"Church is boring. Church is demeaning & judgemental. Church is irrelevant. Church simply sucks the proverbial lemon. Yeah Jesus was certainly one of the greatest people ever to have existed on the planet but please don't tell me that the best kind of community of faith to reflect his life that you guys can come up with is to invite me inside an insipidly dull-looking building among people who look very similar to me but are nonetheless relative strangers (even if I do keep coming back) while the dudes up front keep sitting me down and standing me up for five songs, a sermon, and a platitudinous blessing I could have found in the back of a used copy of Chicken Soup for the Soul. All this & you guys tell me this is the kind of life Jesus wants us to live. Puh-lease. No thanks. I pass. Killer for you - but that ain't what I call living bro."
Perhaps I'm being too generous. But please don't think I'm being too cynical. Among other criticisms (church is militarisitic, homophobic, narrow-minded, etc.) the above sentiments are typically the kinds of thoughts I consistently hear launched at the rapidly fading cultural Christendom reflections of church in North America. But it won't be too much longer (a decade perhaps less) when those criticisms become less prevalent and will undergo seismic shifts. Instead of the church sucks routine we will begin hearing more of these comments: Church is dangerous. Church is adventure. Church is deep renewing friendship. Church is resonant mystery that reaches the most profound places of my self-understanding within the cosmos. Church is radical compassion to the marginalized. Church reflects Jesus of the gospels & not culturual religion-focused Christianity. You say it can't be so. But these will be some of the prevailing cultural motifs that will be used to describe the Jesus-centered & Spirit-led collectives (churches) of the near future. Don't be surprised. There are churches & church movements that are already inhabiting these rhythms. And they are fundamentally altering people's immediate perceptions of church communities & firing the imaginations of those not-yet part of these collectives. Indeed, a new ecclesiological zeitgeist is surfacing with ever-increasing momentum & it is hurtling across the North American & global landscape with pervasive saturation. Yes it is difficult to precisely qualify what we're on the verge of witnessing on a massive and exponential scale - but nevertheless we are witnesses of a new & broader reformation that is not limited to the old divides of Protestant & Catholic, liberal & conservative, rich & poor (the rich & poor dichotomy being the most critical limiting factor in unrealized Kingdom of God movements throughout the globe). This is something entirely different.
What are the factors altering the landscape of North American church rhythms? I'll work my way into the different "factor" caverns in future posts but perhaps a crucial place to begin is to reboot the word "faith." As most of us know, in many North American realities (though certainly not all) faith is understood as something that is private & solely conceptual. I suppose most of us have an inkling of this but thanks to Descartes & co. the modernist era lived in the "what we think is what we are" zone. And this in so many ways was translated into church practices with the dictum: the better one believes/thinks/reasons the better a Christian one becomes. Belief of course, inhabiting only certain circuits of the mind. Therefore, the more propositional-based knowledge one obtains about faith the more faithful one becomes ('Christian Education' being the key discipleship conduit for the 'maturing' Christian; so inevitably the discipleship process became best suited for church-buildings & classrooms that utilized chalkboards, whiteboards, lecterns, overhead projectors, & styrofoam cups of bad coffee - don't misunderstand me though; this was not a wholesale bad development - it just placed emphasis on learning as thinking only and missed some crucial elements along the way). And as we all know & what has been documented, written, and beaten to death in endless books, articles, & blogs this "I think therefore I am" project (otherwise known as the Enlightenment) has washed up as rotting forests of (albeit gilded) kelp on the vast California-sized shores of a new era that inhabits the world of complexity, chaos, & unpredictability.
So while boomer-minded generations & older (though not all of them) will continue to inhabit classroom-based discipleship for deeper propositional-knowledge based faith the Gen Xers (or Busters - but not all of them) and the Millennials (or Mosaics - but not all of them) are amplifying the great sucking sound out & away from these reasoning-based institutions of faith. These generations are not against reason or knowledge or propositions they simply want to add & inhabit different forms of "knowing" as fundamental to life itself.
Faith within the collective imagination of those inhabiting the "post-enlightenment" era has been in the process during the last decade and a half or so of being rebooted as something that embraces an ethos of collective every-moment journey & adventure. Faith is becoming less about just being rationalistic & private (though it inhabits those spheres as well). Faith is becoming (on a large scale) a way that centers around Jesus & moves with the pulse of the Spirit. Church movements that adapt a journey & adventure ethos within their organizing DNA are the churches that are now claiming the future. Of course I don't mean journey & adventure for their own sake - climbing K2 has a certain amount of faith attached to it but without a Jesus-centering it simply becomes a journey & adventure that serves its own purposes. It is within journey & adventure for the sake of shalom & gospel that churches discover their vital edge of living & vibrancy - where they become the living reflections of Jesus himself. And of course, when churches inhabit the rhythms of shalom & gospel within their actions they become renewing movements and as such cannot be self-contained or hoarded.
But be warned: churches that wish to rhythm into journey & adventure by micro-management or top-down command and control structures where insurance policies trump Spirit-led action into dangerous territories will quite inevitably lead back to irrelevancy & stagnation . . .
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