Post-Modern Pilgrims

First Century Passion for the 21st Century World

Leonard Sweet

• Publisher: B&H Books
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9781433674501
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

There is a legend of a Welsh Prince Madoc whose ship became stuck in Chesapeake Bay. After trying unsuccessfully to escape, he had his men row out with the anchor, drop it as far into the sea as they could, and then the ship winched its way forward. The image of the church as a boat and tradition as an anchor is prevalent in Christian art. If we examine the biblical view of an anchor, we find, like Prince Madoc, we are to cast our anchor into the future and pull the church forward.Postmodern pilgrims must strive to keep the past and the future in perpetual conversation so every generation will find a fresh expression of the Gospel that is anchored solidly to “the faith that was once for all delivered.”

CHAPTER ONE

EPIC CHURCH FOR EpIC TIMES

E(XPERIENTIAL)-P-I-C

EBAY

I am an eBay addict.

My most recent purchase is one of the first books published by my Ph.D. adviser. It has been missing from my library for twenty years. I got it for $.50. The postage was more than the book ($2.00). But for $2.50 I felt like I had just reclaimed a lost part of my pedigree. I felt like a kid in a candy store.

Amazon.com and eBay.com are the wonder stories of the ‘90s. From 1995 to 1999, online auction giant eBay did no advertising, no marketing, yet boasted 6 million registered users and grew from 289,000 items at the end of 1996 to 3.6 million today. With a 23 billion market cap, eBay is now worth more than K-mart, Toys “R” Us, Nordstrom, and Saks combined.

eBay is so addictive because it understands postmodern culture better than the church. eBay also alerts us to what the church must do to get the attention and attendance of post-moderns. For the church to incarnate the gospel in this postmodern world, it must become more medieval than modern, more apostolic than patristic. I call postmodernity an EPIC culture: Experiential, Participatory, Image-driven, Connected.

In the midst of one of the greatest transitions in history—from modern to postmodern—Christian churches are owned lock, stock, and barrel by modernity.¹ They have clung to modern modes of thought and action, their ways of embodying and enacting the Christian tradition frozen in patterns of high modernity.

The decline of western Christianity is so well documented it needs no rehearsing here.² The annual meetings of most churches are like that of the swimming coach who made a difficult speech at an awards banquet after a disastrous year. “We didn't win a single meet this year,” he admitted, “but we had a good time and nobody drowned.” The plight of mainline Protestantism has passed into the realm of humor. At a recent board meeting of a community agency, someone used the phrase “mainline churches.” Someone else asked, “What are mainline churches?” A third snapped back, “The ones with the fewest people.”

For the first time in USAmerican history more people are attending nondenominational than denominationally affiliated churches.³ In one year alone (1997–98), average church size plummeted over 10 percent, with a drop of 15 percent during the same twelve-month period in annual operating budgets.⁴ Eighty-five percent of the mainline church is in serious deterioration or comatose. Wonder who are the biggest losers in terms of percent change in weekday activities from 1981 to 1997? For girls ages three through twelve, the four biggest losers were outdoor activities (-57%), conversations (-55%), free play (-26%), and church (-25%). For boys ages three through twelve, the four biggest losers were church (-71%), outdoor activities (-70%), conversations (-60%), and free play (-34%).⁵

I have a friend—one of the most successful pastors in the South—who has a metaphor for the church's plight. He says the church's leaders have Alzheimer's disease. We still love them. We remember and pass on their stories. But they're living in another world. They're totally clueless about the world that is actually out there. The problem is, he laments, they're captaining the ship.

My favorite example of how out of touch the church can be with the emerging postmodern world around it is a throwaway line from Marc Driscoll, Gen-X pastor at Seattle's thriving Mars Hill Fellowship (which is itself planting three more churches). Driscoll says his challenge in reaching postmoderns is not convincing them that Jesus rose from the dead or that there could be such a thing as a resurrection. His biggest challenge is in convincing postmoderns that there was only one resurrection.

Western Christianity went to sleep in a modern world governed by the gods of reason and observation. It is awakening to a postmodern world open to revelation and hungry for experience. Indeed, one of the last places post-moderns expect to be “spiritual” is the church. In the midst of a spiritual “heating up” in the host postmodern culture, the church is stuck in the modern freezer.

The church's crisis is of EPIC proportions. It will take more than a Martha Stewart makeover or spiritual plastic surgery to make church vital to a postmodern culture. Unless churches can transition their cultures into more EPIC directions—Experiential, Participatory, Image-based, and Connected—they stand the real risk of becoming museum churches, nostalgic testimonies to a culture that is no more.

This book begins with chapters of cultural analysis devoted to what each one of these words means in that acronym EPIC. The book ends with a more theoretical analysis of the social forces and intellectual figures fashioning this EPIC model.

Some people want to see God with their eyes as they see a cow, and to love him as they love their cow—they love their cow for the milk and cheese and profit it makes them. This is how it is with people who love God for the sake of outward wealth or inward comfort. They do not rightly love God when they love him for their own advantage. Indeed, I tell you the truth, any object you have on your mind, however good, will be a barrier between you and the inmost Truth.

—Dominican mystic Meister Eckhart⁶

EXPERIEHTIAL: FROM RATIONAL TO
EXPERIENTIAL

Toward the end of his life, the great Dominican theologian Thomas Aquinas had a direct experience of God's love. From that moment on, Aquinas stopped writing and called everything he had written “all grass.”

It is one thing to talk about God. It is quite another thing to experience God.

A modernist dies and finds himself surrounded by dense, billowy clouds that only allow him to see a short distance ahead. He sees that he is walking down a road paved in gold. Ahead, there is a slight break in the clouds. He sees a signpost and a fork in the road. The signpost has inscriptions with golden arrows pointing to the left and right.

The modernist reads them. The right arrow says, “This way to heaven.” The left arrow says, “This way to a discussion about heaven.”

The modernist took the fork to the discussion.

Guess which fork the postmodernist took?

The perpetual openness to experience of postmoderns is such that one can never underestimate the e-factor: experiential. Postmoderns will do most anything not to lose connection with the experience of life.

The magic of eBay is that it makes shopping an experience. There's a homegrown feel to eBay. Journalist Stewart Alsop, while analyzing the eBay phenomenon, calls it “nail-biting, thrilling fun.”⁷

There is no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.

—Beginning of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason⁸

EXPERIENCE CURRENCIES

The postmodern economy is an “experience economy.”⁹ Some call this “immersion living.” Others call it “The Emotile Era.” But whatever you call it, experience is the currency of postmodern economics. In the last half century much of the world has transitioned from an industrial economy (driven by things) to a knowledge economy (driven by bits) to an experience economy (which traffics in experiences).

Sometimes you cannot believe what you see, you have ...