Ministry Post-Modernly

Last week I posted The Long Trip about Willow Creek's realizations that they had engaged consumers with the gospel but had not done a thorough job of moving them from consumers to disciples.

Brad Barret asked this great question (along with some other good comment-ers) that I thought was worth posting about:

What do you make of the "you-centered" approach of post-modernism? Is it too much that we go way out of our way to reach the postmodern generation (which, I guess, is you and me), that we orient most of our programs around the comforts of the attendees?

Basically what I'm getting at is that the primary message from these churches is NOT "Jesus loves you", but rather, "we want you to be comfortable here..."

I think that there's an interesting tension developing in evangelicalism. On the one hand, there's the mega-church and post-mega-church movements. Guys like Rob Bell and others who have taken Willow Creek's baby boomer, seeker-oriented model and post-modernized it a bit, made it a little less suburban and more edgy. These are the types of churches that Brad's concerned about.

Then there's the reaction against the mega-church: there's the emergent church, and other off-shoots. But there's also a small but growing number of evangelicals who are moving away from pop-main-stream evangelicalism and moving towards more traditional, high-church experiences, full of history and liturgy and ritual and tradition and mystery. There have been a number of high-profile evangelicals who have converted to Catholicism over the past couple of years. And my own church and the movement of evangelicals to the Anglican tradition is booming.

So basically, there's folks who are really feelin' what Brad's concerned about. They're Christians who are concerned about the you-centered-ness of some of our churches. And so they're moving to a more high-church experience with more emphasis on the mystery; the vertical as opposed to the horizontal. And of course there are others who are taking what Willow Creek started and developing it for the next generation.

I believe strongly that we have to have both arms of the evangelical church to survive the shift to post-modernity. What has made and kept evangelicalism vibrant and alive in the U.S. is our tradition of re-inventing our ministry without losing fundamental and essential elements of Christendom. We might not even agree on all of what those are (Scripture, a conversion narrative of some sort, salvation in Christ by faith alone are a few core principles), but they're a part of our evangelical ethos nonetheless.

The urgency of the need to find ways to communicate the gospel to each successive generation because something is legitimately at stake if we don't has compelled us to re-think our forms in some radically good ways in the past twenty to thirty years.

Take a look at the Christian church in Europe for what happens when we stop doing this. The ministry situation in most of Europe is basically a complete re-start and it happened in one generation, maybe a generation and a half. This is what happens when we dig in our heels and say "this is how we've always done it." The mistake there is to think that those forms were somehow un-affected by cultural norms and expectations (in this case usually modernism as opposed to post-modernism) and so "that's how it ought to be." The fact is, modernism was no more amenable to the gospel than post-modernism is. It's just different battles we have to fight.

The culture and consumer engagement churches like Willow Creek force much of evangelical culture to at least consider how they're relating to the broader, un-churched world. I think that this is a really, really good thing...even if it there are some poor applications of it along the way.