8/3/14. BLOG. THE CHURCH: DO WE NEED A NEW PARADIGM?
Let me pose a question, or maybe a proposition, that will be widely misunderstood by many. I’m thinking about a generation that is either just emerging, or maybe not even born yet—but time moves swiftly. Here’s the question: Do we need a new paradigm, or a whole new conception of what the design of the church is to be in the purpose of God, and how it relates to its mission as we move further and further into the ‘post-Christian’ culture?
What provokes this was a random conversation I had with a young adult the other day on the covered deck out in the back of one of my favorite coffee shops. Most of the folk there are totally absorbed with their laptops, or with a book, or maybe doing business on their iPhone. Mostly, it is a quiet thoughtful place, where each is absorbed in his, or her, own project. I love it. But, the other day there were just two of us on the deck, and we made eye contact, which indicated that we acknowledged each other as persons, and a willingness to chat for a moment. The title of an open textbook on this guy’s table triggered an inquiry on my part, and I asked him what he was working on … which precipitated a question about what was his occupation/profession.
I pursued that with him, and he was quite eager to share what he was all about. But then he asked me what my career had been (I’m obviously way beyond my prime, alas!). I told him that I had been a pastor for fifty years. But now, get this: His surprising response to me was, “What is a ‘pastor’?” So I explained to him that it was the teaching-mentoring function I held in the church for all of those years.
Are you ready for this? His response to that was: “What in the world is a ‘church’?” He acknowledged that he had heard the word, and had seen the name of some buildings, but it never triggered any inquiry. He acknowledged that even though it had never been anything that called forth his interest, that something on the fringes of his mind became uncomfortable about it.
This is a guy, who is a graduate student in a prestigious university, mind you. But church and pastor were not categories that he had ever had to come to grips with. Here’s my point: in this year of 2014 there are still plenty of people who have had significant and positive engagements with the church, or with pastors, … and there are also those who have been burned, or had unpleasant experiences with it, … but, there is a growing demographic group of younger adults who have no concept of such whatsoever. A new generational culture is emerging very rapidly.
And there is that fact that over 50% of the world’s population is under 25 years of age, and there is a generation yet unborn who will more and more be products of the post-Christian culture, and for whom the whole Christian phenomenon is off their chart. At the same time, there is that huge human hungering for caring human relationships, for meaning, for some kind of a community of encouragement that doesn’t come by way of social media, iPhones, health and exercise clubs, and those sorts of neighborhoods.
The sad fact for many of this present generation, who do, in fact, have connection with the church, is the reality that many so-called churches can be places of loneliness, confederations of religious strangers, and with no context for the kind of wholesome and redemptive and transformationalintimacy that the New Testament so strongly indicates is to be the dynamic of the love of God made flesh and blood in God’s recreated human community.
I’m looking at that generation yet unborn, and at the need for a new paradigm for the church as it pursues its missionary mandate in the world, … a paradigm that moves totally away from impersonal church institutions with their dependence upon sanctuaries and church professionals and rituals, … to a paradigm that is something more like colonies of God’s new humanity in Christ that grow out of a dynamic encounter with the love of God in Christ.
That’s what I’m chewing on. Stand by.
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