Recovering from Modernity: Reflections on the Church in an Emerging Age

The church in an emerging age! That, I believe, is a better way to locate us than the more common terms “emerging” or “emergent” church. I don’t believe we want to be an “emerging,” “emergent,” or “postmodern” church, any more than we should have wanted to become a “modern” church. Rather, in both cases we should have prayed to become the church in either modernity or our postmodern emerging age. Engaged with but not determined by either age; incarnate in but not defined by the spirits of these ages; this is the kind of faithfulness our God requires. in whatever age and place we are called to discover under the Spirit’s tutelage how to be in but not of our world.

Let me say up front what I believe is NOT at stake in this discussion: style of worship or music! To take up “emerging” themes and practices to tweak or build a different, non-traditional way of worshiping is largely a modernist move in line with the confidence in our technological competence. This treats our current struggles as technical problems to which we know or can reasonably expect to find and implement the answers we are seeking.

My conviction, however, is that in this emerging age we face adaptive, not technical, challenges. We have never been this way before (Joshua 3:4ff.) and we do not know the way ahead. The issues confronting us cut far deeper than merely changing the face of worship in an effort to achieve relevance. These challenges require us to adapt what we have known and been and done heretofore in search of genuinely new ways of knowing, being, and doing that creatively respond to the new situation we find ourselves in.

Modernity has been our milieu and master. That milieu is now changing. That master is losing its grip on many of us. A new freedom looms for those willing to embrace it. Adaptive change at our time and in our place begins, I suggest, by entering a recovery process, like unto Alcoholics Anonymous, to enable us to lay hold of that freedom shorn of modernity’s habits and hubris.

Thus, I offer my reflections on what such a recovery or discipleship in our time might entail. I will use a modified version of the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous as a template for my thoughts. I have tried neither to be systematic nor exhaustive; rather suggestive and provocative.

1. We continue to admit that we are powerless over (modernity and the modern church) — that our lives (and discipleship) have become unmanageable.

“The times, they are a changin’.” Bob Dylan’s ode to the cultural upheaval of the 60’s remains true - even truer - for our own time. For we live in an “emerging” age, a time not completely different from what it was, not fully yet what it will be. Experts argue whether this emerging time is late modernity, hyper-modernity, incipient postmodernity, postmodernity, or even post-postmodernity. As long as we recognize, with Dylan, that “the times, they are a changing’,” and can recognize the major features of this change, we can safely leave the experts to decide what kind of “-dernity” it should be called. For myself, I’ll stick with “emerging.”

The church is emerging along with everything else. It should be better prepared for such change because of all groups in our culture the church is the one that should know it is on a journey! The church should be the one group among all others that resists any ideological mystification that implies or asserts that we (our culture, our group, our church, the world) have arrived. After all, the church was first called “the Way” (Acts 9:2) not “the Destination.”

Yet through this time of emergence (roughly the 60’s – present, particularly from the 1990’s on) the Church has struggled as much or more than other groups or institutions in making this passage. The story is well-known. Mainline denominations hemmorage members at an alarming and unchecked rate. More than twice as many people tell Gallup Polls that they believe in God than attend a worship service on any given Sunday. Many are “spiritual” but few are “religious” (i.e. actively involved in institutional religion). As our cities became ganglands (of both the white collar corporate and the drug lord/gangster type) the church by and large retreated to the suburbs. Issues of justice are forsaken for the “just-us” principle of church choosing (whether formally through adopting the homogenous-unit principle of the church growth movement or willy-nilly through the now ubiquitous phenomenon of “church shopping”). The church lurches from panacea to panacea and workshop to conference desperate to find “the key” to growth. Eleven o’clock on Sunday morning remains the most segregated hour in North America (MLK, Jr.). Most envy the “megachurch” even though they know such status is beyond them and even though the very phenomenon itself is likely the last gasp of the age from which they are emerging. Perhaps the single most salient example of the confusion and powerlessness of the church in our time is the frenzy to embrace an obscure prayer (suitably misinterpreted) from Chronicles rather than to focus on the very prayer our Lord taught his followers to pray!

Most now acknowledge the church’s accommodation to modernity and its failure to grow disciples and nurture a sense of genuine Christian, that is, baptismal, identity and practice. Though we hear recurring calls for an orthopraxy (right practice) to match our orthodoxy (right doctrine), still little seems to happen. Even much that passes as “emergent” or “emerging” church may be nothing more than extensions or intensifications of styles and dynamics of modernity itself!

We are, it seems, those of us who are “distressed” by the state of Christianity, “debtors” to the gospel and passionate to live it out, “discontented” with the practice of church in North America (see I Samuel 22:1-2), indeed powerless to change the church. And we fear our own efforts to faithfully follow Jesus and be his people with integrity are unmanageable as well.

Given the intimate, inextricable, and reciprocal connections between identity and integrity, i.e. an appropriate sense of identity grounds the integrity of our actions, while a practice of integrally Christian actions can lead to a clarifying, transforming sense of identity, confusion about who we are entails a corresponding confusion or distortion of whose we are (God) and leaves us vulnerable to having what we do shaped by alien and corrupting forces in our culture. This only further entrenches us in a rut of deepening confusion and fruitless (though often frantic!) activity. Despite calls for and renewed efforts to grow disciples, the church has by and large refused to take a hard look in the mirror opting instead for driving purposefully into that enlarged territory where (so it is claimed) God will again bless and prosper us.

2. Are coming to believe that a power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity.

Perhaps no clearer mark of a church emerging from modernity is this realization that, contrary to the whole thrust from the Renaissance onward, IT’S NOT ABOUT US!

The leading lights of modernity, Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and Adam Smith each in their own way made it abundantly clear that as far as they and the age they shaped were concerned, it was most certainly about us! Humanity proclaimed itself the sole source (Feuerbach and Nietzsche), the chief problem and prime enigma (Marx and Freud), and lone hope of progress and “salvation” (Marx and Smith).

Heaven became simply the sky, sometimes brilliant and awe-inspiring to be sure, but nonetheless barren of hope for help from beyond ourselves. Gone was the wonder of a “starry night” a lá Van Gogh, swirling with heaven’s glory and earth’s vitality. All that is left is a vast cold void punctuated by pinholes of cold light from dead and dying stars.

God became simply humanity shouted in a loud voice, as Feuerbach averred. Humanity became a putative deity, and the church became simply another institution offering its cohesive “glue” as a contribution to holding together modern society. Religion became the handmaid to an autonomous human search for self-fulfillment, self-realization, or self-advancement (or all three!).

Faith was ruled out of court in public life and bought off with the promise that it could have the private arena of religious preference and opinion to regulate. The public square was left to unholy trinity of “Mars, Mammon, and Me” and this terrible triad has wreaked havoc in every area of life – animal, vegetable, mineral, and astral. Faith’s ill-wrought compromise to accept the inner, religio-spiritual life of the people as its domain has been ravaged as well. The story told by the larger culture about the “what, why, and how” of life, buttressed by public institutions, and disciplined by consumeristic materialism soon overwhelmed our religious preferences and opinions, rendering them and the voluntary gatherings of like-minded folk gathered around them little more than capitalism disguised as religion.

An underground stream of dissenting voices trickled through this western wasteland all the while though. Nurtured by figures like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Karl Barth, Jacques Ellul, Clarence Jordan, Martin Luther King, Jr., John Howard Yoder, Will Campbell, Oscar Romero, Mother Teresa, as well as voices from the margins of the dominant culture like Bob Dylan, E. F. Schumacher, and Wendell Berry, a small tradition shouting “IT’S NOT ABOUT US!” kept niggling around the edges of our corporate heart and mind.

Disillusionment with the ideologies and institutions of North America grew throughout the latter half of the 20^th century, growing toward a critical mass for cultural change. Our failures and foibles, writ both large and small, insistently challenged our presumptions to deity, or at least to effective control over our personal and corporate lives. The tragedy and terror of a 9/11, a massive tsunami, and the hurricanes Katrina and Rita, all within a four-year span, have become icons to our inability to control and order nature or ourselves for the larger good.

That small, underground tradition of dissent has in our time sprung up into an oasis in the desert. In its waters many of us have been baptized anew into a vision of and vocation toward a life lived in joyous awareness that “IT’S NOT ABOUT US!” We are still in a desert wasteland, to be sure. Nevertheless some of us have found, or better, been found by, the ONE-WHOM-IT-IS-ALL-ABOUT in the midst of that desert, waiting and wooing us to take up again the adventure of discipleship without easy answers; an Abrahamic venture into the unknown based on the sheer promise that we will be told we’re there when we get there; a groping after both the dimensions of the pathology that has disfigured us and the lineaments of health toward which we are lured.

And this ONE-WHOM-IT-IS-ALL-ABOUT has a name. A name:

• given long ago, but often lost or obscured or domesticated along the way;
• that can only be given, not possessed;
• received by faith alone;
• which speaks primarily in promises and commands and acts in sovereign compassion;
• learned only in embracing those promises and following those commands;
• encoded with daring risk as a chief measure of faithfulness (Ex.3:14) and a burning passion to set all things right (“justice”) as a chief mark of its presence;
• that took on flesh, full humanity - all our hurts and hopes, doubts and dreams, frailties and faith – in short, all the agony and ecstasy that goes with being human;
• that leads to coronation on a cross by way of suffering servanthood and that results in an everlasting reign of honor and glory stunningly embodied still in divine servanthood (Luke 12:37)!

That name, in fact, is “the name that is above every name” (Phil.2:9); the name that compels universal acclamation and adoration (Phil.2:10-11); the name that is now and forever writ large across the horizon of the cosmos, and which we utter in praise and worship every time we cry, “Jesus is kurios” (“Lord,” the word used to translate the name of God, Yahweh” in the Greek Old Testament; see also I Cor.12:3)!

That name, and that name alone denotes the “power greater than ourselves” that can “restore us to sanity.” Truly, this One, Jesus the Christ is the ONE-WHOM-IT-IS-ALL-ABOUT and in his presence we finally (and daily) are able to rid ourselves of the modern era’s conceit that IT-IS-ALL-ABOUT-US!

Thus, that small stream of dissent, epitomized in Barth’s clarion call that what “IT” is all about is not us but rather “the triune God who loves us in freedom,” has sounded forth again in a way that has claimed our attention and faith anew and, at the same time, forced us to emerge from the modern church into the bracing but also disorienting winds of postmodernity.

3. Are making a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of this God.

Every fresh movement of God, every new wind of the Spirit, begins with repentance. This much abused word means simply a turnabout, a change of mind, a 180º reversal of direction, a turn from a wrong way to a right way. If we envision Jesus’ proclamation of the gospel as a recruiting call to join the “guerilla” movement of God’s kingdom, then repentance is our response to that recruiting call, our decision to “enlist” in Jesus’ movement.

Tom Wright often notes the striking use of the Greek verb “metanoein” (repent) in Josephus (1^st century A. D. Jewish historian). There Josephus tells a Jewish brigand, “Repent and believe in me” (strikingly similar in Greek to Jesus’ announcement of the gospel of the Kingdom, Mk.1:14f.) Josephus means for this fellow to change his tactics in fighting against the Romans and adopt his (Josephus’s) own policies and strategies. Though Jesus’ call to “repent” certainly means much more than that of Josephus, it does not mean less. Repentance, Jesus-style, entails a fundamental reversal of direction and reorientation of life.

This new life is perhaps most fully and provocatively displayed in the Sermon on the Mount (Mt.5-7). The Beatitudes (5:1-11) are the “Family Values” of God’s kingdom while the remainder of the “Sermon” an exposition of the “Family Life-Style” of the kingdom. It is to these “Family Values” and this “Family Life-Style” that we turn in repentance as we emerge from our captivity to modernity and its domesticated church. It is to this God (the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ) and into this God’s kingdom that we enlist in repentance.

Over the last 30 years we have (or should have) learned that Jesus’ “kingdom” language in its 1^st century Jewish setting entails at least the following:

• Jesus is a “king”: a political claim to be the world’s true Caesar,” not the pretender in Rome);
• Jesus’ “kingdom” is the world: he intends universal sovereignty and thus will be in fundamental conflict with all other claimants to that sovereignty (i.e., other “empires” that rise and fall throughout history);
• Jesus’ “kingdom-people” are a polis: that is, a public, visible presence within every culture mandated to demonstrate by their lifestyle and the way they order their community God’s intentions for all human communities; a prototype of God’s kingdom, as it were.
• this “kingdom-people” have a foreign and domestic policy: evangelism, biblically understood as the word/deed announcement of the arrival and victory of the world’s true “Caesar” and a call for all to enlist on his side, and justice (the divine passion to set all things right) are its foreign policy. Worship, forgiveness and sharing resources are its chief domestic policies. Thus this “kingdom-people” are a prototype of the life to come, a “back from the future” people!

The turn to this God and the commitment to follow his way of being human rather than our own in the midst of a world-not-yet-fully-redeemed form the core of what Jesus means by his call to “Repent!”

4. Are making a searching and fearless theological inventory of ourselves and our practices.

Whereas modernity nursed us on the ideology of the autonomus individual possessed of autosoteric powers to make and keep human life human; and whereas postmodernity has called all that in question thus opening our culture to all manner of other schemes of salvation and therapies of the good life; and whereas in this new openly pagan (in the classical sense of the term) society the church in North America has an unparalleled opportunity for evangelism; this fourth step in our recovery from modernity looms crucial in not only redefining but, more importantly, re-equipping us for kingdom work in this new situation.

This “searching and fearless theological inventory” entails a sweeping survey of the primary problem areas in modernity’s church. I make no claim to be exhaustive. I simply want to highlight what seem to me the most salient problem areas in which change is required. The good news for us, the gracious news, is that in the particularity of this moment, in this postmodern wilderness, we will find the very One whom we seek, or better, who has been seeking us, waiting for us to turn anew to our God, be healed, and adorned with graces necessary to make our way through the wilderness into what lies beyond.

Yes, we are in the wilderness. We must neither belittle nor bemoan that. We are, to continue my imagery, in recovery from modernity. We are not yet the church we will be. Indeed, we can scarcely see the dim outlines of what such a church might look like! Rather our calling at the present moment is to lay aside all programs and panaceas, embrace the wilderness for as long as necessary, to look long and hard at where we have been as the necessary prelude to where we are going. “’Come, let us argue it out,’ says the Lord” (Isa.1:18). Yes, let us come to Lord for our healing.

1. We Repent of Our Neglect of the Spirit and the Trinity

The promise of the wilderness is the opportunity to recover essential elements of Church and Christian existence that we have forgotten or lost on the journey through modernity. Chief among them, I sense, is the opportunity to enter through repentance not the “Age of Aquarius” the sixties promoted, but a genuinely new experience of life in the Spirit. The Spirit has fared poorly in the “can do” world of North America with its pragmatic, individualistic focus. Now, however, that ideology seems about out of steam. Ironically, the world and church created by such a “can do” mentality are now proving unlivable and non-sustaining for many of its creators and adherents. Our idols always do fail us, and when the weight of the devotion and energy invested in them caves in on us, we are crushed and compelled to look elsewhere for succor and relief.

For us in the church that means a return to the source – the triune God of Christian faith. And in God’s triunity we may just rediscover what we most need! For in a sense, the American church appears to have replicated the historical experience of the early church in struggling toward an adequate vision of the God made known in Jesus Christ. The early church lavished its attention and energy on the Father and the Son. It was not until the late 4^th century that the Holy Spirit made a confessional appearance equal to that of the Son and the Father in the version of the Nicene Creed issued after the Council of Constantinople in 381 A. D.

Similarly (though of course many exceptions could be pointed out), the historical experience of North America seems to have followed this pattern. God the Father seems have been the preoccupation of early America on through the Social Gospel movement of the early 20^th century. With the rise of Karl Barth’s Christ-centered theology in Europe in the 1920’s and its slow infiltration across the pond and the rediscovery of Jesus among disaffected youth of the sixties and seventies, the second article of the creed assumed the largest profile. But in spite of the rise of the Charismatic movement toward the end of these years, we seem to have had no large scale encounter with the Holy Spirit analogous to those of the Father and the Son. Nor of the development of a Trinitarian-focused theology and discipleship!

I suggest (and I am aware of the danger of drawing these impressionistic kinds of large-scale historical parallels, especially since I am not a church historian!), then, that with the collapse of the mindset of modernity we are in a cultural-spiritual moment fraught with potential for engagement with the Spirit that would outsize even the Charismatic movement in this country! It might even be the prelude to a fuller understanding and experience of the Trinity!

2. We Repent of Our Fascination with False and Neglect of Genuine Spirit-uality

Correlatively, this rediscovery of Pentecost that I am suggesting would equip us to experience and discern the genuine movement of the Spirit in our midst from the many trendy and ephemeral spiritualities on offer today. What is needed is a Spirit-uality, a fresh encounter with God the Holy Spirit, shaping us into his kingdom people, soldering our hearts and minds to his kingdom agenda and nurturing us with the broken body and the shed blood of the King himself. Such an engagement with the Holy Spirit will cast the self-help and largely therapeutic (human) spiritualities flooding our culture into sharp relief. This “Spirit-uality” (with the capital “S” and the hyphen) is a genuinely trinitarian encounter with the Holy Spirit and not the immanent movement of the human spirit so beloved of much contemporary spirituality.

3. We Repent of the Individualism that Desiccates our Community and Affirm that Church Is About US (not ME)!

Underlying modernity is a view of humanity that sees the individual as the basic unit of reality. We are like billiard balls, complete and self-sufficient unto ourselves, rolling around the table. We connect with other balls along the way (relationships) which alter our path but these connections remain external and non-constitutive of who we are. I oversimplify here to raise the essential question. Which comes first, the individual or the community?

Western culture has obviously chosen the individual as its starting point. The Scripture however appears to make community more fundamental than the individual. Both creation accounts in Genesis underscore this truth in their own way. In Genesis 1 male and female together are created according to the divine likeness (1:26) to share in the dominion and shaping the rest of creation. In Genesis 2, though the man is first created, he is not deemed complete by God until the woman is fashioned by divine surgery from his rib. Then, in communion with this woman, the man echoes God’s evaluation (2:22-23).

The person-in-community, then, or the model of molecules we all made in high school chemistry with toothpicks and Styrofoam balls connected together in all manner of configurations, serves as a more appropriate image of the human being than does the billiard ball. We are neither solitary nor sufficient unto ourselves. Relationships are constitutive of who we are. In fact, it is not too much to say that we are our relationships! Or, to put it in a slogan, “there is no ME without WE!”

The church, then, cannot be seen as a voluntary association of like-minded people, as are other groups in our culture (e.g., the Rotary Club). Rather, we are called by God into the church, a community the composition of which we have no say in. It is in this diverse community where we discover our individuality through the relationships we have and endure and the gifts we discover and exercise. And all this is by God’s design. We are “created to live as one community,” as the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s A Brief Statement of Faith puts it (l.32). Human rebellion shattered God’s creation of such a community but God was not deterred or defeated. Rather he began again calling a new community (the Abraham-Sarah family) into existence to be the prototype and vehicle of his redeeming passion for the world.

We confess to what is now a commonplace and uncontested charge that western individualism has so insinuated itself into the marrow of the church that the “community” we display to the world is much more a mirror-image of the world around it than of the community God intended through Abraham and Sarah. The disciple community designed to be a “sign, foretaste, and instrument” (Lesslie Newbigin) of the Kingdom of God too often appears instead merely a religious version of Survivor Island! Disciple-making does not happen (again a commonplace and uncontested charge) and the substance of who and what we are often bores or leaves a bad taste in observers’ mouths.

Until we open ourselves to the Spirit’s call to community, abandon ourselves to one another in accountable and responsible relationships, engage jn practices designed to deepen relationships with God and each other, worship with integrity, and share selves and substance with the world, we will continue to fail to provide the “light to the nations” that God desires and the world so desperately needs!

4. We Repent of the Dualisms that Hinder Our Worship and Witness

Rediscovery and fresh experience of the Spirit will also challenge us to eschew the dualisms that have hamstrung much ministry and growth in the church. We may overcome the spiritual-material dualism that has haunted western culture from at least the time of Plato. This new experience of the Spirit has the potential to knit creation and redemption back together again. Our new shibboleth might be “Matter Matters, and it Matters Forever.” In this light we can recover the materiality not only of the inherent goodness of God’s triune work of creation but also the materiality inherent in the church’s eschatology of New Creation – a new heavens and a new earth on which we in our resurrection bodies will live as God always intended! Gone will be the notion of a disembodied eternal existence, putatively “spiritual” and widely believed in our churches. This will now be judged a debilitating dualism that has effectively disconnected and diminished our lives, both here and in the hereafter.

On another level doing away with this spiritual-material dualism might lead to the recovery of the importance and meaning of the “gestures,” or kinetic, dimension of faith. Perhaps through re-appropriating movements like crossing ourselves, assuming various positions in prayer, walking prayer or walking the labyrinth, lavish use of water in baptism and generous portions of bread and wine in the Eucharist, and many others we may make progress towards healing our alienation from our own bodies and the bodies of others. We are one in being (embodied souls of ensouled bodies), one in relationship to our Creator and Redeemer, and one in our destiny (new heavens and new earth). Making peace with and embracing our materiality as bodies and the material as a primary means through which we meet and come to know God must be high on our agenda.

Likewise our worship will be centered on the sacraments and our lifestyles sacramental as the Spirit works in us a Spirit-uality free of dualism. We will be free, finally, to discover God’s presence in the ordinary and the mundane –

“Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes –
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.
(Elizabeth Barrett Browning)

Not only will creation and eschatology be brought back together but stewardship as the proper administration of the creation and justice as the proper ordering of the human community and the fair administration of the goods and services of the community will be restored to their biblical dignity as “Spirit-ual” practices of the first order. Indeed, I do not think it too much to say that we might recover the biblical baseline for assessing the church’s health – how it succors and bring justice to the poor and the helpless! After all, our God declares:

“Do not let the wise boast in their wisdom,
do not let the mighty boast in their might,
do not let the wealthy boast in their wealth;
but let those who boast boast in this,
that they understand and know me,
that I am the LORD;
I act with steadfast love, justice,
and righteousness in the earth,
for in these things I delight,
says the LORD.”
(Jeremiah 9:23)

Everything else pales, if the Bible is to be believed, in light of this baseline of caring for the marginal and ostracized, the “widow and orphan” to use the biblical rubrics. Nothing else finally matters, or indeed can matter apart from this, as a mark of our corporate health. Nothing else, no matter how spectacular or excellent or even necessary, can substitute for the church’s making God’s call to stewardship and justice primary and preeminent. Nothing else relieves us of the responsibility to make the baseline of caring for the poor and needy the very lens through which we look at our world and evaluate where and how we will act.

In other words, the Spirit frees our imaginations to again dream God’s creation-dream and reorient our lives to the world it depicts and toward which history is moving.

5. We Repent of a Doctrine-Centered Reading of Scripture and Reaffirm Its Role as God’s Great Story

This Spirit-driven freeing of our imaginations entails a fresh reading of Scripture. In modernity we searched the Scriptures to arrive at doctrine, which then became our yardstick for determining orthodoxy. We treated the biblical text as a specimen for analysis and definition; a source for ideas and axioms to be ordered and expounded. In the process, the actual story of Scripture got lost or devalued.

With modernity’s demise a window opens for the Spirit to direct our attention again to the Story itself. The biblical text regains its primacy in the church’s thought and worship. The doctrines we derive from Scripture have a subsidiary place as the grammar or guidelines by which we read the biblical Story, not the end product of its study. The Story introduces us to a world in which we learn to integrate our lives and thought; a world more real than that created by the ideologies of progress, capitalism, communism, globalization, etc. A world that itself becomes the standard by which we evaluate everything else.

And this world is breathtaking! Scripture as Story can save us from the prevailing sin of modernity’s approach to the Bible – BOREDOM! Instead of reading the Bible piecemeal and extracting morals or doctrinal points from them (which, frankly, is boring save for the most motivated and intrepid church members), with the Spirit’s prodding we read the Bible as one big Story about what God is doing to bring about his dream and his invitation to us to by faith in Christ to join in fulfilling this grand dream. Doctrine helps us to clarify and read the story more faithfully but is not the goal or end product of Bible reading. Rather, the Spirit’s goal is imaginations energized and fertilized by the Bible’s Story and wills commandeered for God’s service. As Karl Marx said of philosophy so we must learn to say of theology that its purpose is not to understand the world but rather to transform the world and ourselves in it! Or, better, to bear witness in word and deed to God’s transformation of all things. To wit, then, we read Scripture primarily for formation, not information.

Reading Scripture as Story will lead us to expect the continuing retrieval of practices like Lectio Divina and praying the scriptures to expand among churches and Christians previously unaware of them. These practices are more appropriate and important ways of engaging the Story for transformation than is the linear, analytical mode of analysis we have been taught in higher education and more rigorous and focused than the “what does this passage mean to me” subjectivism that often passes for Bible study in the church.

To encounter the Scripture as Story, God’s big Story for the world as well as God’s Story for each of us personally will be anything but boring! The Scriptures will throb again with the Spirit’s energy to revive and renew us as God’s people! Worship will come to life as we gather knowing better whose we are, who we are, and what we are to be about in the world. The traditions found in Scripture become the living words of the dead, while the poverty-stricken worship so many experience today reveals itself to be the dead words of the living!

6. We Repent of Treating God’s Word as Mere “Words”

A cognate retrieval will involve seeing God’s Word as not merely verbal but rather creative expression in all its forms. Fully embodied communication will be sought and welcomed. Music, dance, art, poetry, drama will join the verbal is giving voice to the church’s testimony and faith. An appropriate use of communication technology will accompany this move to fully embodied communication.

However, we will always acknowledge that there is more to God and God’s Word than we will ever capture even in our best communicational efforts. Sometimes the fullness of this divine Word (hyperreality as Pete Rollins calls it) drowns our efforts to communicate and silence becomes the most eloquent testimony we can offer to God’s presence with us.

We will also repent of treating words (in culture in general as well as in church and worship) as “mere” words, tools to achieve our designs and agendas or our “will to power” (Nietzsche). This “linguistic nihilism” affects us at every level in our world. Comedian Stephen Colbert calls this “truthiness,” the “claim to know something intuitively, instinctively, or ’from the gut’ without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or actual facts… and its use as an appeal to emotion and tool of rhetoric in contemporary socio-political discourse.” (Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness) The ubiquity of “spin” (another term for linguistic nihilism) renders us nearly insensitive to its presence. In fact, we scarcely hear any outrage when it occurs. Governmental lies, bureaucratic doublespeak, and interpersonal deceit make every statement suspect, guilty until proven innocent. Every statement is scrutinized for its “spin,” how it has been fashioned to sound the best, reveal the least, and satisfy the largest number of listeners. In the church at least we will reject “truthiness” and “spin” and strive for truthfulness and transparency in our relationships and witness. We are created and redeemed to “speak the truth in live” to each other and for this we will strive.

7. We Repent of our Embrace of Modernist Epistemology

Instead of autonomous individuals seeking truth, we pledge ourselves to a communal search for truth. Our primary goal will not be not to possess “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Rather, confessing our at best partial grasp of the truth, we will cling instead to our relationship to the One who is himself “the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” Thus, we make no extravagant claim to what we know, but we do humbly confess that we have been laid hold of the One who is the Truth (capital “T”). Our focus will be on doing the truth we know more than knowing more truth than we do.

Our search for truth will not be directed toward attaining indubitable certainty but toward a deeper relationship with the God characterized by faithfulness and fidelity toward us. Our “method” will be future-ancient: we will remember the future so we can imagine the past and thus live faithfully in the present. We cling to the reality of God’s remembered future (hope) and imagined past (faith) so that we may risk reaching out in love to serve those around us in the present.

Openness to insight and wisdom from any and every quarter will mark our epistemology. We will expect to find such wisdom and insight through out the breadth and depth of God creation and creatures. For the God we know in Christ is the Creator and Redeemer of all and “in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them” (II Cor.5:19). We should not therefore be surprised when we discover others in whom knowledge of God is found or through whom knowledge of God is communicated. The risen Christ is free to meet and claim any he chooses on whatever path they may be walking and use them for his kingdom work.

8. We Repent of our Captivity to the Present and Infatuation with “Virtualism”

Modernity and a good bit of postmodernity are guilty of what C. S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery.” The assumption that whatever is new and novel is, ipso facto, better than what is not drives much of what we do and how we feel. The west is pathologically amnesic. Nostalgia is our preferred mode of engaging the past. And the past, thus engaged imprisons us in a sanitized version of itself and neuters its ability to impact or energize us for the present and future.

Chronological Snobbery combined with nostalgia cuts the umbilical cord of the present and future from the past, leaving us with only a shriveled present and utopian (i.e., cut off from reality) future.

Repenting of chronological snobbery will free us for genuine biblical “remembering.” Such remembering draws its substance from God’s future (the most real of all times) enabling us to imagine our (and the biblical) past faithfully which then catalyzes us for present faithfulness. To repeat: we remember God’s future in order to imagine the past so that we can live faithfully in the present. Far from imprisoning us in an unreal past and setting us up to live toward an unreal future, biblical “remembering” draws us ever further into God’s future for his creation and creatures.

A corollary of repenting from chronological snobbery is the affirmation that we are in this for the long haul. We are caught up in something much larger than ourselves and our lives are claimed by purposes far more significant than the goals and designs we might craft for our “three score and ten.” The most remarkable affirmation of the need to embrace the long haul comes from maverick composer John Cage. The first chord of his organ piece “Organ 2/ASLP” (for “as slow as possible”) was struck on February 5, 2000 and will take 639 years (!) to finish. A series of weights hold down the keys until the next chord is played six months later. Cage intended this extraordinary piece to be a statement of hope that the world and its inhabitants would remain, preferably peaceably, at least for the duration of its performance.

I stood at the bottom of Palo Duro canyon a few years ago and gazed at this masterpiece of God’s handiwork. The beauty of this scene enveloped me and the realization dawned that God does good work and takes his time doing it. God is not in a hurry!

As believers in Jesus Christ and members of his kingdom movement, we too must take a similar “long view.”

“The distinction between Church and world is not about living in different spaces, but about having a different perception of time. The Church is a community of the new time … time is a gift, because it is God’s time, not one’s own; and time is a friend, because there is nothing to fear from what God has
in store. Time is “on our side”. One cannot buy time with God. One must learn to enjoy God’s time … It is easy to slip into the old ways, and treat time and people as commodities for one’s own advancement. But gathering together in worship, Sunday by Sunday and many times besides, is a constant reminder to the Church that it is living in God’s time, not its own.” (Sam Wells, Transforming Fate into Destiny, 1998, 142-49)

Our trust, of course, is not in human ingenuity and technology to extend and resist time, but rather in the person and promise of the One who created and redeemed all creation. We are committed to the coming of this God’s kingdom and prepared to practice the “waiting that strives” (or the “striving that waits” of II Peter 3:14: “Therefore, beloved, while you are waiting for these things strive to be found by him without spot or blemish, and regard the patience of our Lord as salvation.”

This “waiting that strives” equips us for living faithfully and creatively in an emerging, postmodern world. It

• keeps our eyes focused on the prize – the salvation of God of his creatures and creation;
• teaches us to resist the near-cultural mandate for “instant gratification”;
• allows us to “slow down” and receive time as a gift and vessel in which our life with God is graciously shaped in a “timely” fashion and resist the spiritual formulas and shortcuts so prevalent in “ministry” today;
• encourages us to adopt God’s rhythm of time embodied in the liturgical year, and the office of daily prayer as a framework for our lives;
• enables us to realize that if God has given us time enough for the living of life (Ecclesiastes 3:1-9) and gifted us with a vision of life’s end or goal (“salvation” or to echo The Westminster Shorter Catechism, to glorify and enjoy God forever), we can order our lives in a way that removes much of the hurry and stress that seems so inevitable and to bear witness to God’s own intention for us.

Practicing such timefulness will reacquaint us with the earth and air around and under us. Slowing down to feel the gracious habitat God has given for our life will tether us to God’s presence with us a in a way like no other. Humus (the ground) and humility belong together, both linguistically and spiritually. When we realize and accept our God-given “place,” we gladly affirm that we are “from the dust” and are but creatures not the Creator.

As we learn to love this humus, we will see it not only as our essential habitat but as the “theater of God’s glory” as well. The welfare of this humus will grow ever larger and its needs more insistent in both our daily living and our planning and ethics. We will love this ground because it is the “holy ground” upon which God walked in the garden “at the time of the evening breeze” in relationship to humanity and will walk again in the New Jerusalem. This, we will shout, is the “place” where God will meet us in mercy and judgment, in healing and hurt, and above all, in hope of the realization of God’s intent for his creation. Thus we will resist the encroachment of “virtual reality” or cyberspace as a primary or even real medium of community and connection to reality.

Whatever their potential and possibilities (and there are some), virtual reality and cyberspace remain phantoms of creation and relatives of the ever-present temptation of western culture – Gnosticism.

9. We Repent of our Addiction to “Christendom” and Vow to No Longer be “Christendummies”

“Christendom” is that amalgamation of religious-secular power that exercised geo-political power throughout the western world from the 4^th-20^th century. “Constantinianism” is a related term named after Emperor Constantine who began the movement toward Christendom. It sees the end of history (the kingdom of God) coming to fulfillment in history through the emergence of Christendom.

The apex of this movement is the American experience in which this country was born and heralded in biblical terms as a “city set on a hill” and a “light to the nations.” Of all countries in the world, America was believed to enjoy a special status and commission from God to spread her way of life, including her religion, around the world.

Christendom came to us with our mother’s milk until the end of the 20^th century. We knew no other way of being Christian. Only in the aftermath of the collapse of colonialism around the world, the 60’s, and the loss of trust in major institutions, war and revolution in every hemisphere of the globe, have we been able to see more clearly the dimensions, dynamics, disabilities, and demise of this longstanding phenomenon.

We see clearly enough now to realize that the collapse of Christendom, so seemingly disastrous and debilitating for the church, is actually a good and necessary thing that we must learn to embrace. This of course requires us to learn to be church in a new and different way. This is a significant aspect of what the “emerging church” movement is all about. This diverse group of people and churches is perhaps the most visible component of all those who have embraced this demise of Christendom and the necessity of entering that wilderness in which we currently reside and vow to be “Christendummies” no longer!

Along with Christendom and Constantinianism comes civil religion (perhaps these days we ought to say “uncivil” religion!). This social religiosity casts a patina of the sacred over all that the society holds dear. Civil religion reinforces the culture’s value structure and meaning system; it identifies national symbols with transcendence and national purposes with God’s overall plan for humankind and history. This triad of Christendom-Constantinianism-civil religion confronts the church with a basic choice. Think of it this way. Do you consider yourself a Christian American or an American Christian? Which term is for you the noun and which the adjective?

If we are Christian Americans, those whose fundamental identity is “American” flavored by Christianity, we will embrace or be susceptible to the appeal and tenets of civil religion. Our faith, to the degree that it is genuinely Christian, will be decisively corrupted. Civil religion corrupts Christian faith in many ways, some of which I have already introduced above. For our purposes here we note some of the key ways this corruption occurs. One way to visualize the way Christian faith forms and transforms us as persons and as a people is to imagine a cord of three stands: priorities, passions, and practices. These three strands must be wound together ever more tightly around the gospel for us to demonstrate integrity in our witness and work. Civil religion, however, works to keep this “tightening” from happening. And it does this by diverting, distracting, and re-defining these three “p’s.” Here’s how it works.

In the first place, civil religion patriotizes our priorities. But it directs our loyalty in the wrong direction. The cross becomes draped in the flag. Jesus becomes a “superstar.” The church morphs into a “cheerleader” for the nation’s causes and struggles. We believe that God is on our side and we go into battle with “Gott mit uns” (“God with us”) stenciled on our helmets as German soldiers did in WW II). In short, our priorities are re-directed in an idolatrous direction.

Civil religion also parochializes our passions. The breadth of our passion for others is foreshortened to the interests of our group or nation. Justice is reduced to “just us.” Planning and arming ourselves to harm others of different race, creed, or place, even when these others are our brothers and sisters in Christ, becomes not only thinkable but actually doable. This sin against the Body of Christ is the most heinous imaginable. Our passions are thus corrupted, our sense of “place” dulled, and our witness to God’s love for the world is rendered null and void.

Finally, civil religion makes our practices perilous for others and ourselves. Resort to violence becomes almost a reflex when a threat to us and ours arises. America is often able to impose its will and way on others by military, political, or economic means. That will and those ways seldom redound to the benefit of those they are imposed upon. The lifestyle we export is deadly to humans and environment alike. And on it goes. And civil religion is rationale and support for such dangerous ways and our practices are turned from life to death!

For those of us old enough to, say, have seen Mickey Mantle play, Christendom was unavoidable. There was nothing else. But now that Christendom is irretrievable broken, many of us vow never again to be “Christendummies” but to pray and seek new and life-giving ways to be church and live Christian lives. We look especially to our younger sisters and brothers who have never been “Christendummies” to provide insight, vision, and courage for the journey ahead.

10. We Repent of Acquiescing to Modernity’s Effort to Kill Time and Space

Along with and related to the first item mentioned above, neglect of the Spirit and the Trinity, this may be the most far-reaching and fundamental of the matters of which we need to repent. In Christendom the church accepted the world’s secularizing definitions of time and space. The church in an emerging age has the opportunity to rediscover ancient yet ever new answers to the questions of “What time is it?” and “Where are we?

Secular modernity killed time by engaging in historical amnesia and focusing on future utopias. The present was thus voided of meaning and our frantic search for pleasure tried to fill the void. Time became our possession, a resource to marshal in pursuit of our own agendas and purposes, or a burden, “just one damn thing after another” (Henry Ford), to be endured. Modernity sucked the spirit out history, trading kairos (fulfilled time, God’s time) for chronos (chronological time, clock time) as we went our own way and “worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (Romans 1:25).

We saw above how “chronological snobbery” speared us on the horns of a dilemma, impaling us between nostalgia and utopia, thus robbing the present of vitality and significance. Here I want to note the way popular and influential theologies replicate the killing of time.

Creationism takes on evolutionism (the philosophy, not the science) and this pseudo-argument locks us away in its own unreality and creates a situation analogous to the larger cultural phenomenon of nostalgia. Similarly, the focus on proving the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection (which I believe in) can lock us into a mindset that robs the present of its potential and power. On his only trip to the U.S. Karl Barth was pressed by an editor of Christianity Today on his views about the historicity of the resurrection. Finally, Barth quipped “Are we talking about Christianity today or Christianity yesterday?”

A utopian future is foisted on us by the interpretation of biblical prophecy that goes under the name of Dispensationalism. Popularized by the Left Behind series, this approach tends robs both the past and the present of real significance and posits its highly schematized interpretation of Christ’s return as the focal point of Christian living. While I have suggested that remembering God’s future is critical to a Christian way of living, that “future” must be based on responsible biblical and theological interpretation. Dispensationalists interpret biblical prophecy in a way most other Christians find irresponsible if not incredible! They one-sidedly treat prophecy as primarily future prediction (which it is not), require a modernist degree of precision and accuracy in the fulfillment of prophecy foreign the ancient world of the biblical prophets, and cobble together their prophetic system by drawing texts from here and there in the biblical material with little regard for context, thus putting together what God has kept apart! The future limned by their scenarios is one that is out of touch with the genuine reality of God’s future. “Remembering” this future will not enliven one to genuine present faithfulness. Again, time is killed by irresponsible hermeneutics!

Recovering from these corruptions of modernity entails reclaiming God’s time as our own. The rich though long-ignored resources of the liturgical year, Sabbath, and the daily office of prayer offer profound ways of reclaiming God’s time as our own and putting us in touch with God’s reality, God’s Story, kairos - fulfilled time.

How then do we kill space? - Primarily by downgrading creation to nature. This is more than a mere linguistic difference. It is a difference in worldviews. For Christians there is no such thing as “nature.” We know no sphere of physical being, sufficient unto itself, devoid of meaning or purpose beyond perpetuating its own existence. Crudely put, we have come to view nature as no more than a complex clod of dirt, rock, and water, enriched with all kinds of vegetation and resources. These resources are there to be harvested and consumed by human beings according to their best lights and purposes.

On the contrary, Christians know only “creation,” God’s handiwork, the theater of God’s glory. This creation is fully dependent on God for existence and provision, has its own integrity and relationship with God apart from humanity, and is destined for redemption along with humanity to reflect God’s glory throughout eternity. Humanity stewards the resources of creation according to God’s purposes rather than their own respectful of its integrity and limits.

Some scholars suggest that the Garden of Eden functioned as the Temple of God’s original creation. In redemption God is fulfilling that original intention such that as God’s presence filled the Tabernacle and the Temple, so knowledge of God will fill the earth as God’s new and final Temple. Recovery of such creational and redemptive perspectives will “re-sacralize” (in terms of covenant obedience and biblical hope) the cosmos. This is not a re-mythologizing in terms of repopulating creation will all sorts of various deities and creatures that reign over different spheres of life (as in much New Age thought) but rather the affirmation that the environment around us has an integrity of its own as God’s handiwork and a moral value that rightly makes claims on our ethical attention. In this way, we will begin to recover the life of God’s world.

I believe that this transfiguration of time and space is correlative to a fresh experience of the triune God and Spirit-uality. Attempts to express this dual transformation lie at the heart of our contemporary “worship wars.” The struggle over music and style of worship are the signs of this struggle. That is why to simply change worship or music is inadequate to our need. The real struggle is going on in the repentances I noted above and any genuine advance in theology and ministry will “emerge” from this level of engagement.

This is tantamount to a changed view of God, a changed relationship with God, fresh (though in truth, ancient) theological perspectives, all of which will shape the worship of the church in decisive and necessary ways. Great potential and great peril attend this struggle. Much rests on its outcome. This is the bank of the river Jabbock for us (Genesis 32). We will wrestle with God here. We will wrestle with each other here. We will face the Enemy here. Doubtless we will leave this encounter limping but that will be the price of becoming “Israel” (the one who strives with God) anew! Better limping, after all, than comatose (the church of the modern age) or dead (a victim of the Enemy)!

The remaining steps in our recovery from modernity consist in keeping the momentum going. These steps involve embodying the process we have already considered in an ongoing communal way of life. The process of identifying and repenting of our wrongs cannot be sustained if we try to do it by ourselves. Instead, we need to continue on to Step 5.

5. Are admitting to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

Here we embrace the community to which we are called by God by inviting “another human being” into our process. Our repentance thus becomes rooted in accountability to another member of the community. We can hide from God and kid ourselves, but when we look into the face of another who knows our struggle and commitment to change it is impossible to ignore the truth of the genuineness (or lack thereof) of our repentance.

I suspect the specificity of our confession to another is rather directly related to the quality and intensity of our repentance. And as we have seen, repentance is a matter of changing direction, reversing our field, walking a different path. The quality and intensity of our repentance, then, means then concrete differences and practical changes in lifestyle more than any particular emotional content which may or may not be present. Accountable community is the incubator of true repentance. Thus Step 6.

6. We are opening ourselves to God that God may remove all these defects of character.
Humility, restitution, ongoing inventory and reflection (Steps 7-10) fuel this kind of repentance. Poverty of spirit, seeking reconciliation, and courage to keep looking at our lives in light of God’s present and oncoming kingdom form the warp and woof of discipleship in our time and place.

7. Are humbly asking God to remove our shortcomings.

8. Are making a list of all persons we have harmed, and are willing to make amends to them all.

9. Are making direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10. Continue to take personal inventory and when we are wrong promptly admit it.

Finally, we complete the cycle and are back where we started, acutely aware of our disabilites, but with a difference. Now our focus has shifted. No longer is it our own lack that grabs our attention. Rather, through this process of recovery from modernity, we can now embrace that lack as just the place where God through the Spirit can begin the transformation of our lives, churches, and perhaps even cultures. This Spirit-ual (i.e., done by the Holy Spirit) transformation re-members us into the community of faith (that foretaste or prototype of the kingdom), re-forms us into active agents (subversive guerillas, actually) for the kingdom in the world, and re-sounds through us the radical good news that:

• the world’s true king has come,
• is recruiting his people,
• beginning to implement his reign of justice and peace,
• and wants YOU (the world) to join him in this work!

11. Seek through prayer and meditation to deepen our conscious contact with God, praying only for knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry that out.

12. Through such an ongoing spiritual awakening, we try to carry this message to other addicted to modernity, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Prayer, meditation, and a relationship with the living God are the chief means the Spirit uses to re-member us into the community. The knowledge of God’s will and the power to live that message out are the means of our re-formation into active agents of God’s kingdom. And the actual experience of the living God in community and world is the energy that lights our fires and enables us to shine as that “city set on hill” that Jesus himself says we are and are to be. The reality of this experience embodied in our attitudes, dispositions, and actions is the sliver of hope that we can indeed substantially recover from modernity and discover both the wisdom and ways of being church in an emerging age!

The author of Hebrews cites Psalm 118:6 (Heb. 13:6): “The Lord is my helper, I will not be afraid. What can anyone do to me?” and a few verses later makes his own affirmation of faith: “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever” Heb.13:9). From these two confessions of faith we find the courage and the comfort to engage the new “emerging age” which quickly engulfs and challenges us with the confidence this changing time (or any other) can ultimately do nothing to harm us and with the assurance that the One who walks with us is more than sufficient to met the challenges through us because God’s power is made perfect in our weakness!