Time is about change, and change is not always welcomed or appreciated. We are living in a time of great social changes. It can be scary because we do not know what is coming. I have seen three ways churches and people deal with time and change.
1.
One is a concern for restoring the past. Especially during the early part of my ministry (the 80’s), there was a pervasive sense of having lost the “glory days” of the 1950’s, and a drive, or at least a longing, to get them back. In their view churches began losing members when we started going along with cultural shifts. Even now significant nostalgia remains among some, along with anger, grief, and fear about where we might be heading. They want somehow to go back to the way it was. Conservatives often say they are all about the authority of Scripture or upholding orthodox doctrine, but mainly they are just advocating a return to an earlier culture, one that they argue was more stable and more religious.
2.
Others, especially many younger people, reacted in the opposite way. They saw the cultural changes of the last few decades as almost unmitigated progress. The problem was that the church was out of synch with the times. Therefore, they undertook to make the church more “relevant” by adopting new music, new technologies, new language, new media, new theologies, new morality, new social relationships, and generally reveling in newness and novelty. Liberals claimed to be following God’s “new thing.” But some of these tactics also came to be adopted and developed by many evangelicals who used the new approaches selectively to communicate older theologies, politics, and morality.
3.
Then, early in the 21st century, we saw a third approach which recognized the inadequacies and failures of both prior approaches, and therefore tried to anticipate or manifest the future of the church. It wanted to get ahead of the curve and express the faith in terms of “emerging” culture. The idea was to notice the shift from the modern to the post-modern, and identify and anticipate what was coming “next” by basically continuing the trajectory. Here we find evolutionary models like those of Ken Wilber and spiral dynamics. They sought to live into a culture that was still in formation.
The thing about all three approaches is that they were all basically about marketing, asking: “how do we sell the church to consumers today?” It’s about what people want: the old, the new, or the next? We interpret time and its changes through our egocentricity. That is, our desire and our fear condition our outlook. They shape and skew our memories, our experience, and our hopes.
Distinct from attempts to privilege the culture of the past, present, or future, the gospel of Jesus Christ is timeless, eternal. Jesus proclaims “fulfilled” time, which is not just the sum total of everything that happened in linear time; it is a different kind of time altogether. It is a Truth that is always there above, within and beneath our experience of time, which occasionally makes itself known to us.
The gospel community is called to live in this other kind of time, the eternal now, God’s time. We need to be the interface with the eternal, the beachhead of the Kingdom of God, and radically counter-cultural leaven and salt within a society. This means refusing to wed ourselves to the culture of any generation, past, present, or future. We are citizens of heaven, which is to say God’s all-inclusive, universal creation.
Therefore, the authentic gospel community is necessarily going to look like an anomaly or anachronism in our time. It does not compute. It does not fit into the way people normally think, no matter which generation they relate best to. We have to finally learn to be okay with that. It is time to embrace this discontinuity with culture, and be who God calls us to be no matter what kind of reception we receive.
We need not examine social trends to figure out how to effectively market our brand. We need to discern the Spirit. Adaptation means learning how to communicate eternity in the context of a particular society.
+++++++
No comments:
Post a Comment