BLOG 4/1/15. (NO FOOLING) POST-NEWBIGIN SCHIZOPHRENICS
A couple of generations ago, missionary Lesslie Newbigin returned from a distinguished missionary career in India, only to find that it was much more difficult to get a hearing for the gospel in his native U.K. than it was in India. His conclusion after some time in a local parish was that western culture had heard the gospel and had built up anti-bodies against it, and was finding the church totally irrelevant to their secular and post-Christian lives. That, in turn, provoked him to write a couple of significant volumes: Foolishness to the Greeks, and The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, which books became a cause célèbre among a large number of (frustrated?) clergy, who were finding the same phenomenon here in the United States.
There emerged onto the scene a number of think tanks, study centers, and seminary curricula to study and research this reality, namely, that we had passed from the era of Christendom, and were now rapidly entering a totally post-Christian (or post-Christendom) culture. It seems that almost everyone who encountered Newbigin’s teachings found them inarguable.
The irony that has become obvious, however, is that the very promoters of Newbigin’s thesis are those who have been formed by the ecclesiastical culture and institutions of Christendom itself, like: church institutions, theological seminaries, clergy, and church-planters—which culture is deep into their DNA—rather than by a very real and virile post-Christendom response to the problem. Church institutions, such has have dominated at least the last millennium and a half, along with a whole ecclesiastical class of church-professionals/priests/clergy are, after all, not New Testament categories. (This is possibly true of even Newbigin himself!)
All of this transition is not some night-to-day rapid transition. Cultures change at their own pace. Newbigin lived and wrote primarily to the latter half of the twentieth century. His milestone books were written at the birth point of the millennial generation, which is now entering middle-age. What has transpired meanwhile is the emergence of a digital culture, of instant communication, of social networks, of whole new and innovative cultural phenomena that now determine our daily lives more than we know.
The products of this post-Christendom culture are not only not at all impressed or influenced by our venerable old church institutions, … they are unaware of them for the most part. I have been asked by some very bright young products of this culture: What is the church? What is a pastor? These conversation partners were not asking this in any hostile way, but out of pure curiosity about terms I used that didn’t register with them. What causes curiosity in them are those persons who actually are products and practitioners of the life and teachings of Jesus. When they encounter one or several folk who think and behave in response to a different authority, or creative source, or guiding line, or center provided by God’s upside-down Kingdom which lives have meaning and hope and humor, … then they want to know why that is. That’s what Christendom missed. It focused on the ecclesiastical institutions and its traditions and rites, but not on equipping Christ’s individual followers into the image of Christ.
Back to the post-Newbigin schizophrenics: There is (as I said above: ‘ironically’) a whole syndrome of church leaders who think they are cutting edge folk because they have studied Newbigin, and agree with his thesis, but in reality are still practitioners of a Christendom ecclesiology. They need a lesson from Jeff Bezos and focus on the individual customer rather than on corporate profits., … or maybe Steve Jobs who said that every company ought to reinvent itself every ten years. Chew on that, and feed me back your comments. Thanks.
