BLOG 7/4/17. WHEN THE CULTURE CHANGES AND THE CHURCH DOESN’T
On a Fourth of July when a troubled nation seeks to remember its more noble roots (and maybe forget its more ignoble history of racism, prejudice, anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, anti-immigrants from many places, etc.), … let me shift gears and look at the Christian church’s response, or lack of response, to the rapidly changing culture, in which it is an alien, or unknown, factor, and how the emerging generation is able to totally ignore it.
The Pew Research Center has revealed (and I’m quoting from How to Escape the Apocalypse by Wilkinson and Joustra) that the emerging generation is “more un-moored and distrustful of institutions than their parents … they don’t like political parties (though they tend to vote liberal) and tend not to identify with religious institutions, but they think the social future is relatively bright” (p. 164). One can add to that appraisal the realities of a nomadic culture in which persons and families are more nomadic, moving frequently, changing jobs, living overseas, and which one’s residence may be temporary, and in which one seldom knows one’s neighbors because they are ‘cocooners’ who come home, pull down the garage door and disappear. Or there is the iPhone culture where folk don’t engage in fruitful conversation eyeball to eyeball easily, and are confined to the world they find on their devices. Then there is the absence of any traditional and formative cultural framework of thinking, and whatever it may be, it is more likely to be some form of self-satisfied humanism than anything like the accepted Judeo-Christian thought patterns of former generations.
The culture has drastically changed. In many ways, the cultural traditions of our parents’ generation are like a rug that has been pulled out from under us, along with its institutions. But has the church as church, … the church as the community of God’s New Creation people ceased to exist? Or has it just failed to notice that it no longer that things are not as they once were, and all the cultural landscape has shifted under our feet. I often think of our Christian family in nations where the church has been declared illegal by radical governments, and its venerable sanctuaries destroyed. Does that mean that the church ceases to exist in those places, or only that it has had a rude awakening to its true calling? Maybe gone underground?
Oliver Goldsmith wrote his poem about The Deserted Village in the 18th century. It is about the cultural transition that took place when the industrial revolution moved the textile industry from being a cottage industry in small villages, to the massive industries in the large cities, so that the villages sat nearly empty, and one of the victims was the churches which had been a significant part of the life of the village, and where the pastor was a key human encourager. Now that was all changed, and the church hardly knew how to incarnate itself in the large, impersonal, poverty-stricken culture. The culture changed but the church didn’t know how to respond.
If the church of the 21st century is to be the incarnation of God’s New Humanity in Christ, then it must continually be engaged in, and equipping every believer in what can only be described as a ‘cultural exegesis’ and able to recognize the components of that culture, and be creative, mobile, flexible, and versatile in it communal expressions. The emerging generation is still that humanity that God loves with infinite love in Jesus Christ, but they are not into church institutions, but rather are into meaningful relationships. … And that has thrilling prospect if one is willing to live dangerously! Otherwise the church joins in the deserted village syndrome, alas!
http://wipfandstock.com/what-on-earth-is-the-church-14083.html
