The Emerging Church: "Vintage" Faith for a Post-Modern World, Part 1

After revealing my thoughts over the past month, Pat brought a few books over for me to read. I’ve finished the first two, and it’s just swirling more stuff around in my head. Consider this a book report of sorts.

The first book I read was Post-Modern Pilgrims: First Century Passion for the 21st Century World by Leonard Sweet. This book was published in 2000, and as such was relatively early in the post-modern discussion.

OK, so now I’ve introduced a new term that some of you might not know — so here’s my summary of “Post-Modern.” In the 20th century, we looked at history and, for Western thought, saw three categories, each defined primarily by their worldview. Ancient history (up to around 500 A.D.) is characterized by the dawn of civilization, authority placed in kings, prophets, and oracles, and limited historical records. Medieval history (about 500 A.D. through about 1500 A.D.) is characterized by the authority being placed in the church, and the growth of the Judeo-Christian worldview, and the explosive growth of written manuscript. Modern history (about 1500 A.D. through the present) is characterized by the pursuit of and authority in knowledge and understanding (basically, the Enlightenment), and the explosive growth of the printing press.

For most of the 20th-centurty, it was taken for granted that we had “arrived.” The “modern” worldview was as far as we were going to get. The term itself sort of insinuates this. But as early as the 1940′s, and especially during the 1970′s, people started noticing a shift in culture. In was a shift to personal experience, suspicion of authority, and a willingness to accept conflicting ideas. In each case of the worldview changing significantly, it was aided by a significant technological change. In the 20th-century, with the explosive growth of radio, television, and especially the internet — a huge shift in communication by any standard of measurement — the change is happening much more rapidly.

We are moving into what is best called, at this time, “post-modernism.” I don’t know anyone who “likes” the term, but we’re kind of stuck with it for now. “Post-modernism” reflects an experience-based worldview. Spirituality is not real unless it is experienced. Large organizations are not to be trusted, as they have hidden agendas.

Most importantly, the post-modern mindset has a high distrust of Christians. They are mostly aware of Christians based on their experience of boring church experiences — perhaps good music or great preaching, but nothing really spiritual about it — or worse, through negative church experiences. The media, and perhaps rightly so, portrays Christians as hating gays, getting upset about the ten commandments, yelling at people walking into abortion clinics. We’re dogmatic, closed-minded, and unloving. They like Jesus, they just don’t like Christians. As Mahatma Ghandi said, “I like your Christ, but I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.” This is how most of the post-modern world views the church.

What does this mean for the church? How are we going to survive?

Back to Leonard Sweet. In his book, he uses the word EPIC to convey the shifts we need to make.

First, we need to move from a rational approach to an experiential approach. In the shift to a post-modern world, we are seeing the growth of “experience” industry — tourism is perhaps the ultimate experience industry. Sweet says that “in postmodern culture, there is no interest in a “second-hand God, a God that someone else (church tradition, church professionals, church bureaucracies) defines for us. Each one of us is a Jacob become Israel: a wrestler with God. The encounter, the experience is the message.”

Descartes’ famous quote “I think, therefore I am” — what is considered by some to signal the start of the Enlightenment and the modern worldview — was simply the beginning. He was attempting to prove God exists by reason (and did a pretty good job, I might add). But the post-modern mindset doesn’t care. You can “prove” that God exists, but until they experience God, the post-modern mindset won’t believe it.

Second, we need to move from a representative approach to a participatory approach. This kind of flows with experiential, because you can only experience something when you really participate in it. But more directly, we no longer want guidance, we want choices. We no longer want to belong to an organization, we want to participate in a community.

This is why democracy will thrive in the post-modern world — we want to participate in government, not just be ruled by it. The same could be said for how the post-modern mindset approaches religion.

Third, we need to move from a word-based approach to an image-driven approach. In the modern world, the focus was on knowledge and understanding — so naturally our words (what we said) had to convince and explain.

Image-driven is partially literal — using images to convey meaning — but it also involves making use of metaphor, of story, to connect with the post-modern mindset. “One Coca-Cola executive is said to have declared that the company could survive the loss of all of its assets… providing it kept posession of the Coca-Cola logo… If… the greatest resources anyone can ‘own’ are images and stories, Christianity ought to be the biggest brand around.”

Finally, we need to move from an individual approach to a connected approach. This may seem at odds with the post-modern mindset — but in reality, the post-modern mindset is not that truth doesn’t exist, it’s just that it is difficult to find it. And we don’t trust organizations to tell us truth, but we will trust our friends, and form a community, to journey there together.

But we also want to be respected as individuals — so it’s not just about communal, it’s about individual-communal.

Overall, Sweet’s book asks a lot of questions, without providing the answers. This is important, because we still don’t know exactly where post-modernism will end up (which is also why we don’t have a better name for it yet). We also don’t know exactly where the church will end up, either. But the reality is, that for churches to thrive in a post-modern world, huge things need to change. But the biggest changes will need to be within us.

More on this in Part 2, where I will discuss the next book, and get a little more into how we need to change, both as individuals and as churches.