Embarking

(written back in August… but forgot to post)

I’ve found the conversation around mega-churches and emergent churches lately quit fascinating. (cf. Fitch’s first post, and his redux post] I’ve heard many people for awhile saying, “the fruit just isn’t there with the Emergent Churches.”  By fruit, this usually means converts.  So, when David Fitch went after Mark Driscoll and talked about this issue, I found it quit interesting.  Being someone who is emerging at heart and history (and in some ways theologically, but not others) but also being currently a pastor at a mega-church (where I sometimes fit in, and other times feel like an odd-ball) these conversations are quite intriguing.  I’m particularly interested in numbers 4 and 5 of the 5 points Fitch makes, which I’ve listed below - this from the Out of UR Blog:

4. Having said all this, I think that the missional communities that do persist probably have a higher conversion rate than the Driscollesque mega churches. Missional churches are much smaller, so 6 conversions from a group of 25 over ten years would match (or exceed) the percentage growth of a typical mega church. I think it would be interesting to measure how many dollars per conversion are spent in missional churches versus mega churches. It makes me smile knowing missional churches are probably more cost effective when it comes to conversions because we resist spending money on buildings, programs, and “the show.”

5. We must recognize that “missionary conversions” take longer than megachurch conversions. The conversion of a post-Christendom “pagan,” who has had little to no exposure to the language and story of Christ in Scripture, may require five years of relational immersion before a decision would even make sense. If you do not have this immersion/context, any decision that is made is prone to be little more than a consumerist decision—it is made based on the perceived immediate benefit. It lasts as long as this perceived benefit remains important. It does not lead to discipleship.

So a true missionary conversion, which I believe missional churches are after, takes a much longer period of time than the kind of conversions most often generated through a megachurch. The megachurch is largely appealing to people who grew up in old forms of church and know the Story but quit going to church many years ago. These “unchurched people” require the old messages to be made more relevant. They need to be “revived” or called back into a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ. There’s nothing wrong with that, but we should recognize there are fewer and fewer of these kinds of people left.

These are some arguments that I myself have made in the past.  Knowing, realistically two things: 1) how inefficient mega-churches really are in reaching the lost per dollar spent and 2) how really unconcerned most members of these churches are to reach anyone.  Emerging churches are still too young to measure long term fruit and effectiveness, but it will be interesting to see the longer term effects of churches that spend less money, focus more on community, tend to care more about “holistic transformation”, and are committed to individual people over programs.  The percentages of transformed lives to Jesus Lordship and Kingdom per capita and per dollar (though even talking about it that way seems, somehow, wrong) would be very intriguing to see.  So… someone do the study already.

The other thing I find so intriguing is the issue of “who” these churches reach.  My take is that not only mega-churches, but most contemporary evangelical churches are fairly good at reaching those who are part of Christendom… meaning they’ve been raised with Jesus and the church, and they have been educated in Christianity.  They may be “de-churched” because they were one-time churched, but maybe they never took the step to enter the Kingdom and submit to the Lordship of Jesus.  Those people do need to be reached.  But what I think is being argued in some of what Fitch is saying is that those who are part of the emerging postmodern, post-Christendom culture have very little or no knowledge of Christian theology or of Jesus other than what they learned on the Simpsons, King of the Hill, or in political campaigns.  These folks are a slower burn because they have so much knowledge to gain before they have a clue what they are saying “yes” to.  I’ve heard Alan Hirsch talking about this at a church planting portion of the RCA’s OneThing conference in San Antonio when he said that the “forms” of church we are using today are reaching a certain group of people, but that the culture shifts of post-christendom require new forms of church plants to reach new people who will likely never be reached by our current forms.

Ok, so I’ve been gone for awhile.  You may notice, I blip on and off like a bad TV that’s been hit by lightening.  True.  When busyness hits, I go underground - at least on the blogosphere.  I wish it weren’t so because it’s wonderful to write for no other reason that to write, process, and share.  Anyway, this week in September is the busiest week of my year and September is generally the busiest month.  But this summer in general was just plain busy.

There are a couple new books I’m reading, or almost done with.  The first is GloboChrist: the Great Commission Takes a Postmodern Turn by Carl Rashke.  If you’d like to read an excerpt, click here.  Tall Skinny Kiwi has been blogging about it, and I hope to engage it a bit in the coming weeks.  I’m pretty much done with it.  I’m also half way through Andy Crouch’s new book Culture-Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling.  Both are good books, and I’ve enjoyed them both.  Lots to say about Crouch’s book.  Raschke’s is provocative, interesting, sometimes overstated, and just OK.  I’m going to be starting Gordon MacDonald’s book Who Stole My Church soon as well as Four Views of Youth Ministry and the Church with one of my youth pastors.

On to McLaren.  I wanted to share a quick metaphor that McLaren used when he was talking about The Gospel and salvation and Kingdom.  To truncate it a bit, Brian was talking about what I’ve mentioned before about the message from many that the penal substitutionary theory of atonement or receiving Jesus as one’s personal savior is the Gospel.  Someone in the audience had questioned him about where he stood on this theory, etc. as the Gospel.  McLaren used a metaphor in which he said something to this affect, “People want to talk a lot about going to Florida and what I think about Florida and how to get to Florida, when I thought we were going to California.”  I didn’t really like his metaphor, although I thought it raised some important issues.  When you talk to people (like me… and Brian) about the Gospel, our view is wider than the theory of substitutionary atonement or receiving Jesus as Savior.  However, when many people here that, they think we’ve forfeited the gospel.  I would argue that we are actually saying that the Gospel is more than that, not less.  And for sure, Christ’s work on the cross as our substitute to atone for our sin and rebellion against God is key, and core to the Gospel.  However, it is not itself the gospel. 

So, I have an alternative metaphor.  Think for a moment about the St. Louis Archway.  It was originally built in the ’60’s to commemorate Thomas Jefferson and the Westward expansion of the Americas.  So, imagine with me that the Arch were the actual gateway to the the West, that you would have to pass through the archway to get to the western frontier.  And let’s say that the Eastern United States was ruled by a different king and under different rules than the Western United States.  So, let’s say you live in the east, and friends of yours have told you about the King and Kingdom of the West, how different it is, how much more humane, how much healthier, etc. it was.  So, you head West from your home in Washington DC and you come to the St. Louis Archway.  You take pictures; you go to the top of the Arch; you even take the helicopter ride.  Then, you settlt there on the banks of Illinois just to the East of the Mississippi river, or maybe you cross over and you set up your new home on the western banks in St. Louis, Missouri.  But, you never go West (young man).  You never see the sprawling Iowa and Nebraska plains, the deserts of Nevada, the mountains of Idaho, or the California coastline.  Even so, you think you’ve travelled West. 

That’s the metaphor I think of when we truncate the Gospel to a theory of atonement, to a sinner’s prayer (which much of the time is misunderstood while it’s happening), or being born again (not in the biblical John 3 sense - which is more like the West , but in the contemporary sense like the banks of the Mississippi).  Those are all gateways, are all part of going West, but the Gospel is about the King and his Kingdom that are both coming and have come.  And as CS Lewis said, we must go “further up and further in” to experience the beauty and wonder of the place Aslan has prepared for us. 

I’m certainly interested in the St. Louis Arch and getting across the Mississippi, but I also really want to see the Rocky Mountains, the Snake River, the Tetons, the Black Hills, the Grand Canyon, the vineyards, and pacific coast beaches.

After McLaren’s talk, my friend and I had the highlight of the evening when we stopped at one of my favorite places:  Traverse Bay Pie Company.  If you’re ever near one, you have to stop and have at least a piece of pie, but don’t go alone.  Make sure you have a good conversation partner along.

from Willow Creek Leadership Summit 2008: Session 5, Chuck Colsen, Breakpoint, Defending The Faith

We have bought into a lie:  we’ve transferred our allegience from truth to therapy.

Leadership lessons from the marines:

• The test of leadership is to serve your troops.
• Then you give them the bigger vision.
• Follow me.

If you are a shepherd, your job is not to pander to your people, it is to lead them.

Don’t be ashamed of truth.  Defend the law of non-contradiction.

Stop blaming the culture for everything that’s going wrong in the world today.

God’s judgement comes first on the people of God.

In our country we are in Babalyonian Captivity.

Defend the faith once for all delivered to the saints.

What is Christianity? 

• It is a worldview, a system, a way of seeing all of life through Jesus Christ. 
• Abraham Kuyper:  “There is not a square inch on the whole plain of human existence over which Christ, who is Lord over all, does not proclaim: ‘This is mine.’” [Souvereiniteit in Eigen Kring, 1180, p. 32.]
• It rests on basic truth claims.  1)  It starts with a very simple declaration, “God is.”  It is the most rational choice.  Alvin Plantinga: “The first presupposition about reality is that God is.”  2) God speaks.  The bible is authoritative and inerrant.  3) The fall.  When asked the question, “What’s wrong with the world today,” GK Chesterton said, “I am.”  4) The incarnation.  5) Conversion/ transformation is essential.  6) The Trinity. 7) Unity - we are reconciled to one another. Judgement
• The Christian view must propose rather than impose. [axiom}

Comments:  I get what Colsen is doing, and I think defending the faith is important.  However, as you can see in previous posts, introducing people to a system or converting them to a system or a set of propositions as our manner of apologetics or evangelism is not my preferred modus operandi and I don’t think it speaks to a postmodern culture.  He’s not wrong, by any means.  I just think the strong emphasis on this type of apologetics and propositional truth defense isn’t so helpful these days, but rather something that makes us feel pretty good because we’re defending the faith, which is important, but we aren’t necessarily reaching people through it.  He quoted a lot of people I love (Alvin Plantinga, GK Chesterton, Cornelius Van Til), but we take different approaches to these things.  I also am a huge fan of both cultural engagement, of Christians living as a peculiar people in the culture, and of people understanding a Christian world and life view, especially being able to articulate how the Lordship of Christ makes my life different because of the commitments I have.  However, I still think that spending the bulk of our time defending propositions and a system to our current culture creates a barrier of entry for those outside.  Our time should be spent introducing people to the Lord Jesus, allowing the Spirit to work in their hearts, and then helping them to understand what a commitment to Jesus and a transformed life requires.  I would say that we pretty much agree on foundational elements, but we probably disagree on where to place emphasis in our current postmodern culture.  To put is succinctly, I’m less interested in contending for propositions or even for Christianity than I am for Jesus Christ.

from Willow Creek Leadership Summit 2008: Session 5, Craig Groeschel, lifechurch.tv, IT: How Leaders Get IT and Keep IT

Intro:  We’ve all been to churches that don’t have “it.”  They’re flat.  We’ve all been to churches that have “IT.”  It is that something special of God that is so real that lives are transformed by the very Spirit of God in a special way so that people meet Jesus Christ, and want to tell their friends about it.

Sometimes you can have the same things (same people, same form), and one group has “IT” and another doesn’t.  Example:  same forms of worship, same kinds of teachers, same types of ministries.  The same can be true of teams within a church or organization.  You can have IT, but lose IT.  So, what is “IT“?  Don’t know.

Theories about IT

• God makes it happen.  It is from him, by Him, and for his glory.
• We can’t created, produce it, or manufacture it.
• It is rare that one person will bring, but it’s common for the wrong person to kill it.
• It can’t be taught, but it can be caught.
• It’s not a system or a model but can be found in all types of churches.
• Whereever you see it, you see transformed lives.
• It attracts critics.  People misunderstand it.
• “It happens!”  But often, it doesn’t.
• If you have it, it doesn’t meant you’re going to keep it.
• If you don’t have it, it doesn’t mean you can’t find it.

Early church had IT.  (Acts 2:42-47)

• Try to kill them, it grows.
• Dude falls out window, you just raise him up from the dead.
• People sell their stuff so other people can eat.

4 Qualities when IT is present

• Organizations that have IT are laser focused.  Jim Collins:  “What can you be the very best at?“  To reach people that no one is reaching, you have to do things that no one is doing.  But in order to do things that no one is doing, you can’t do what everyone else is doing. [axiom]  “Planned abandonment.” Don’t do more.  Do better.  How do we stop entertaining people from other people’s ministries?  lifechurch.tv does only five things well: weekend services, small groups, children’s ministry, student ministries, missions.
• Organizations that have IT see opportunities where others see obstacles.  They see potential when others see problems.  They believe they have everything that they need to do everything that God wants you to do.  You have it.  (Again… a Collinsism modified).  God often guides by what he doesn’t provide. [axiom]  Meaning, he’s trying to show you something through your greatest limitations.  He may have another route you need to go.
• Organzations that have IT are willing to fail.  Failure is a necessity. [axiom]  Failure is often the first step into seeing God.  Example:  Peter failed, was restored, got it, and then preached and 3000 were saved. 
• Organizations that have It are lead by people who have it.  You have to have it for your ministry to get it.  You can have it, and then ministry can sometimes kill it.  When you have it in your heart, you tend to get it around you because it tends to draw people.  If you have it inside, you get it outside.  AFterwhile you begin to think that if you get the outside you’ll get what’s inside - you misunderstand it and lose the very things that are necessary to have IT.  “I had become a full time pastor and a part time follower of Christ.  I lost IT.”  Your ministry will not have it if you don’t have it.  If it’s become more about your ministry than about His Kingdom, you’ve lost it.”

4 Questions:

1. What are you doing that you need to stop doing?
2. What problems or obstacles might actually be potential and opportunity?
3. What has God called you to do that you’re afraid to attempt?
4. If you don’t have IT, what are you going to do to get IT?

Closing Prayer (Franciscan Prayer)

May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half truths, and superficial relationships, so that you may live deep within your heart.

May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that you may work for justice, freedom and peace.

May God bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation, and war, so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and to turn their pain in to joy.

And may God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in this world, so that you can do what others claim cannot be done.

from Willow Creek Leadership Summit 2008: Session 4 Part 2, Efrem Smith, Sanctuary Covenant Church, Leading in New Cultural Realities

We live in a divided, multi-racial world.  All of us who are leaders must be willing to lead out in this increasingly multi-ethnic, multicultural world.

We must become loving leaders.

• In order to lead in this every increasing multicultural world, we must become a “beloved leader.”  MLK Jr. used the phrase, “The beloved community” to talk about a life lived across racial lines.  You can’t have a beloved community without beloved leaders.  We become a beloved leaders when we allow God’s love to come in us and flow through us to lead in a multicultural world. 
• “Justice comes when God comes back, but until then, it’s just us.” — a friend from Texas
• Who loves across race like God?

We must become abiding leaders.

• We need to abide in something greater than us.
• Some of us have not stepped out as multiethnic leaders because we don’t feel qualified.  That’s an excuse.  God’s in the business of recruiting unqualified leaders.
• This is no time for empire building.  This is a time to “dwell” or “abide” with the people.
• “Sometimes we have to stop dreaming about church buildings and start thinking about transformation.”

We must become confessing leaders.

• We have to confess where we’ve gotten it wrong.  We have to be willing to say, “My bad.”
• “When high pressure collides with low pressure, it creates a storm.  One of the reasons we have such storms in racial tension in our world is because the high pressure of what God wants to do is hitting the low pressure of what we’d rather do.”
• There is no place in the world anymore where you can segregate but in the church.

We must become perfecting leaders.

How? 

• We must do it organically in real communities.  Organic gatherings.  “If you can have a multi-ethnic potluck in Minnesota, you can certainly do it in Bangaldesh.”
• Youth development and empowerment.
• We have to deal with systemic issues.

We must engage a multicultural, multiethnic, multicultural world.  Almost nowhere in the world would anyone speak against that anymore.  What’s wrong with the church?  What if we actually did something about the system and the ethos that created the system of segregated churches and did something that was socially innovative and gave a little picture of heaven?

My battery is dead… so I have sign off.  Until tomorrow…

from Willow Creek Leadership Summit 2008: Session 4 Part 1, John Burke, Gateway Community Church, Leading in New Cultural Realities

The right kind of soil matters.

I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow. The man who plants and the man who waters have one purpose, and each will be rewarded according to his own labor. For we are God’s fellow workers; you are God’s field, God’s building. –1 Corinthians 3:6-9

Spiritual leadership is all about creating the right soil, the right environment.

• Spiritual leadership/ church is messy.  Jesus’ ministry was messy.
• Does the soil you’re creating allow room for authentic questions and struggling?
• We have to be willing to get our hands dirty, cultivating the soil as necessary.
• Who should we be ministering to and reaching?  Messy people.
• If we are not seeing messy people around us who are becoming part of the church, then we are not leading like Jesus.

The Messy Leadership That Cultivates Environments

1. Cultivate the soil with grace-giving acceptance.  Come as you are.  God will accept you as is and walk with you to become more and more what he intended for you.  Most people don’t experience this kind of grace-giving acceptance from Christians.  [Note:  this reminds me of the book The UnChristian and many of the findings there.  See my posts on UnChristian.]  U2 - “Grace makes beauty out of ugly things.”  Too many churches are making it difficult for messy people to come to God.  (cf. Acts 15:10-11,19)  What are the barriers to grace in our context (our particular church/ perceptions, etc.) ie. hatred of gays, how we think about other religions.  How do we answer the culture’s questions well without creating barriers to grace?  In every culture, there are cultural barriers to grace.  What are they in yours?  And how do you do that without compromising truth?
2. Cultivate the soil with authentic confessing community.  Jesus couldn’t stand the game-playing, saving face of the Pharisees.  Phariseeism is pretending that we’re better than we really are.  When we really live in authenticity with one another, God shows up and something amazing happens.  And that is something the world is looking for.  “…calling out the masterpiece underneath the mud.”
3. Inspiring constant connection to God’s spirit.  [John 13-17]  This is one of the most difficult things for self-centered Christians to do.  Stay connected; fruit happens.  [axiom] Spiritual fruit is scandalously simple.

I’m impressed with John Burke because he’s connecting a couple of things together that I really like.  He’s authetic.  He’s leading an effective church reaching many who are far from God.  He’s connected to an emerging culture and meeting real people who are really in the real world.  He doesn’t back off from solid scriptural truths about spiritual transformation.  He’s seeing real fruit in the younger generations and doing creative ministry that is both meangingful and impactful. 

from Willow Creek Leadership Summit 2008: Session 3 Part 2, Wendy Kopp, Teach for America

Wow.  Wendy was certainly inspiring.  Her conversation with Bill Hybels was wonderful to listen to, but difficult to capture in writing because it was an interview.  So, I’m not even going to try.  Here are just a couple of things:

13 million kids in America live below the poverty line.  Half of those never graduate high school.

“It’s easy to lead something you really believe in.”

Bill:   “You are anabashed about asking people to give up 2 years of their lives, and you see results.  Why are church people afraid to ask people to sacrifice?” [paraphrase]

Welcome to the Gum, Geckos, and God Blog Tour!  I was delighted to be invited to participate.  I not only enjoyed reading the book, but interacting with Jim has been fun, too.  Jim Speigel is Philosophy Professor at Taylor University in Indiana. (Also, Jim and his wife just launched a new blog as well, called Wisdom and Folly.)  I had a hard time confining my questions, so I asked Jim a series of questions.  I’ll be posting a new one every couple of hours, and I hope you find these engaging.  Here’s the first installment.

Embarking: My question comes from pages 20 and 21.  You are talking there about how you realize that no matter how hard you try, you cannot shield your kids from the evils of life.  Then you talk about Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings Trilogy (a favorite of mine as well), the Black Riders, and the intent of “this present darkness” and the rulers of this age to hurt, intimidate, and influence your children against the Kingdom of God.  Then you mention that you didn’t realize how your training in philosophy - what you call “the study of wisdom” would prepare you to be a better parent.  The question, then, involves your appropriation here of Tolkein, and later Star Wars and your mention of art and the aesthetic in the spiritual formation of your children (see p. 131).  I love your appropriation of art and aesthetics to develop a creative imagination for what it might be like to in another person’s shoes to better live out the Golden Rule.  Throughout the book, we can see clearly your appropriation of both philosophy and your training in biology, but can you tell us a little more about the use of art and aesthetics in such things I imagine as training children in a biblical worldview, increasing their sensibilities to beauty and its malformations, and strengthening them for engagement with the world in which we live?  And beyond children, how can we increase and imaginative vision that boosts morality practically in our churches today?  (By the way, I think such creative imagination and imaginative teaching is seriously missing from our arsenal for a number of cultural reasons, particular in the Protestant and evangelical manifestations of Christian faith.)

SPIEGEL:  The category of beauty is crucial to a Christian worldview, and both adults and Christians should have a strong aesthetic sensibility.  This is so for several reasons.  First, we believe that God is the Cosmic Artist.  He created everything, and he made his creation beautiful.  Now as we struggle to comprehend both God and the nature of the universe, the concept of God as artist will help us in both respects, especially as we encounter confusing or mysterious aspects to the world and the divine nature.  Since good art has many layers of meaning and needs to be interpreted, we can better understand why there would be so much mystery in the world given that God is an artist.  Beauty is often confounding, even in human-made art.  How much more so, then, in divine art?

Second, God himself is beautiful.  Scripture frequently refers to the “glory” of the Lord, but rarely do Christians-especially evangelicals-recognize that the term “glory” is an aesthetic concept.  So when we consider the truth that God does all things for his “glory,” we discover that the meaning of everything is ultimately aesthetic-for God to demonstrate the beauty of his being.  It was through reading Jonathan Edwards’ The Nature of True Virtue that I came to this realization, and it has transformed the way I think about and apply theology.  I now see, as Edwards points out, that even moral concepts are subcategories of the aesthetic.  For example, virtue is a kind of moral beauty.

Third, God’s primary special revelation-the Bible-is itself a work of literary art.  This not only reveals God’s high regard for aesthetics but it also implies that a sound biblical hermeneutic must be aesthetically savvy.  And those of us who handle Scripture in a leadership capacity-as theologians, biblical scholars, preachers, youth ministers, etc.-must learn something about aesthetics if we are to maximize our effectiveness.  Minimally, I think this implies that Christian leaders should regularly “consume” good art, in the form of quality music, film, literature, etc.  This point answers your last question, I think.  We, as a church, will develop a stronger “imaginative vision” as we become more aesthetically literate.  Christians should be connoisseurs of all kinds of art forms.  As churches become more aesthetically trained, a number of salutary effects will follow, from increased discernment to greater creative ability among Christian artists themselves.

Finally, to address something you allude to in your question, in Gum, Geckos, and God I explain why aesthetic development is a boon to moral-spiritual development, particularly as regards our ability to apply the Golden Rule.  Since application of this rule requires a strong imagination (as one tries to imagine what it is like to be person X in a certain situation), the more we can develop our imagination, the better we will be at applying the Golden Rule.  Well, of course, this rule is at the heart of a Christian ethic, so it follows that the more imaginatively skilled one is, the more morally mature one will be-other things being equal, of course.  In other words, whatever one’s state of moral-spiritual formation, it can only be improved through aesthetic development.  Here we see, then, a strong recommendation for training in the arts and aesthetics.

I’ve talked in previous posts about what it means, has meant, and might mean in the future to be an evangelical.  There are lots of definitions, but there is some remarkable similarity among them.  I want to mention a new document here entitled “An Evangelical Manifesto” which seeks to give some definition to Evangelical identity and public commitment.  The document seeks from within evangelicalism to give self-definition in a sort of apologetic against or in contra-distinction to the labels that can come from culture, media, and those who might speak against evangelicals.  I don’t think, though, that it’s primarily defensive.  There’s certainly a view towards the future of evangelicalism in the midst of a shifting church, culture, and theological debate.  There is certainly a focus here on the place of evangelicals in public life and some “redefining” based upon evangelicalism’s wedding itself too much in the past to religious right.  The document on first glance looks to be pretty good.  People like Timothy George, Os Guiness, Richard Mouw, and Dallas Willard were a part of the steering committee, which is good.  I’m still reading it, so I’m not ready to comment, yet.  There are a few things about the tone, the wideness, and the heart of evangelicalism that I like.  Not sure if I’ll sign it, yet. It’s been noted by CNN (actually AP) and USA Today among others (and you can find an article at CT here).

In the year that I was born, Joseph Sittler, former professor of biblical theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School wrote the following in Essays on Nature and Grace. 

As biblical and theological scholarship moves toward a more inclusive and precise formulation of the hermeneutical problem, more serious attention is being given to what theological implications inhere in style of speech and forms of rhetoric as these come to us from the earliest Christian communities. [from "Evocations of Grace," p. 98}

The hermeneutical issues inherent in the way communities are formed, what we believe, how our social systems are shaped, how our biases are generated and solidied, how power is used and abused... these are not new issues.  The "linguistic turn" as it's usually called, and the move towards a non-foundationalist epistemology (which are two critical cultural/ philosophical/ theological changes underneath postmodernity) are not new on the scene.  The hoopla in the church today over these questions, their potential danger according to some, the risk of moving towards a hermeneutic more sensitive to these issues, and the emerging church are played like the bogie man has suddenly arrived.  As the quote above reminds us from the year of my birth... this is an issue that goes back well over 36 years, and even more.  Theologians and philosophers and linguists have been working on these issues for decades.  It is only lately that the cultural tide of postmodernity has really begun to rattle the things that so many of us  have held dear.  Had we been paying attention all along, we might have been more prepared as a church to engage with this shifting cultural and philosophical paradigm without running scared and immediately becoming defensive or reactionary.

Again... one more reason for the church to be constantly listening with one ear to the culture.  Hear me clearly... not so that we can change what we believe to suit the culture or that culture holds even a candle to the revelation of God and his interaction with creation, but so that we can more clearly understand who God is, who we are, and what we believe in the midst of shifting cultural sands, emerging global and local (glocal) realities and communicate with that culture in the language it is using.  We must stop creating bunkers to retreat from a changing culture or we truly fail to be salt and light in the world because we salt food people aren't eating or light up places where no one lives. 

Ask yourself:  "What good does it do to put an extravagant lighting system in abandoned factory built for making Polaroid film when even Polaroid has decided to stop making Polaroid and go digital?"

Or, "Why dump your greatest investment dollars in Jolt Cola if everyone's now drinking Starbucks, Rockstar, and Green Tea?"

I know those are strange questions... or analogies... but that's what it sometimes feels like churches do because we like Jolt and Polaroids.

Here is one of my favorite verses as of late:  "No one, after drinking old wine wants the new, for he says, 'the old is better.'" [Luke 5:39]