Category Archives: post-modern

Keeping Holy Ground

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From this months issue of Christianity Today (May 2009):

Keeping Holy Ground Holy

The average person is not at all repelled by Gothic or Romanewque architecture,” says Robert Jaeger, executive director of Partners for Sacred Places, a nondenominational nonprofit that preserves and renews historic church buildings in the U.S. “The average person finds the symbolism and the craftsmanship compelling, beautiful, and comforting.”
There’s a desire out there to connect with something ancient, something transcendent,” asays Ed Stetzer, director of Lifeway Research and author of Lost and Found: The Younger Unchurched and the Churches that Reach Them. “there’s a hunger to move beyond a bland evangelcialism into something with more historic roots.”
Last year, a LifeWay survey commissioned by the Cornerstone Knowledge Network found that unchurched adults prefer Gothic church buildings to utilitarian ones, challenging the conventional wisdom that medieval-looking churches feel out-of-touch and stuffy to seekers. LifeWay showed over 1,600 unchurched adults four pictures of church buildings, ranging from mall-like to Gothic. The majority prefered the most ornate church.
“The study probably tells us that the appearance of a traditional church might not be the turnoff that people assumed in the seeker age,” Stetzer says.
Of course, Stetzer also notes that in North American and Europe, the congregations with the oldest buildings are the ones struggling the most to retain memers. THere’s a difference between admiring a building from the street and going inside to connect with a congregation”
Buildings don’t reach people, people reach people,” says Stetzer. [Nathan Bierma. 2009. “Keeping Holy Ground Holy – A new survey suggests seekers are not looking for user-friendly, mall-like buildings.” Christianity Today, May, pp. 36.]

For a generation (or two), the buildings provide us an opportunity for piquing interest and are a tangible invitation to enter in. We see this at my parish all the time. But, whether people stay or not depends on whether something is going on within the place. That “something” is not the building, not nice people, not a cornucopia of programs, not socio-political positions, but whether God is encountered in the midst of the people in the context of worship, the Eucharist. It is the encounter with God and the real change that such an encounter causes within that will cause people to stay.
What to do? Even the writing of the article reveals a passing way of thinking – “Seeker” is passé. Current day evangelicals are generally better in shifting with the times, but there isn’t the moderating influence of the Tradition. Here is the pressing problem with the Episcopal Church. We are the ones with the old buildings and a dwindling membership. Yet, we are the ones with all the attributes that should be attracting “seekers” of the younger generations.
We continue to be stuck, and for too many of us we continue to believe that it is “moving the furniture around,” programs, social activism, and many other things that bring people in and cause them to stay. Those things don’t, in most cases.
There has to be a lessening of “scheming” to “save us” and more of the simplicity of the foundational principles of the faith, the Tradition, that which has spiritually enlivened and feed people for two millennia, that which has survived – more about Jesus as the person He claimed (claims) to be and less of what we want to imagine Him to have been or to be coming from both the imaginations of conservatives and liberals. This also means, of course, that the architectural styles of church buildings are a bit moot – people will stay where their souls are touched by God.

Kerygmatic Vocation

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“Our Christian faith — and correlatively, our account of apologetics — is tainted by modernism when we fail to appreciate the effects of sin on reason. When this is ignored, we adopt an Enlightenment optimism about the role of a supposedly neutral reason in recognition of truth. (We also end up committed to ‘Constantinain’ strategies that, under the banner of natural law, seek to build a ‘Christian America.’
“To put this in more familiar terms, classical apologetics operates with a very modern notion of reason; ‘presuppositional’ apologetics, on the other hand, is postmodern (and Augustinian!) insofar as it recognizes the role of presuppositions in both what counts as truth and what is recognized as true. For this reason, postmodernism can be a catalyst for the church to reclaim its faith not as a system of truth dictated by a neutral reason but rather as a story that requires ‘eyes to see and ears to hear.’ The primary responsibility of the church as witness, then, is not demonstration but rather proclamation — the kerygmatic vocation of proclaiming the Word made flesh rather than the thin realities of theism that a supposedly neutral reason yields.”

James K.A. Smith, PhD., Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?; p. 28.
I wonder whether a lot of this modern/postmodern stuff is a replying anew the differences between Platonic and Aristotelian thought? Between Augustinian and Thomistic thought?
The latter is being played out in this new world of Post-Christendom, particularly within the context of the American Culture-War dynamic. What do we make of this?
Frankly, as I continue to move into the idea of re-formation out of the “Systems” (City of the World) and into some sort of “other than” (City of God) — perhaps a move out into the desert, metaphorically speaking — the rethinking of how we perceive and live out this Christian Life in our changing national context (really this ground shift of perceptional foundations within the culture), the more I am drawn to pre-Constantinian examples of Christianity. A “kerygmatic vocation.”

“GloboChrist” or is that “RoboChrist”

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The following are a couple paragraphs from a review by Christopher Benson entitled, “The Messenger Is the Message: How will you obey the Great Commission today?” of Carl Raschke new book “GloboChrist: The Great Commission Takes a Postmodern Turn,” one of the books in Baker Academic’s series concerning Post-Modernism and the Church. I look forward to read it; although “GloboChrist” in the title? Really?

Obeying the Great Commission in the global cosmopolis does not involve a mission trip to “lost peoples at the margins of civilization”; the margins have become mainstream, while the mainstream has become marginalized. Nor does it involve sophisticated marketing campaigns. We make disciples of all nations as the pre-Constantinian church did in the face of “daunting and promiscuous pluralism”: through incarnational ministry, being “little Christs” to the neighbor; through contextualization of the message, speaking the idiom of the neighbor; and through relevance, hearing the needs of the neighbor. Raschke adds that relevance should not be confused with the prosperity gospel, “seeker-sensitive” ministry, the “hipper than thou” emergent church movement, the social gospel redux, or “bobo” (bohemian bourgeois) culture. Relevance is radical relationality…
GloboChrist ought to be regarded as an essential postscript to Lesslie Newbigin’s The Gospel in a Pluralistic Society. Raschke is at his best when he assumes the prophetic mantle, judging the Western evangelical church for “whoring after the false gods of spiritual and material consumption”; uncovering how the religious left is just “a fun-house mirror of the religious right”; questioning if Islamism is “an understandable reaction against the global overreach of the pax Americana”; chiding fundamentalists for idolatrously substituting an “eighteenth-century propositional rationality for the biblical language of faith”; pleading for the Emergent Village to stop replaying “the modernist-fundamentalist debates of a century ago”; and exhorting postmodern Christians to overcome their passivity and “privatized sentimentality” with a witness that possesses “the ferocity of the jihad and paradoxically also the love for the lost that Jesus demonstrated.” [emphasis mine]

The only thing, I really don’t like the term, “GloboChrist.” It sounds stupid, in my humble opinion. The last line of the quoted paragraphs above, along with the term “GloboChrist,” well, I just keep envisioning “RoboChrist” and I don’t like it. If we aren’t careful, “GloboChrist” will be the next rendition of the “Pax Americana” crusade waged by certain overly aggressive, culturally myopic groups in the form of “RoboChrist.” It will happen, you know, and they will completely miss the point.
It is easier believing in a super-being (RoboChrist) that will force everyone to “do the right thing/believe the right thing,” then to die-to-self in order to do a much more difficult form of ministry that involves incarnational being.

Another viewpoint

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In response to the Internet-spread article “The Collapse of Evangelical Christianity” by Michael Spencer (read his response to the controversy he started) that I blogged about yesterday, comes this piece by Mark Galli, the senior managing editor of Christianity Today, and a professed Anglican (although I don’t think he remains in The Episcopal Church).
The piece is entitled, “On the Lasting Evangelical Survival”
There is plenty of statistical work that shows that the post-Baby-Boomer Evangelicals are departing from what has become American-Evangelicalism – the politicized Religious Right advanced socio-political agenda and perspective or feel-good mega-churchism. See Barna’s research in the book “unChristian.” (There is a lot more evidence, but I just don’t have reference on me.)
I agree with Galli, however, that there doesn’t seem to be significant evidence that these disaffected Evangelicals are migrating en mass to Orthodoxy, The Church of Rome, or even as Galli would like to see, Anglicanism. A slow counter-movement of a good number, yes (I’m one of them), but not mass movement. Some are delving into Emergent stuff and House Churches, etc. Regrettably, what generally happens is that young people leave to no other church, but simply drop out.

The Collapse of Evangelical Christianity

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I’ve been saying for some time now that American Evangelicalism will enter a significant decline, if not collapse, in the near future. I say this primarily because American Evangelicalism has aligned itself with political conservatism – a wedding of conservative theology with conservative socio-politics. (Equally so, conservative politics via the Republican Party has been absorbed into the politicized Religious Right. To be a Christian one must be a far-right Republican. To be a “real” Republican, one must adhere to the Culture War social agenda.)
This kind of thing has already happened in the past with Mainline Protestantism – a merging of liberal theology (Social Gospel) and liberal politics (more currently manifest through identify-politics and political-correctness). Mainline Protestantism collapsed because the social and political overwhelmed or actually replaced the theological – social action became more important than relationship with God and the worship of God.
Interestingly, the Democratic Party did not fall pray to liberal theology in the same way that the Republican Party has been overrun by the Religious Right. It was a different time.
American-Evangelicals have not learned the lessons of history, and now they are condemned to repeat it.
There is an interesting article in The Christian Science Monitor – once and perhaps still a Gold Standard for the international social and political reporting – entitled The coming evangelical collapse
The article begins:

We are on the verge – within 10 years – of a major collapse of evangelical Christianity. This breakdown will follow the deterioration of the mainline Protestant world and it will fundamentally alter the religious and cultural environment in the West.
Within two generations, evangelicalism will be a house deserted of half its occupants. (Between 25 and 35 percent of Americans today are Evangelicals.) In the “Protestant” 20th century, Evangelicals flourished. But they will soon be living in a very secular and religiously antagonistic 21st century.

I want to comment on a couple points brought up by the author:

• The emerging church will largely vanish from the evangelical landscape, becoming part of the small segment of progressive mainline Protestants that remain true to the liberal vision.

I don’t think this will happen! For one thing, those involved in the Emergent Conversation are Evangelicals, even if of the next generation of post-modern different-kind-of-Evangelical than that which is reflected in the Cultural War prone Religious Right. Mainline Protestant liberals are entering into a “Post-Christ” existence that looks far more like Unitarian Universalism than a traditionally understood Christ-centered Christianity and that won’t stop (even as their ever dwindling numbers drive them further into obscurity) – the Emergent folks aren’t going there.

• Two of the beneficiaries will be the Roman Catholic and Orthodox communions.

I think this is where Anglicanism can play an increasingly vital role, if we are able to maintain our Christian distinctiveness and not fall prey to the dividing and reactionary forces – if we resist the compulsion to become like American-Evangelicals or Liberal Protestants! Frankly, were not doing a very good job resisting the temptation. (Much of our current Episcopal Church leaders certainly fall in line with Liberal Protestantism and are unrelenting in their push to remake the Church in their own image, but many of these people are entering retirement age! The next generations of Episcopalians are not like them, thank goodness, as the post-Baby Boomer Evangelicals are not like their parents in their religious experience and expression.)
Faith in American will certainly look different in the next 20 years (and I think 20 more than 10). The triumphalism of Baby-Boomer American Evangelicalism will certainly take a beating. Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy will maintain, if not grow, but I doubt they will have a significant impact on the unChurched and increasingly secular people – they will not be viewed as a place to explore faith due to their dogmatism.
Again, by the nature of Traditional Anglicanism where a historic Gospel is proclaimed and seeking and questioning are truly engaged and dealt with and were a comprehensiveness is welcomed in our common life, this seems to fit well with the sensibilities of up and coming generations. Will we be able to take advantage of this for the sake of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the reconciliation of us all to God, or will we continue down the road we are currently on to our own division and destruction?

Simple Church

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I’ve been thinking for a while now, dreaming actually, of a way to go forward in the midst of The Episcopal Church’s continued decline. I can either continue to bemoan all the controversy, the bad management, the weird developing theologies, etc., and all that comes with the “diminishment.”
More broadly, we face the decline of Christianity in the U.S. and must consider how to live effectively in an increasingly post-Christian culture. Honestly, I don’t care that we are in an era that is increasingly post-Christian. It is much easier to identify those who truly desire relationship with God, reconciliation, and new life. Most of the rational behind the Culture Wars is about certain groups trying to rescue Christendom, and it will not happen without autocratic force.
In the face of diminishment, however, comes opportunity for thinking of different ways of doing all this stuff. So, perhaps I need to refocus on what’s next… After all, it is the ethos of Anglicanism that is important to me, and if the structures cannot hold together then there isn’t much I can do other than keep the ethos. I’m not yet vested in the Pension Fund, so what the heck.
For example, at present, approximately 45% of all Episcopal Churches cannot afford a full-time priest or lay employee. If things continue on as they probably will, that percentage will only increase. Add to that percentage another 15% of all congregations and we have a second group of parishes that can only barely keep a full-time priest. What can be done about this? All kinds of things, actually, but…
As I’ve said over and over again, Anglicanism is strategically situated to the condition of and characteristics of the younger generations, if only leveraged well. (We aren’t doing very well, however.)
Ancient-Future, Simple Church, simple living.
The “Simple Church” movement, also known by the name House Church movement, part of the Emergent Conversation, and on and on – is a way of being the Body of Christ in ways that resonate with an increasing number of people and is possible where money is in short supply. In the context of liturgical and sacramental Anglicanism, this can be very interesting way of doing the ministry. I can imagine that those of the Oxford Movement, if present today, would be all over it. New Monasticism, too.
For those clergy and lay people who desire “intentional community,” we can live together and go out into the world for ministry – lay people into the working-world where clergy rarely go, for clergy into all those parishes and missions that cannot afford a priest. Simple living, intentional living, meeting with the faithful and those seeking. Being there. Nothing new, really, but a very old model in a very new time.
This is want we want to do in Red Hook, except the authorities-that-be say our parish cannot hire a second priest (me) – politics. And, I’m warn-out and tired of being bi-vocational. My best energy and time is taken up doing things I don’t want to do, yet the job enables me to be at St. Paul’s, possibly in Red Hook, in this City.
Imagine The General Theological Seminary in this kind of context. Benedictine spirituality, living in intentional community on the Close. Going out into all of The City being the representatives, the hands, the mouths of God in all levels of society. A place of excellence in learning, in worship, in encouragement and challenge. “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” (Acts 1:8) From this City, the influence will reach all over the world. No one can convince me that this kind of vision (not my own, but becoming my own realized through the lives and experiences of many others), no one can convince me that this kind of formation for priests and laity alike will not appeal to and enliven 150 people from around the world that want to participate in such a place. No one can convince me that there isn’t money and people will be parted from their money to see such a thing happen. It takes people with strong vision and determined conviction to give up their own lives and allow God to be present in and through them. It takes leadership.
Why not? Why not? It is hard for people living in the fog of diminishment to see clearly opportunities. It is easier to fight over what’s left, even as it all slips through their fingers.
More later…

As the world turns…

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CORRECTION: The commenter did not comment on my post about the Sudanese Archbishop’s comments, but about the Ekklesia article. Sorry about that! However, it all gets mixed up in the same pot, I think.
A person posted a comment to one of my recent posts covering the Sudanese Anglican Archbishop’s call for the resignation of the Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire. During the press conference at Lambeth, the archbishop comments on difficulties he has with Western/American ways of living the faith and the competition for souls he is engaged in with other religions in the Sudan (and like experiences in other Global South states). For the archbishop, the reality that Anglicanism is shrinking in the West while growing in the developing world is proof that we are wrong and they are right.
The commenter wrote, “Yes, the church in the West has been shrinking, but that won’t last forever. And people who live in wealthier countries need faith, too, don’t they?” I absolutely agree, but the contexts in which we live really are different. That with which we in the West compete is not a fundamentalist Islam, but more of a fundamentalist secularism. The way both of us should proceed is not to become like the other – more fundamentalist or more permissive – but rather a third way. How we “prove” the significance and viability of our faith-system/religion is the rub, I think.
I have to look at my own “spoiled Westerner” status, too, even though because of what I’ve had to endure and struggle through I know just a little bit of the emotional and psychological and spiritual stuff that other oppressed people have had to endure. The humbling aspect for me concerning the good archbishop is that he and his folk have endured struggles I can’t imagine – 10 fold. I can’t just dismiss him like I can someone like James Dobson or Pat Robinson. They are tired and pathetic in their Culture War crusade in so many ways.
One of the problems I see is that too many and large segments of the Church universal will not or cannot understand that the West has been moving into post-modernism for a while now. This IS the way of thinking of the younger generations, and it isn’t going to change because a bunch of old men demand that these people “correct” the very constructs by which they make meaning of life. This isn’t a matter of “worldly” thinking, any more or less than Modernism is “worldly.” I content that post-modernism presents to the Church a fantastic opportunity for evangelism at least in the West, if only we can accept the challenge.
Too many Christian groups would rather demand the culture(s) not be post-modern and condemn the system as if they can stop the process/progress, rather than spending all that energy learning how to be witnesses within it. One of the problems, I think, is that post-modernism demands that Christians actually live what they say – action over words, orthopraxis over the words of orthodoxy.
If we prove the inadequacy of Christianity by our hypocrisy, then why should anyone consider Christianity or a culture/society give it a privileged position? They, it, shouldn’t. The “competitive marketplace” of ideas and the leveling out of the playing field for all competing religious systems (death of meta-narrative, supposedly) forces us in the West to live the Christian life in ways that we have not had to live for centuries. How will “they” know we are Christians or that the faith is real? By our love, by the way we live our lives and not by fine sounding arguments. (I know that Modernism and Post-modernism both seek “proof” in various ways.)
For the most part, we live a deficient Christian experience in the West. Post-modernism calls us to account, for the sake of those who do not yet know Christ. In some ways, post-modernism does to modern day Christianity what Jesus did to the Judaism of his day – to the Pharisees of his time. Jesus called the religious leaders to account, corrected them, and presented what the faith was supposed to be over-and-against their misunderstanding and misapplication of God’s Way. Post-modernism is accomplishing a very similar task with us today.
This is an exciting prospect for me, frankly, and an opportunity for God to prove to suspicious and cynical Westerners the vitality and reality of salvation, redemption, and reconciliation in ways rarely experienced in the West for a very long time. It is an opportunity, but it calls us to a level of sincerity, devotion, and the giving up of self and our own agendas and wants to a degree that many are unwilling to do. We are just like the rich young ruler who gave up discipleship with Jesus (and possibly heaven) even though he obeyed the Law faithfully – he did not go and sell all that he had. He would not give up his privileged and incorrect way of thinking and living. Will we?
Of course, this dynamic is experienced primarily in the West were post-modernism has already taken hold and in many segments predominates. In parts of the world where fundamentalism reigns – Muslin, Christian, native religions, or whatever – it will not work the same. This is where the “competition for souls” takes on a temporal militancy rather than a cerebral exercise. There is a third way, if only we are willing to seek, listen, discern, and obey (oh, how we hate that last one!).
Something like that, anyway.

Ordinary Radicals: We Will Not Comply

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Believe it or not, there has always be a “radical” streak in me. Early on when doing campus ministry right out of college, the pastor of the church through which I did ministry, a friend, would always tell me that I’m rebellious.
I like this:

I particularly like the, “With the theology of empire… We will not comply.” I made a post a while back that I will not subscribe as an American to Empire, even while those leaders in the present government and ideology are bent on attempting to create an American Empire.
The Ordinary Radicals
Merging Lanes

Today’s L’Abri

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There are a couple interesting articles in this recent issue of Christianity Today (March, 2008). One article has to do with L’Abri – a “retreat” established by Francis Schaeffer and his wife in the Alps of Switzerland. Lots of ’60’s – ’80’s young people flocked (relatively speaking) to L’Abri to debate and then sit at the feet of Schaeffer as he discussed and commented on Christian life within the West and within “Modernism.” L’Abri was a haven for those disaffected young people who had a difficult time with the common Evangelicalism and the Christian religion in general.
Schaeffer died during the 1980’s and over the years L’Abri has changed from a strongly Evangelical community within the Modernist approach to knowledge and Truth to a now Post-Modernist community that is very different from the place that Schaeffer established when he was at the helm.
I can remember back as an undergraduate in the early ’80’s dreaming of going to L’Abri. I have to admit that I still want to spend time there even as I have changed and can now feel the inner drive and throb of seeking that many a student deals with (after all, we are always students, are we not?). Frankly, I would love to have such a place here, now, and be part of such a community! It fits well within my notions of “intentional community.” The idea of being about the living of an authentic life in Christ as we strive together to not be bound by cultural convention but to understand the unplumbable depths of God’s Way.
Anyway, here is a couple paragraphs I think are insightful concerning younger folk:

[Thomas Rauchenstein, a youngish Canadian and a current L’Abri worker, commenting on Schaeffer’s presuppositions when making his arguments] “Presuppositionalism can appear to be humble, but actually it’s quite arrogant… It says, ‘You can’t critique my assumptions.’ students today have the despair of having lost that certainty.” The postmodern critique of objectivity has saturated them. “We’re at the transition point, philosophically,” said Peltier. “People talk in the language of postmodernism, but what they want from Christianity is very much modern.”
In other words, when students say they seek authenticity, what they really want it certainly, an inner knowing. Convinced that they won’t find it intellectually, many pursue that feeling of conviction through experience: in the communal life and worship at L’Abri; in the books by emerging church authors that are popular with many students, and in the charismatic worship style that – though Pentecostals have never been a significant presence – is no longer taboo here.”

I might suggest that for a significant segment of the student population, the traditional forms of worship – in the sacramental and liturgical – also enable this population to “experience” God in ways that their former/current church-culture did not provide them.