that’s another post altogether).

    To embody and do justice in the name of Jesus is the unique calling of the Church in and to the world.

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    Posted in church, Jesus, justice, postmodernity, preaching/teaching, western culture

    The MOVE: The Journey from Attractional to Missional

    June 7, 2007 // 4 Comments »

    At the risk of confusing those who associate “The Move” with my friend Babs’ dancing talents…

    I actually feel like offering a thought or two on a different kind of move – the one from an attractional way of being the church to a missional way.

    More and more churches are attempting (or at least saying they are attempting) to make this transition.  For those of you interested in this phenomenon, I wanted to try and spark some discussion.

    1) Attractional churches exist because they are predicated on a certain understanding of the gospel.  Therefore, there is no true movement from attractional to missional where there is not a renewed understanding, articulation, and demonstration of the gospel.  The distorted version of the gospel which undergirds an attractional model of church was largely inherited on account of a Christendom context within modernity.  As Western culture increasingly moves out of modernity, we are having an opportunity to rethink our understanding of the gospel and this is the starting place for those churches who are seeking to be missional.

    2) Not unlike Paul, who thought the gospel was one thing and discovered it was another, churches looking to make this transition ought to do so in sackcloth and ashes. They need to be prepared to ask forgiveness from those they have injured, ostracized, and neglected.  Churches who fail to experience grief over the damage they have done and embark on the journey toward healing and restoration probably have no idea what they are talking about.  Such has been the lot of the people of God down through the ages.  May it not be true of us.

    3) This transition needs to be a cautious and patient one. Much undoing and unlearning needs to take place if this transition is to be genuine and lasting. More than this, until we acknowledge that we have been heading in the wrong direction and make the decision to do some back tracking, then all perceived forward movement is actually just more deviation, just with new fancy language.

    4) This “new” way is not really new at all. It is not a transition predicated on changing times, postmodernity, or the emerging culture. This “new” way forward is actually the way of Jesus. It is simply being rediscovered in the wake of the crumbling of modernity and Christendom.  If there is something intrinsically right and good about the missional church movement, then it will not be a passing fad only to be replaced with the next cultural shift.  Being missional is not about being relevant, it’s about being faithful.

    5) What it means to be missional is not to be equated with serving others.  It is not a simple matter of shifting ones attention and focus from drawing people in to becoming more service-minded.  Instead, as I was alluding to above, it is a major shift in our understanding of what it means to be saved, what the good news really is, and what it means to be the people of God.   In short, the move from attractional to missional is not primarily a church matter (How do we do church?)  It is a theological matter (Who is God?)

    Getting Personal

    Yes, I have been personally burned and hurt by the modern, seeker-sensitive, attractional model of church.  Like many others, who I am quick to defend, but whose incessant whining I also tire of quickly, I sometimes have a tendency to lash out and I am quick to criticize.

    However, what I am offering here runs quite a bit deeper than that. What I offer here is an authentic desire for those churches wishing to make this sort of transition to succeed.  To be honest, I am not sure how well I would do as a leader in a church trying to make this sort of transition – perhaps that will be what God has for me down the line.  Whatever the case, I pray for my brothers and sisters seeking to make this sort of transition.  I stand on their side as they seek to honor and remain faithful to the call God has on their lives, and I hope that if I am ever in the situation to help maneuver a change like this, I will hold tight and fast to these reminders.

    Posted in church, kingdom, missional, modernity, Paul, postmodernity, theology, western culture

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