I am in Orlando Florida for a few days at the General Conference of the C&MA. I am here to do (among other things) a talk about the theme “postmodernity as good news for the church.” The point I am trying to explore is put well by Dwayne Brothers (on his blog) who attended this same seminar I led at the Grow Center a couple weeks ago. Dwayne states my basic point as:
Postmodernity allows for a critique of the way modernism has captured the church. In essence it frees the church to be the church. We are free from the attractional model of church – producing goods and services for people shopping for services – to embrace a missional paradigm – that we are participating in the mission of God.
Now I have done this talk a few times. The idea that postmodernity is good news for the church is nothing new for surely James K A Smith did a version of this idea in his book Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? My book The Great Giveaway takes a different approach (an ecclesiological approach) to the same end. What I am trying to do in these seminars is find a space to deconstruct the way we do church in America and reveal the sources of power, influence and rationality behind the ways we do things. Then I want to show a.) how these ways of being church are indeed (often) unfaithful to our calling (ekklesia), b.) tied to the cultural assumptions of modernity – not Christian ones, and c.) why they might be worth giving up because this culture of modernity we so esteem is in the process of a major crash and burn.
I would summarize the presentation like this. There are three broad shifts in the culture that postmodernity accentuates:
THE SHIFT in how we know: From … we know through universal processes of reason to … we know through participating in a community and its stories. I go into Lyotard here.
THE SHIFT in the way language works: From language represents reality to language being reality. I go into Derrida here.
THE SHIFT in the way I understand my-self in the world. From radical individualism to relational selfhood. I go into Foucault here.
My goal here is not to dazzle with postmodern analysis (couldn’t do it if I tried). Rather I wish to use postmodernity to do some “psycho-analysis” on the evangelical church revealing why we are the way we are. And then as with all good psycho-analysis … let us be freed to pursue being the church under the reign of Christ participating in His mission.
In the session …
I describe why there are no credible metanarratives (Lyotard). I then show why this means we must then more faithfully live our story. The expression of that is a more Missional church, a church driven by participating daily in God’s Story. Matt 6:33. 2 Cor 5:14-21.
I describe why truth is textual, communal. In a sense reality is created via community and language (Derrida). I then show why this means we must more intentionally reject violence for hospitality as our way of life in the world. The expression of that is a more Communal church. Acts 2: 41-47
I describe why our “selves” are always being technologized by the culture industries and multi national corporations (Foucault). I then show why this means we must reject consumerism in all its hideous forms for monastic practices of resistance in spiritual formation. The expression of that is a (more intentionally) Transformational church. Rom 12:1-2.
Notice, to all who would jump to conclusions, my primary drive is NOT to contextualize the gospel to a so-called postmodern culture. My first drive here instead is self-analysis of our own (evangelical’s) modernity. In fact for me, contextualization is a modern move that must be deconstructed. For so often contextualization assumes there is a message which can be extracted from a given culture and translated into another culture’s language and cultural practice. Yet this move in itself is naïve to the pitfalls of modernity. For it sets us up to repeat the errors of commodifying and/or consumerizing of the gospel. Instead I subscribe to a much slower approach (if indeed I am called to enter a foreign culture with the gospel). Let us as a church understand our own allegiances and cultural formation first. Then, with who we are and what God has given us (historically) let us take up (incarnational) residence in a different culture and allow God to build relationships in mutual submission out of which God works through hospitality, humility and love. Allow God to transform the relationships we participate in as we live the gospel in historically continuous enScripturated ways which shape those very relationships. Out of this, a community forms which indeed takes on its own cultural (Christian) identity forming a bridge into the new cultural context.
Each time I have done this seminar, the conversations, the irruptions and the rants have blown my mind. Today’s seminar was quite calm in comparison. Nonetheless, what is striking is the differences between the young and the not so young (those in ministry twenty plus years). And the openness of many pastors in smaller congregations (even some in the mega) is encouraging.
As always, in the search for improving my presentations, I welcome any comments, criticisms, and suggestions for improvement or things to add.
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Tommorrow (Sunday a.m.) we’ll be speaking with the gathering at Watermark, an emerging church gathering in Tampa Bay. Looking forward to it!
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I always appreciate your focus and clarity in sifting and analyzing, and coming out with a picture that shows a contrast between the old world and the new.. yet remains biblically faithful. Curious.. you mention the difference in response between the older generation and the younger. How many of that older generation are really able to follow you? ANd of the ones who don’t or won’t, how many do you lose because of their inner responses to certain names and terms.. Lyotard, Derrida, deconstruction? Have you been able to guage that?
Thanks so much for this – lots more food for thought as we process change in our smallish church.
DAWN
Len … I really don’t know if I am making sense to the older (or those working out an evangelicalism that reached its hey day in 1955 and ruled supreme til about 1980)audience. I doubt whether the French continentals are the issue. Thanks for your coments … and mcdlt’s as well.
DF
“In fact for me, contextualization is a modern move that must be deconstructed. For so often contextualization assumes there is a message which can be extracted from a given culture and translated into another culture’s language and cultural practice.”
Daang. Thanks. This was like a lurking truth in my soul. Thanks for voicing it.
And I had the same question as Len. “I really don’t know if I am making sense to the older (or those working out an evangelicalism that reached its hey day in 1955 and ruled supreme til about 1980)audience.” Do you mean that you don’t think they have ears to hear, based on their ideas of what church and gospel are? Or do you mean that they WONT’ hear (a question of the will)? Or does it really matter?
I ask, though, because Aquinas (ancient dude for whom “contextuality” isn’t really an issue), I would think, would point to the will (I think). Whereas Derrida would point to the “ear,” no?
Further, I am strongly curious to hear more of a description of “the irruptions and the rants.” Like, do folks actually get angry? Visibly, audibly? Raising of voices? Or just objections to the message, seemingly without their hearing it in the first place?
jason…
Nice Aquinas/Derrida metaphor … the rants I get often is …”when are we going to stop trying to be something new to each generation?!!… when this postmodern thing is over what is next? the gospel is the gospel!! ” tO WHICH i SAY .. you sound like Gianni Vattimo … you’re tired of the tyranny of the new .. the inescapability of the hyper modern ever the new and improved…(read for instance The End of Modernity p. 100) and what we are saying to all this is “get off the treadmill”… It’s great quoting Vattimo as an echo to the fundmamentalist voices that come my way … DF
Thanks DF,
Fun(ny). From quoting Vattimo you should go to Vico (Giambattista), just to really be openly ornery and ironical. When I say “ironical” there, I mean it in terms of the question of where we are in “real time.” You might as well be openly ironical if irony is going to happen anyway, lol. Maybe, too, the openly ironic can serve as a mirror to the probable orneryness that comes your way.
From good ol’ wikipedia on Vico: “The final age is characterized by popular democracy and reflection via irony; in this epoch, the rise of rationality leads to barbarie della reflessione or barbarism of reflection, and civilization descends once more into the poetic era.”
From Vico’s New Science, for fun: “to introduce geometrical method into practical life is ‘like trying to go mad with the rules of reason,’ attempting to proceed by a straight line among the tortuosities of life, as though human affairs were not ruled by capriciousness, temerity, opportunity, and chance. Similarly, to arrange a political speech according to the precepts of geometrical method is equivalent to stripping it of any acute remarks and to uttering nothing but pedestrian lines of argument.”
More entertaining musings from a “past time” on the “madness” of foundationalism across which Jason has recently come: “In one sense, the ‘Battle of the Books’ illustrates one of the great themes that Swift would explore in A Tale of a Tub: the madness of pride involved in believing one’s own age to be supreme and the inferiority of derivative works. One of the attacks in the Tale was on those who believe that being readers of works makes them the equals of the creators of works. The other satire Swift affixed to the Tale, ‘The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit,’ illustrates the other theme: an inversion of the figurative and literal as a part of madness.”
But…but…but…says the foundationalist…”I was saying that we should get over our fascination with the “new and shiny? That Swift things seems to indicate that you (DF, Jason) took me to be saying the opposite? Uuuhhh…”
I LoveTaylor Swift!! She\’s So Pretty!!!