BLOG 3/9/16. APPLE, AIRBNB, UBER … AND THE CHURCH

BLOG 3/9/2016. APPLE, AIRBNB, UBER … AND THE CHURCH

Those who think creatively and who think futuristically fascinate me. As someone has said, such creative people “suspend the horizons within which everyone else thinks.” I sat listening in utter fascination the other day when Charlie Rose interviewed the CEOs of Apple (Tim Cook), Airbnb (Brian Chesky), and Uber (Travis Kalanik). I had to chuckle because in the earlier days of my rather long life, such stuff would have been consigned to the category of science fiction.  Add to them the other transformational figures in this emerging culture such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergei Brin and Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, … and on and on. What is true of all of them is that they tend to be young, they have imaginations, they sense real needs, have a focus on the customer, and who see nothing as impossible. They are all creative, and they are all futurist.

But, alas, there are huge segments of the population who want it as it has always been, or the way it used to be. They are not all that interested in creativity or in the future. This is quite obvious in the current presidential campaign in which there are those who want to “make America great again,” or “take back America,” and conversely others who want “a future you can believe in.”

The church is not at all immune to this. I admittedly have the proclivity of being a futurist and to have an eye to the emerging generational culture—even though I am getting ancient. This became an obvious problem to me in a church I once pastored which was predominately older folk, but in a community with a generation of younger adults who had a difficult time identifying with ageing churches. My leadership was formed by my Biblical sense of the church’s mission, and by the church’s definition as given in New Testament scriptures, and did not give it liberty to be a “comfort zone” religious institution, but rather an incarnational community of the radical and subversive teachings of Jesus and the apostles (note those adjectives).

There began to emerge a subtle and persistence resistance to my leadership among a number of my designated leaders (elders), and hearty encouragement only by a few. So we resolved to have a retreat and to invite an elder from another Presbyterian Church, who was also a remarkable management consultant, to lead it. As a part of the weekend retreat she ran us all through a Myers-Briggs personality discipline. The weekend was cordial and we concluded it without coming to any dramatic conclusion. But she invited me and my wife to lunch the next week, and chuckled that the problem was obvious, namely, I was an INTJ or a futurist, as were only a few of the other elders, but the majority of the elders were resistant to that and wanted stability and traditional church structures. Futurist are always a very minority factor in the scheme of  things.

The patterns of the past, as expressed in traditional church institutions, were quite comfortable for a former culture, but are obviously not speaking to the hidden spiritual hungerings of a totally different post-Christian, even secular, age. But that doesn’t mean that there is not a need there for these products of the Information Age. We are, to be sure in a liminal period culturally. But all too much of the traditional past is held to with an idolatrous zeal by many who sit in positions of influence in congregations and seminaries. Happily, there are those prophetic younger voices who are speaking to this issue, but to older and more traditional products of the church, they are speaking in sort of an ecclesiastical science-fiction. The church that Jesus is building is alive and well, but it is and will increasingly take on new forms, … even as businesses and commercial interests have had to adapt to Apple, Uber, Amazon, Airbnb, Micosoft, Google and the rest. It’ll be fun to watch. But it is happening! You may find a vital church in a corner pub on a Sunday morning, or some colony of God’s New Creation people in an expression you never imagined. Jesus said: “I will build my church,” but charged us to “go make disciples.” That’s the mandate.

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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