Here we go… (part 2)

In the last post, I promised that we would get to Snyder and his book Radical Renewal and I realized as I started this post that I hadn't yet. While I think the book is awesome and will probably explore more of its ideas in other posts, the part of the book relevant to this chart is another way to explain how it's OK for the forms of doing church to be changing all the time, the wineskin metaphor referenced in the subtitle.

Snyder is referencing what Jesus said in Matthew 9, Mark 2 and Luke 5 about new and old wine and wineskins. (Unfortunately, my copy of Radical Renewal is in a box in the garage with most of my library from college, so I can't tell you which of those parallel passages Snyder actually uses. I don't think it makes a lot of difference, fortunately.) What Jesus says in these passages is that you shouldn't put new wine into old wineskins because as the new wine continues to ferment it releases gases which will burst the old wineskin. Instead, you should put new wine into new wineskins because they will expand along with the gases, not bursting. In Snyder's view, Jesus is the wine, and He is always new, so we need to continually renew the wineskins we deliver Him in, or else the delivery system will burst and both the delivery system and Jesus will not be delivered and will be lost to those who need to be reached. The idea is that, as we try to take Jesus into new, different places, whether geographically or temporally, the way we present Jesus needs to change so as to be a way that works in the culture instead of impeding the gospel.

On to the X-axis. As can be seen, the X-axis is split into different columns which represent different ways of doing church. These columns don't represent specific models, but instead represent the foundational principles out of which multiple models have grown. It should be noted that almost every church incorporates experiences, programs and relationships into the way they do church. Emerging churches, for example, have both programs and relationships in their church. Traditional churchgoers both have experiences and have relationships with other churchgoers. The point here is that different churches base the way they do church around different things, incorporating a lot of things, but being based on a select list of principles shorter than all the things done in those churches.

The first column, going from the left, is the column with churches who are based upon experiences. Their primary focus is to provide experiences which people will enjoy and find attractive, therefore making the decision to join and continue to be involved in the church. Examples include the "seeker sensitive" churches which primarily target "moderns," that is, those generations up to and including a lot of the Baby Boomers, and a lot of the "Emerging Church," which targets "post-moderns," those generations after the Baby Boomers. This means, interestingly enough, that, because Post-Modernism is primarily a reaction against Modernism, the Emerging Church looks worlds different from the seeker sensitive movement of the past even though they both have virtually identical basic principles. Both seek to fulfill the experiential desires of different demographics so, since moderns like big open spaces with lots of light and an emphasis on reason over emotion and a break from the past, while post-moderns like darker, more filled spaces with an emphasis on emotion over reason and experiential rituals which make one feel like they belong to something bigger, seeker sensitive and Emerging churches are very different in their forms.

The next column over is that which contains churches based upon programs. Again, every church, or at least almost every church, has programs, no matter how much they are stripped down or thought through. We're talking here, though, about churches whose basic principles which determine how they conduct church are their programs. The idea is basically that if people go through different programs, they will become better Christians, growing closer to and knowing God better, becoming better, more godly people and loving each other more. The church is seen, unconsciously or not, as a collection of programs, where people go to "do" things, whether AWANAS or Bible study or Sunday morning service, etc. It is assumed that if someone goes through these programs, the programs will make them better people. This is largely the way the traditional church is run, and is a distinctly Modern way of looking at church, catering to those who think that people can be programed much like machines. Rationally, logically, the thinking goes, how could someone not be affected by going through a program where they read the Bible or memorize verses or hear about the Bible?

The last column contains the churches which use relationships as the basic foundation from which they gain their forms. For these churches, everything is planned around the relationships involved in the Church, the relationship Christians have with God, the relationships they have with each other and the relationships they have with the World. Again, these churches have programs and experiences too, but they are generally rare and thought-through enough that you don't notice them when you come into contact with them. The prime example of this is the Organic or simple way of doing church that this blog is concerned with arguing for.

My discerning readers will probably have noticed that there is only a dash under the "Program Based" column for the "Post-Modern" row. This isn't an accident. As I stated above, programs are a very Modern kind of thing. While no one can escape them, post-modernists dislike them strongly and will abhor doing church in a way based around programs. While other churches in the Modern row will generally slowly shift into the Post-Modern incarnation of their principles, the "Traditional," program-based way of doing church is going to die within the next century, to be generous. This leaves the individual local churches that fall under the "Traditional" category with a choice, if they choose to listen to this wake-up call, and wake-up call it is. Coming to understand that this is the way the Church is in America right now is more important to Traditional churches than to any other type of church, because they are on a course that will lead to their extinction.

So please, wake up, for your own sakes. (And, yes, for Christ's and our sakes too, but especially for you.)

Traditional churches have a set of three options, which are pretty simple, really. They can either stay in their column or move to the right or to the left, into different columns. Either a church will stick to its guns and philosophic foundation and die or it will reevaluate its foundation and either go Emerging or Simple. Those are the three choices, plain and simple. My prayer for Traditional churches is that they wake up and realize that they have this choice to make, and then that they make it wisely.