Bandits No More

As one who has done a fair amount of work on postmodernism, I am always attentive to discussions on the subject, though never surprised when one particular approach to postmodernism (the Neo-Nietzschean) is taken to be paradigmatic of the whole. From Barna’s answer to the question, “What is postmodernism?” it looks like he is taking that approach.

Postmodernism represents the change in worldview based on the ideas that there are no moral absolutes because truth is a relative construct; that life is mosaic rather than linear; that meaning is derived from the customization of reality rather than the acceptance of a mass reality; and that all you can know for certain is what you experience.

If we’re going to understand POSTmodernism, it helps to consider MODERNISM first. Speaking philosophically (although there are many other ways to speak, this seems to be the ball park in which most Christians think about postmodernism), modern thought has majored on Three interrelated themes: Epistemology (the question of how knowledge, especially certain knowledge works), Atomism (especially in its social form, Individualism), Universalism (a preference for the timeless, eternal, abstract and general over the particular, concrete and contingent).

The strongest stands of modern thought have followed Descartes and Locke in positing a foundational approach to knowledge. The strands of POSTmodernism that get the most press assume this position also. True knowledge – that which leads to certainty (which in morality might be termed “absolutes”) is foundationalist – that is, it is rationally built upon universal and indubitable propositions. These POSTmoderns differ from the moderns in that once they accept this criterion for true knowledge they reject the notion that it is actually attainable.

What we see in this variety of postmodernism is, then, more an extreme form of modernity than it is something different. This is also the case in the second area, Atomism. Within this version of PM, we see radical individualism, though frequently this variant appears to let its versions of Epistemology and Atomism moderate its hold on Universalism.

Fortunately, Barna moves beyond the theoretical into the practical. Here his repsonses are more helpful. When asked about how to reach this generation he responds:

First, you cannot effectively evangelize most of them by preaching at them. Effective evangelism with this group requires relationships, dialogue and a willingness to journey together. A Socratic form of evangelism – question-based, rather than didactic; long-term rather than hit-and-run; conversational rather than confrontational; backed up by personal modeling rather than institutional traditions and dogma – works best.

Second, there is neither interest in nor loyalty to the local church, so assumptions regarding the primacy of church affiliation are ill-advised. We do not want to automatically give in to people’s desires, but we also have to face certain realities regarding Scripture, culture and religious practices and tendencies. The format of the church that most people experience was man-made, not God-ordained. We have a lot of leeway regarding what the church should look like, and very little leeway regarding what we should believe. Consequently, we have to re-think the shape or model of the church required to penetrate young people in a completely different and rapidly changing culture.

Third, leadership is paramount to growing a healthy and far-reaching Church among young people. Vision, mobilization, motivation, and strategic direction are necessary for both appeal and impact. Having churches that lack strong, vision-driven leadership won’t get far.

This is good. Evangelism is about people relating to people. It’s not about finding the one effective strategy or assuming one-size-fits-all.

Next question: given the regular decrease in church membership over the past ten years (with few exceptions) what do you believe are the keys to “bringing them back?”

People respond to value. If they felt they were getting something of value, they would devote themselves to the ends of the church. Their absence suggests that they are not receiving perceived value. Value is reflected in different things to different people.

For regular church-goers value may be a great children’s ministry, great preaching, belonging to a loving community, and so forth. For individuals who are not faith-focused, it may relate to friendships, doing acts of kindness that make a difference in people’s lives, gaining meaning in life or achieving a sense of belonging. When people adopt a church, they want a place that fills in the gaps in their life or that helps them to be someone they would not otherwise become.

Bottom line, we must recognize that each person has to be treated as an important individual and ministered to in ways that reflect their individuality and idiosyncrasies. To bring people back to a church we must develop significant relationships with them; live a credible Christian life that makes such an experience desirable or at least intriguing enough to explore; take advantage of opportunities to engage them in dialogue about meaning, purpose and truth; invite them to experience a community of faith that provides value and does not waste their time or insult their taste and intellect; and mentor them in light of biblical principles as they strive to make sense of life and faith.

Is his adherence to individualism and the modern marketing model taking him too far? How far can one take the teaching of becoming “all things to all people” that we find in I Corinthians 9?

The last question to Barana asks him what surprises him the most when he looks at the American church today. Here’s part of his answer:

How ignorant people are of their faith in spite of decades of exposure to teaching, preaching and conversation about Christianity. Most people say they know all the major principles of the Christian faith and have no intention of changing any of their perspectives – and they stick to that. However, when you question them as to what they believe, it becomes apparent how ill-informed most Americans are about the fundamentals of Christianity. Getting them into Bible study groups, Sunday school classes and more worship services seems to have a negligible affect upon their faith knowledge. Sadly, in many ways we seem to have inoculated people to Christ.

Why are people so happy to be ignorant? Or – perhaps the better question – why are people so unwilling to have their knowledge tested? My guess is that most think what they know is irrelevant – that basic Christian convictions are only important to professional Christians and have no practical relevance to their lives. To me, this is one of the main fruits of modernity that makes me weep.

The Anglican church, like many in the west, is facing fracture. The Lambeth Commission report is due tomorrow and it seems unlikely that they can produce a report that will make the Orthodox (most of the Anglicans around the world) and the Revisionists (mostly in the West) happy.

What strikes me is one response by American Episcopalians:

But there are many Episcopal clergy and laity — the great majority of the American church, in fact — who believe the issue is not homosexuality, biblical orthodoxy or traditional Anglicanism. Forty-five signed a recent statement affirming themselves as the church’s mainstream, concerned that “the Anglican tradition of living in tension and diversity of thought” is at stake.

Anglicanism has historically seen itself as a middle way between Catholicism & Protestantism. It has embraced great diversity. But in seeing diversity as its core value, its defining purpose, these Anglicans seem to have left Christianity behind. Jesus – and the orthodox tradition – may or may not be important, but they are secondary to maintaining diversity of thought. Unfortunately other churches (including my own UMC) seem to have gone this same route.

We certainly have our work cut out for us.

Christianity Today has a short overview of the history of the church in Turkey. Not a pretty picture.

Purpose Driven Life – Day 4

The theme of Day 4 is the fact that we humans are made for eternity. We’re made to last forever. If this is so, there are important consequences for how we live our lives.

1. “Your relationship to God on earth will determine your relationship to him in eternity.” This is an important corollary. Not only must remember that we are eternal beings, not only must we remember that this life is exceedingly small compared to eternity, but we must also act on the reality that this life, short as it is, has eternal consequences. What we do here and now is of tremendous importance. At the end of the chapter he adds, “measured against eternity, our time on earth is just the blink of an eye, but the consequences of it will last forever.”
2. “When you live in light of eternity, your values change…. You place a higher premium n relationships and character instead of fame or wealth or achievements or even fun.” What is it we’re involved in that will last the longest? It certainly isn’t the accumulation of things. After we start acting from the perspective of eternity, we can see more clearly how ephemeral so many of things our culture values really are.

This article quotes several church leaders speaking to the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry. Let’s start with retired Bishop Joe Pennell:

“Every congregation deserves spiritual leaders,” he said. “… We need leaders today who are concerned about more than institution maintenance. We need leaders who are more concerned about faith than maintaining the status quo. We need leaders today who are nailed to the historic faith, which brought the United Methodist Church into being.”

There seems to be an implicit claim that some number of congregations don’t have “spiritual leaders”, and that these (non- spiritual?) leaders are concerned with institutional maintenance, maintaining the status quo, and who are not “nailed” to the historic faith. I can make some sense out of this, but specifity would help. Many many pastors find themselves in typical UM congregations: an aging congregation, pressed for money, in an aging building. Fear is rampant. “Will we be able to pay the bills? Will we be able to keep the doors open?” Being rooted (can I say that instead of “nailed”?) in the historic faith is essential if these spiritual leaders are to lead their congregations into healthy change. I’m not sure how willing we are to mark out what exactly that “historic faith” is, though.

Christian leaders must be like Jesus by being counterculture leaders and understanding that if they lead out of their convictions, others will reject them, he said.

Yes, but… Which culture are we to counter? The strongly institutional and bureaucratic culture of United Methodism? Some strand of American culture?
I don’t understand the end of this sentence. Are we to seek rejection by leading out of our convictions, or are we to pursue acceptance by not having convictions?

Rev. Jerome Del Pino, top staf executive of the Board presented three leadership characteristics needed in our age:

1. The first characteristic of such a leader is that of being a guardian of the connection, he said. The leader does not abandon the ideal of a global church that is diverse in hues, languages, cultures and traditions. He said global leaders take seriously the view of Methodism’s founder, John Wesley, that the world was his parish, and because the church is changing faces, such leaders are not “prompt(ed) to trim their vision to the local, the familiar and the domestic.”
2. A global leader also bears a renewed vision of the church, Del Pino said. The leader envisions a church that recovers its Methodist heritage without “self-interested denominational navel gazing or anxious preoccupation with its own survival.” Leaders with renewed vision embrace the purpose for which the Methodist movement was founded, he said. “From the beginning, Methodism existed not for its own sake but for the sake of a larger catholicity.”
3. A third characteristic of a global leader for a global church is that of advocating for a learned leadership.

Sounds good. But with all such prescriptions, I’d like to hear how they think this differs from the status quo. What are we now doing that we need to change? What are we failing to do that we need to start doing?

Patti Davis chides President Bush for valuing “a cluster of cells” over the life and well-being of thousands. The immediate occasion of her tirade is the death of Christopher Reeve. UNlike John edwards, she doens’t proclaim that John Kerry would have healed him, but that embryonic stem cell research is the solution to such ailments.

The President encourages research on adult stem cells. This isn’t good enough.

he has authorized funding for adult stem cells—which do not hold the same miraculous potential as embryonic stem cells.

He has authorized some work on embryonic cells to proceed, but these lines are “contaminated” and worthless.

She seems to be of the opinion – admittedly easy to come by with the news coverage often so poor – that Bush has blocked all but a tiny smidgen of research on embryonic stem cells. This is not the case. what the president has done is limited the use of federal funds for this research.

She goes on:

Scientists would be working feverishly to turn this miraculous cure loose on the world. Because they have families too. They have loved ones and friends, and they value them more than clusters of cells that will only ever be clusters of cells. With each day, each month, each year that passes more people will die. We will look at names, at lives, and we will be left with the sad truth that many of them didn’t have to die.

Why do we have so many clusters of cells laying around? Where did they come from? What are they? Did an advanced race of aliens leave them behind? No. They are the results of thousands of Americans going to great lengths to have a baby of their own. Unable to have children through natural methods. couples took advantage of technology that would combine sperm & ova in the lab, leading to embryos for implantation i n the mother. Since it is common for these embryos to not implant successfully, they would create several at one time and freeze them for future usage. Well. they implanted more often than expected, and now there are thousands of embryos in freezers waiting for the implantation day that will never come.

What kind of embryos are these? Rabbits? Monkeys? Birds? Tigers? They’re human embryos. Look at them under a microscope. They probably won’t look anything like a human – only a cluster of cells. Since that’s all they LOOK like, that must be all they are. SO therefore we can do with them as we please. Or so some like Ms. Davis think. It seems to me that we have one wrong – creation of “excessive” humans – which peopel want to correct by harvesting. I’m mighty uncomfortable with that idea.

Christopher Reeve died yesterday. The first reports I heard of his death were this morning, and were in the form of “Hollywood Legend Christopher Reeve has died.” Please know I intend no disrespect for the man who became the face and outspoken advocate of spinal chord research.

What Christopher Reeve has accomplished since a horse-riding accident in 1995 left him paralyzed is certainly admirable. His advocacy has made stem-cell research a key issue in the current presidential campaign. John Kerry mentioned him by name in last week’s debate.

But was Reeve a “Hollywood Legend”? I don’t think so, and don’t understand how journalists could so characterize him. He is best known for starring in the “Superman” movies of the 80s. While many people saw these movies, and they propelled him into other roles, they were hardly the stuff of which legends are made.

Journalists are trained to seek a headline, and what better way to get a headline than to tie it to Hollywood, the capital of glitz and curiosity. I admit that when I heard the teaser on the radio, that a Hollywood Legend had died, it got my attention. I waited patiently through the commercials to get the story.

There are Hollywood Legends. Bogart, Hepburn, Ford, Spielberg, and many others, are people whose lives are synonymous with the motion picture industry. Could Reeve have continued his acting career and achieved that status? Quite possibly. He did, in fact, continue to act, but his roles were limited, and best understood as an aspect of his advocacy.

Reeve reached fame through Hollywood, but he did not reach greatness until after Hollywood. When he choose to focus his life on increasing awareness and raising research dollars for a cause that could help thousands if not millions of people, Reeve found a cause that was much larger than even the superhero he had portrayed. Was Christopher Reeve a Hollywood Legend? I don’t think so; but he may have actually become Superman, and done so from a wheelchair.

I have no trouble believing that there are peopel who have come to the US with the intention of working to destroy America. I have great troubel believing Monika Vardeh is one of them. What will it take to put more intelligence into our immigration and security screening efforts?

“Prove God’s existence to me” is the request, even the demand, of many unbelievers. Many Christians have tried over the years to do exactly that. The great Thomas Aquinas offered five proofs for God’s existence. I don’t.

When challenged to prove God’s existence, I respond by asking what the challenger accepts as evidence. Miracle stories, of course, are out. “Stories” and “myths” from the Bible they will not accept as proof. As it usually turns out, the only acceptable evidence would be on the level of calling down fire from heaven. Not fire that hurts anyone, of course, but that puts on a really good show.

While I have no doubt that my God could easily send down fire from heaven that doesn’t damage a thing, I have never felt the call to ask God for this. Neither do I think God is interested in being treated like a dog that does tricks.

What I offer as proof is this: I am part of a body of people whose lives are based in finding hope and peace and forgiveness in God. These people live their lives in response to God’s love. Were it not for the love of God, we would be without hope, without peace, and without joy. We would know moments of happiness. We would know times of laughter and light-heartedness. We would not, however, know the deep-seated joy that comes from knowing and living in the love of God.

They would, and they have, then challenged me to “prove” to them how this group of people, the church, is better than other groups of people who worship other Gods. They want me to prove to them why my God is the right one.

The only proof I can offer is the proof some are unwilling to accept. “Come and join us,” I say, “and you will find all the proof you need.”

Great insights on leading innovation by Larry Osborne. Huge distinction that applies directly to our situation:

Start-ups have only a future to create. All of their energy, thoughts and effort can be focused on finding new and better ways to do what they do. They have little to lose, and their small size allows for lots of quick mid-course corrections along the way should a path prove to be a dead-end.

Existing programs and organizations have a past to protect. The moment a program or organization moves beyond the start-up phase it no longer has just a future to create. It also has customers or members to hold onto.

He had a 25 year old church and thinks he has a past to protect. He should try 150 years.

We definitely need to pay attention to this. We need to find ways to make it safe to innovate (and safe for the innovators) even while we protect the past. Read the whole piece.