I don't think I've said anything immensely controversial in these last few posts (except, perhaps, that I think Simple Church is the way we should be doing church, and also the implicit assertion from my Anabaptist history post that the Reformed movement isn't as loyal to its oft-vaunted Sola Scriptura as it claims) but I'm pretty sure that I'll be breaking that pattern in this post, so I want to offer a rather large caveat so that when this post is dissected and torn apart (yes, I'm admittedly flattering myself that this post will get that much attention) it will get torn apart on the right points, not the wrong ones.
I'm a big idea person. I think and speak in generalities and, while I think I usually can see both the trees and the forest pretty well, I tend not to communicate the trees as well as the forest when I write or speak. When I make statements, they are often sweeping and "skip" over exceptions (which I tend to think are either too obvious or too insignificant to mention). So, let it be noted that there is an exception to everything I assert (including this assertion.) If something I write isn't true, by all means, please let me know, but if I, for example, say that such-and-such a philosophy leads to such-and-such an outcome for such-and-such a reason and then lay out examples one, two and three, please don't take my meaning to be that this happens in absolutely every case and that one or two isolated counterexamples prove the assertion wrong. Please, assume generalization and exception in what I say, because you can't talk about sweeping movements, big ideas or general theories effectively without assuming them.
Thanks.
So, this post is about where I see the Church right now, in America (the clauses "right now" and "in America," that is, the States, being rather important). To aid in my explanation, I've created the little chart below. I should note that I came up with it myself, but that a few people older and wiser than me, and in the know, have said that it is generally accurate and that they liked it. It certainly isn't in any kind of final draft form and I'm especially unsure of some of what I've put in the top right area, but I'm sure enough of it to show it to people, like those that read this blog. I've found that it generally helps people understand what I'm trying to say. Also, if you find this chart helpful, feel free to use it, as well as anything on this blog that originates with me. While my jury is still out as far as some parts of the paying people for ministry issue goes, I'm very sure that the very green, unfinished ideas I'm posting on this blog should be free. I apologize for the small size. If someone can give me pointers on how to make it bigger, I'd be much obliged.
So, the Y-axis, if you will, represents time, measured in the predominant culture in the United States, progressing forward as we go down the chart. We see that we are in a transitional phase, as we are leaving the Modern Era and entering the Post-Modern Era. This is one of the fundamental truths that we need to understand, in my opinion, if we are to understand well where the Church in America is today.
To explain this idea a little more, I'm going to have to take a detour. My Junior year in college, I took a Christian Ministry course where I had to read a few books. One was by Howard Snyder and called Radical Renewal: The Problem of Wineskins Today. I recommend the (rather short) book highly. Another was Brian McLaren's Church on the Other Side, a book that I recommend not because I agree with it, but because it is a great primer to help one understand the Emerging Church, I think. We'll get back to Snyder's wineskins, but we need to address McLaren right now.
Incidentally, I double-majored in college, in Biblical Studies and History-Political Science, and I can't help but be reminded of Karl Marx by McLaren (and here some of my political ideas are going to spill into this post, as much as I am going to try to keep them generally out of this blog; I'm sorry). Like Marx, I think McLaren has quite often hit the nail on the head when trying to diagnose what's wrong. Just as Marx's criticisms of the cruelty and injustice of the economic system around him were dead on, a lot of McLaren's criticisms of how the Church in America isn't acting as it should really are dead on. Just as Marx did, however, I think that McLaren has also gotten the solution terribly, awfully wrong. (I also think that Marx and McLaren also have a tendency to be so optimistic and confident as to be a little silly at times. See the Marxist belief in the inevitability of the victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie and McLaren's chapter on foreign missions in Church on the Other Side for examples. At times, neither Marx nor McLaren seem to have any idea what they are talking about when they really have a responsibility to.) So I'm going to borrow liberally from his diagnosis here, as well as just restate some basic missiology that everyone in the Church should be familar with. (I suspect that what I'm about to borrow isn't original with McLaren, just that I first heard it explicitly stated and well explained from him.)
When we visit a foreign country on a short term missions team, we don't have a problem when church is done differently by the people there. We, usually, understand that different cultures will have different ways of doing church. We see that it is right and healthy for the same basic foundations of Christianity, the DNA of Christianity, if you will, to be planted in two different cultures and to grow differently. It's OK that two vastly different cultures worship God in different ways, as long as they hold to the same basic tenants of Christianity: Jesus is God and He died for my sins, God is Three in One, the Bible is the inspired, infallible Word of God, etc. As long as they hold to these kinds of things, it doesn't really matter whether one culture's church uses pews and another has everyone stand, or if there is one pastor or if everyone rotates preaching, etc. The external forms of worship aren't what need to be the same across the board, but the internal, foundational beliefs and relationships are what need to be the same. The external forms grow out of these foundations, growing differently in different cultures. (This isn't to say that forms don't matter, or can't be right or wrong, just to say that different cultures should have different forms.)
We need to take this understanding that doing church will and should be different in different cultures and apply that to the shift we see in culture in the United States. We see that there is a difference in culture, not over geographical space, but over time in the United States. This is what happens (especially in the West) and it's OK. No culture is completely evil and no culture is completely good, but each culture has parts of it that agree with a biblical worldview and parts that don't. This goes for both Modernism and Post-Modernism. The important thing that we need to realize is that doing church will and should look different in a Post-Modernist culture from what we see in Modernist culture. We are currently crossing a temporal border and it is right and good and healthy to adjust the way we do church as we the Church in America are increasingly Post-Modern in culture. Does this mean that it's OK for those of us who are Post-Modern culturally (and I do not count myself among that number, by the way- I've spent too many of my formative years outside the West to feel I belong to any Western culture) to hold onto all of our Post-Modern culture? Absolutely not. Just as with every culture, there are parts of the Post-Modern culture that run counter to the Bible, to the Truth and that should be changed by any Post-Modern Christian. The point, though, is that it is possible to be a Post-Modern Christian; we don't have to be Modernists to be Christians. Just as we wouldn't expect people in the CAR, say, to do church the way we do, those of us who are Modernists shouldn't expect people in the 21st Century to do church in the same way they did in the 20th century.
So, along the Y-Axis, then, we should expect to see changes in the way church is done, because culture is changing along the Y-axis.
Stay tuned for an explanation of the X-axis in the next post.
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