BLOG 8/17/16. BREAKING WITH TRADITIONAL ORTHODOXY ON CHURCH INSTITUTIONS (continuing the conversation from the last blog)
The response to my last blog on: “the sons of the world being more shrewd than the children of light” was interesting. For at least a millennium and a half the traditional orthodoxy made the focus of the church’s role in the world to be church institutions, i.e., sacralized places to which one resorted to participate in the rites of ‘Christian worship’. This along with the dominance of a sacralized class of persons known as ‘clergy’ insofar as history records was the traditional orthodoxy. Its focus was not so much on the missional raison d’etre of the church, that purpose for which Christ calls out a people and sends them into this world to be in incarnation of his New Humanity in recreated community, … but rather on the proper form and operation of church institutions.
So whenever one departs from that traditional orthodoxy some folk get quite uncomfortable. And there is no moment in which all of that traditional orthodoxy changed, no 9/11 Twin Towers, or December 7th Pearl Harbor moment. Rather it was a gradual and almost imperceptible cultural diastrophism in which such institutions began to lose their dominance, especially in our western culture. Lesslie Newbigin was the prophetic voice who sounded warning signals in the latter half of the 20th century. What ever-so-subtly there began to take place is what his disciples call: a period of liminality, like a ‘cultural whitewater’ in which we have been forced from the stability of the traditional orthodoxy (Christendom) and are being carried along in forces beyond our control into the unknowns of a post-Christendom cultural scene that is still unfolding before us.
The post-World War II generation of Boomers were the first blush of some restlessness with the whole scene, but though they produced the ‘Woodstock culture’ and episodes of generational rebellion, they were still very attached to their parents’ traditional orthodoxy of Christendom. They were followed by what is known as Gen X’ers. (Sociologists Strauss and Howe have written several great explanations of the generational cultures.) The Gen Xers where skeptical about the whole scene but were not generally an activist generation, but they were emerging ineluctably into the whitewater/liminality for which they and the church were unprepared. They became more detached from Christendom and the church. They were followed by a very creative, ‘fix-it’, ‘create something new’ Millennial generation. The whole digital culture became their native soil, and the traditional church faded more and more to the margins. Now is emerging into full influence Generation i-Y, almost totally formed by the digital culture.
So back to my thesis of the last Blog: Over 50% of the world’s population is now under 25 years of age, and for most of them the church and its Christendom form hardly registers anywhere in their consciousness—and meanwhile those traditional church institutions with their steeples, and organs, and in-house religious activities are vainly trying to regroup themselves to reach the Boomers, … which Boomers are still somewhat wedded to the structures of Christendom, but which Boomers are now moving off the cneter stage and into the AARP.
Astute observers, such as Bill Easum saw this several decades ago and wrote his book: Dancing With Dinosaurs. So also missiologist Howard Snyder very accurately stated it in his The Problem of Wineskins. This all doesn’t mean that the church is dying or losing its dynamism, only that there has emerged a whole new generation of creative, and culturally aware church planters who are motivated by their mission, the mission for which Christ calls the church. These colonies come in all kinds of forms, and are indigenous to their neighborhoods, and keen in communicating their message—of faithfully being the children of the Light, agents of Christ’s love and hope right in the midst of the vicissitudes of this culture, and negotiating the ‘whitewater’ … this period of ‘liminality’ into the culture of post-Christendom. They are creative and very encouraging to me. Stand by.
