"If you have a new world, you need a new church. You have a new world."
- Brian McLaren
- Brian McLaren
Change has changed. It used to be that every few decades a new technology or idea would come about that would change the way we lived or how we viewed the world. The telegraph eventually gave way to the telephone and radio. Radio set the stage for television and cell phones. Eight tracks and vinyl records eventually gave way to the CD. Then came the iPod and now the iPhone. The dizzying truth is that the gaps between the advent of these new technologies used to be centuries, then decades, and now just a few years. It seems as if these changes are so rapid that we can't even keep up on a day to day basis.
A few of us here at Lifesong have been reading Brian McLaren's The Church On The Other Side, and we've been openly talking about some of the ways our world has changed, and about how it is literally impossible to keep up anymore. McLaren actually says that change itself has changed, and that the rate of change has sped up to the point that it is actually impossible to think about and process all the information we are confronted with each day.
So the question for us is: What does this mean for the Church? How should we live as those claimed by Christ in order to save the world if we can't even comprehend what is going on in the world?
The first thing to do, as I see it, is acknowledge that we're ALL in the same boat. No one is comfortable with the rate of change in the world, and no one can keep up with it all. Change has leveled the playing field, and we are all trying to wrestle with how to live. I propose that the Church has two options:
1) Grasp the past tightly and try to weather the storm. It seems this is the turn that the Catholic Church has recently decided to take with its recent advocacy of returning to the Latin Mass. This is also the approach of many Evangelicals/Fundamentalists who long for the glory days of religious revival or the hey-day of the American empire. I sometimes watch the more-extreme voices for these folks on channel 17 and they're usually talking about how evil the rest of the world is and how great their brand of Christianity is. As one of my professors rightly said; "the way forward is not backward".
2) Pack lightly and move forward. Change happens, and when it does, the Church needs to change too. That means that we need to discover what is essential to our faith and be willing to re-invent everything else. There are, however, many ways to go wrong with this approach. We sometimes throw the baby out with the bath water when it comes to change and tradition, and some traditions speak throughout the ages. I suggest that maybe the best place to start as far as what is non-negotiable is this simple three word confession that dates back to the early church: Jesus is Lord.
If we live with this truth at the center of our lives, nothing else can claim us or distract us from our mission in the world. If Jesus is Lord, nothing else can be. We still, of course, have to figure out the practical implications of what it means to make Jesus' life the center of our lives, but at least we'll be asking all the right questions - even if the answers miss the mark (and they will)...
We're still trying to figure out how we should live in this world of rampant change, and I have to say that it's really refreshing just to stop for a minute and talk with trusted friends about some of the craziness (good and bad) in the world and take time to think about what it all means. Ultimately, we know that as His people, Jesus is present and in the center of these discussions, and we pray for the courage to continually re-invent our Church so that we might live with Jesus at the center of our lives - constantly reminding ourselves that if Jesus is Lord, nothing else can be...
Check out how our Church tries to follow Jesus through all this change at www.lifesongchristiancommunities.org
No comments:
Post a Comment