1/13/14. “TOTO, I’VE A FEELING WE’RE NOT IN KANSAS ANYMORE!”

BLOG 1/13/14. “ TOTO, I’VE A FEELING WE’RE NOT IN KANSAS ANYMORE!”

The direction to which I have committed myself in these Blogs is that of an alternative narrative for the church’s future. Right away I’m in trouble. I have learned the hard way that imagining a different future for the church doesn’t sit well with those who are happily content with the present, even when that present may be a relic of a passing culture, and rapidly fading to the margins of the 21st century. More than that, I have learned that people can be contemptuous of me when I dare to critique the church to which they are emotionally attached, even to the point of idolatry. It is fairly well established that most cannot imagine anything other than the church they know and have experienced—they cannot see beyond the horizons, or suspend the boundaries of their thinking.

When Dorothy and Toto wound up after having been swept by tornado into the Land of Oz, it didn’t take long for Dorothy to decide that they weren’t in Kansas anymore. Even that illustration may lose my younger readers (but thanks to Google they can check sit out). In recent decades we have gone through what can best be described as a cultural diastrophism, when the subterranean tectonic plates upon which we depended for stability for centuries, shifted and eliminated the familiar landscape. One of the pieces of that landscape was the conception of the church as an institution, a village meeting place, a reminder of the story of Jesus, a community with pastoral father-figures, liturgical services, respectable people, good works of many sorts, choirs and fine music—but increasingly detached from the daily lives of its participants, and essentially unevangelized in its comprehension of the teachings of Jesus, and the obedience required by such.

We moved ineluctably into the post-modern, post-Christian (post-everything?) western culture of the past millennium and a half, and into the present information age-digital global culture, with the church diminishing in the prestige and influence which it formerly had, and being so inconsequential it has been increasingly abandoned by many, especially in the emerging Millennial and the Generation Z cultures. These generations have more information at their finger-tips (being digital natives) than is imaginable—the iPhone bunch. But they also live in a culture of moral and ethical ambiguity, and loss of meaning, while at the same time they come with a pragmatic streak that wants results. The church has been in denial over this. It, all to much, has clung to its traditional forms of dominant clergy, passive laity, predictable church life and sermons, impressive sanctuaries … while more and more of its participants abandon this as: questionable use of their time, and resources, even many of those who are intentional disciples of Jesus.

But I am an optimist. It is Christ who is building his church. While the church has been marginalized in the west, it is growing globally, but often in different forms. Often this Lord has to come as a ‘refiner’s fire’ before the church is refounded upon that thrilling purpose for which he founded it. So my thesis is that a previous (and increasingly ineffective) narrative of the church, so familiar to us, is departing, and we are in a position to imagine a new and alternative narrative that is the dynamic presence of God’s New Creation community, that can only be explained by God’s working, and which will be fruitful in the realities of this bewildering new culture.

So my first macro force for such a narrative is our cognition that: the church is humanly impossible, i.e., it only brings Light into the darkness by the dynamic working of the Holy Spirit creating obedient disciples whose lives display the glory of God in the midst of daily life. I’ll leave it there for now, and let you chew on it.

About rthenderson

Sixty years a pastor-teacher within the Presbyterian Church. Author of several books, the latest of which are a trilogy on missional ecclesiology: ENCHANTED COMMUNITY: JOURNEY INTO THE MYSTERY OF THE CHURCH, then, REFOUNDING THE CHURCH FROM THE UNDERSIDE, then THE CHURCH AND THE RELENTLESS DARKNESS. Previous to this trilogy was A DOOR OF HOPE: SPIRITUAL CONFLICT IN PASTORAL MINISTRY, and SUBVERSIVE JESUS, RADICAL FAITH. I am a native of West Palm Beach, Florida, a graduate of Davidson College, then of Columbia and Westminster Theological Seminaries.
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