I've been struggling from a leadership standpoint with the conversation over cultural relevancy. It's the "kiss the culture" question; you know, are we going to so engage the culture that we lose any sense of what it means to be an authentic church, or spurn it in such a way that our rejection of culture is seen as a rejection of the people Jesus so clearly comes to love and claim as his own?Here are the brass tacks in my context: forecast? 8% decline in our county over the next five years. Average age? 46. The largest unchurched population? Under the age of 45. An interesting fact? Our community is much younger than we think it is. The average age of the Evangelical Lutheran Church is somewhere in the late 50's depending on who you talk to and the resources you cite. The reality is, we hang out with folks our own age...e.g. NOT the younger generations around us.
The Jesus and Kingdom questions? How are we going to connect these next generations to Jesus and his work?
I live in an interesting culture. It's what sociologists label as "oral." This does NOT mean my community is illiterate. Far from it. You'd be surprised by all of the University trained farmers in these parts. But it is to say that information about important things is communicated in coffee shops, in church hallways, via rolled down windows in idling vehicles pitched parallel and opposite in the middle of roads, and through the communal interactions of dozens of community organizations that make a town like mine go round the sun. When I first arrived here, I launched a mid-month periodical as a counter point to our newsletter called "The Spirit Porch," a sort of forum for conversations about faith, life, and discipleship. My readership (in town) was all of ten people out of our of a mailing list of 250.
I stopped that after about five months. Discipleship wasn't coming through spiritual reading. It was coming through the holy conversations, one on one, that occurred at the gas pump, at the corner store register, and just outside our town's library.
It was these experiences that convinced me that getting an active Internet site up and running shouldn't be a high priority.
A year later we've just finished our re-survey for the Natural Church Development work that's been underway in the congregation. The results? Our coach tells us that we've had greater overall growth than any other church utilizing the instrument in the Nebraska Synod. How did we do it? One Jesus conversation at a time. One Jesus question at a time.
What do you think JESUS is passionate about? How can you/we be passionate about that?
What do you think Jesus really values in our lives together as his church?
How do you think Jesus feels about our worship? Is he inspired by it?
Where do you think Jesus is calling us to follow him?
How do you think Jesus is challenging us to grow?
How do you think a church of the God of the empty tomb is called to serve? Give? Lead? Live?
What kinds of opportunities do we have to tell others about Jesus in our day to day lives? And what's holding us back?
These are relevant questions here. They are questions that are stirring the saints.
I know our USAmerican culture is changing. Christendom, whether small town America knows it or not, is on the ropes. We can't take for granted the Christian face of the nation anymore, if we ever could. We can't take for granted the church's protected status in our culture as blue laws erode, as soccer makes its way to Sunday morning, and hockey to Sunday afternoons, and as every hunting season imaginable becomes an excuse for not worshipping the living God.
I know it's getting harder to communicate. The cultural gap between my confirmation students and the Builder generation of my congregation is a light year apart. To give you a sense of the rate of disconnect just between myself and my confirmation students, think on this. I'm thirty. In confirmation just two weeks ago we were talking about God's gift of the Sabbath and relating it to the Old Testament concept of the year of Jubilee...God's vision for grace and a clean slate for human communities and creation. We talked about the recent year of Jubilee (2000) and about Bono and his work for international debt relief. "You know who Bono is don't you?" Blank looks. "You've heard of U2, right?" Again blank looks.
I thought to myself, "But God, I'm only thirty!"
They're not listening to U2. They are listening to "Linkin' Park" and "Green Day" and "System of a Down" and "Eminem". None of these kids loads the top ten organ hits of all time onto their iPODs. But my congregation IS talking about a costly organ renovation. Why? So we can make sure the next generation will never come?
I think I know why we're losing the conversation and why the church is struggling with relevancy. I think our organs and other social projects have become more important to us than Jesus, his message, his work, and our mandate to connect others to him. I think that in the church we are passionate about maintaining our museums for posterity, rather than creating MASH units for our hurting communities, wells of the deep water for the spiritually thirsty.
Perhaps you're sitting there saying, "Nathan, it's just not that black and white." And maybe you're right. But maybe we could at least agree on one thing: our passion for Jesus, the risen One, and for the creation he comes to claim as his own, should be WAY more important than any of our man-made traditions and agendas.
In his book "Blue Like Jazz"; Donald Miller writes...
A friend of mine, a young pastor who recently started a church, talks to me from time to time about the new face of the church. He says the new church will be different from the old one, that we will be relevant to culture and the human struggle. I don't think any church has ever been relevant to culture, to the human struggle, unless it believed in Jesus and the power of His gospel. If the supposed new church believes in trendy music and cool Web pages, then it is not relevant to culture either. It is just another tool of Satan to get people to be passionate about nothing (111).
Maybe the questions is, are we passionate about our forms of communication? Or are we passionate about that which we are communicating, and the ones to whom we are communicating? Can we reach the next generations with worship that features organ music? Of course we can. But those others we are called to reach, to love, and to embrace should be the first move in our thinking and not the last. And maybe questions about how we communicate should be of higher value than questions about how we're going to maintain the museum. One thing I know for sure: churches that create museums soon turn into mausoleums. The organ shouldn't come first. The building shouldn't come first. Even our budget shouldn't come first.
Jesus should. And all those he's called his own, that don't know yet that they belong to him.
Don Miller has named the mark of relevancy: it won't be found in Blogs like these, pod casts like those, or $70,000 organ renovation projects. When these things become our passions, we become passionate for nothing. The church's relevancy has always been and always will be her belief in Jesus and the power of his gospel.
4 comments:
Here. Here. Well said, Sunshine. Relevancy to culture begins and ends with passion for Jesus and participating in his mission. In between those poles is how we communicate. I think it's less about the instrument of communication and more about the Spirit-giftedness of the person doing the communicating. For example, a $70,000 organ renovation could be an important investment in your mission to the next generation IF you have J.S. Bach as your cantor, who tickles the ivories with his 'Easter Oratorio' such that all are drawn into tearful contemplation in the presence of the holy. However, if the communicator isn't Spirit-gifted and committed to excellence in using that instrument, then it will have zero relevancy to our culture. The same can be said for preachers, web designers, newsletter editors, liturgical artists, and all who communicate the gospel. Relevancy begins and ends with Jesus-passion, and in the middle is Spirit-giftedness.
Add this into the mix: what happens when young leadership steps into a full-time calling? We take these gifted young people, teach them NOT to speak the language they know, and give them tools that don't connect with even their own souls. "Youth are the church of the future," where future = taking care of the future of the ones who are passing on. The youth I know look at the future that is painted by current power-holders in congregations, shake their heads, put on their iPod earphones and walk away to another beat.
GenXers, Millenials, everbody really, knows how to sniff out BS. Since the church has been jumping on different honeywagons over the last century, no one likes its stink anymore. The current goal for our time (and really the essential goal for all time) for the church is to JUST GET CLEAR ABOUT JESUS' MESSAGE.
But being clear means giving our lives away eventually, and at times I'd rather talk about organ projects, because I'm often confused and mistake my current life as really good.
By the way, Nathan, 30 is old. Let's see, your oldest confirmands were born around 1992. You were driving cars before they were conceived. You and I are old. But you have better hair than I do. Peace!
As someone with a degree in Organ performance, I have mixed reactions to your comments. You are asking the right Question–how can we be faithful to the mission of sharing the story of Jesus in our current context. On one level, it is totally contextual–there will be as many different answers to that question as there are local contexts. There will not be a one-size-fits-all answer. I usually find myself making the “MASH” argument too. If everyone is dead, what use is the Museum? Get the message out! Save Lives! Triage is a short-term and immediate concern. While often necessary, so is a return to health, wholeness, and life. If all we do is MASH triage, well who will be the Doctors in the next generation? Perhaps we need to attend to the cultural artifacts of the past (museums–passing on the traditions) as well as attend to the immediate MASH activities.
Time is the factor, immediate or long term. Unintended, as well as intentional consequences. I am reminded of the Building of St. Peter’s. For 500 years, it has inspired millions. And as an unintended side effect, the opposition to the fund raising efforts for it, gave us Luther and the Reformation! (Moral of the story: you never know what the effects will be–even of an organ installation).
And while we are on time, I will have to wait to later to respond to your observations about your being an over the hill 30 year old pastor talking to 15 year olds. As a 50 year old professor–the whole thing looks even more askewed than you might imagine. (I was in college when you were born, can use a slide rule, and knew World War I vets).
I know that Bach was extreemly interested in the faith of his time. If one looks into his library, one find scores of theological tomes. For him, art was in service of communicating the message of Jesus. What was cutting edge delivery of the Message in one generation, may not work as well in subsequent generations. Thus, the need for constant re-packaging of the message.
But I am not sure one can neatly separate the medium from the message. You seem to want to preserve the “pure” message apart from its packaging. McLuhan has taught us that the Medium IS the message. I think you should recheck his ideas. Also look at his tetrad of questions about medium–What does it extend? What did it make obsolete? What is retrieved? What does the technology reverse into if it is over-extended?
I know it is a theme I have voiced to you before but there is a great fault line appearing–this time the shift will not be exponential–it will be quantum. As I have said before, you have a chance of being on the other side of the shift. Me, and the church and society of those of us over 50–well, I am more and more convinced that we will be “left behind” on this level--- Maybe the “Left Behind” people were right, just not in any way they could have ever imagined!
I also think that much of what you were observing are psychological observations. How should individuals live with passion for Jesus. And as someone trained in psychology, I think that you are skilled at working with the dynamics of spirituality in this personal and individual level. But I must remind you that many of the questions you are asking about organs and churches are really sociological questions. How does the church function as a social institution. Those questions cannot be answered by asking the question of the individual’s passion for Jesus. I suppose that what you ultimately need to map out is the dance between the sociological and psychological dimensions of living with passion for Jesus.
My thoughts on this are more sociological. I think groups work and behave according to patterns. It appears to me that churches and groups do have homogenous tendencies. Local Churches do tend to have a dominant demographic. I used to think this was always bad. However, I am not so sure. McGaverns work on the Homogenous Church Growth Principle is something we have not come to grips with at all!! Whatever the common demographic, it does make ministry and evangelism more possible. Such specialized churches will eventually become outdated–unable to reach younger generations. I do not think this is bad either. It might be that in the long run a church must go through a life-cycle. They need to go through all the stages, complete it and die..hopefully to be reborn in a totally different way. Perhaps we put some churches on artificial life support when we should just let them die? Maybe we need to let the old church go out in its blaze of glory–with full dignity-- and not try to revive it one more time.–Isn’t that consistent with your observations about semper reformand?
Will the church of the future need organs?–maybe not, and 70,000 sounds like a lot of ministry which could be better spent. But then again I remember what Jesus said when the Judas protested that the ointment poured out on Jesus could have been sold for a lot of money (one full years wages!!) And given to the poor. Jesus said to leave her alone, she does it in preparation of my death. Perhaps this is often what we need to do. Let it be given joyfully as a preparation for death.
On another level, there does seem to be a return on the part of Millennials, especially those raised Lutheran. They seem to have very traditional tastes in church music and liturgy. Or put another way, there may really be a real roll for the organ in the future. Recently, I had a very interesting paper from a Church of Christ student who does not like contemporary worship–he wants to go back to the old hymns and old ways. Is this not also the case with Evangelicals going back to Canterbury or to Eastern Rite Christianity? I doubt that organs will become as central as they once were, but they may not turn out to be the museum/mausoleum you envision either. It seems counter intuitive I know, but this seems to me to be one of those post-modern paradoxes. It might be nostalgia or it might be something significant, a pattern that allows us to cope with post-modern times. (I know that I am easily influenced but I am currently watching Star Trek Voyager. They use holidecks all the time. They go often to situations from the past–to play, to cope, to gain understanding. Is it possible that churches, retro-churches, organs, High Church liturgy, et. al. might function in our post-modern world the way the holidecks do in Star Trek??–it is worth thinking about, islands of “nostalgia/fantasy/history/ theater/imagination” to which we visit to think, cope, retreat, re-create, and rest??)
Wray,
Thanks for taking the time to really interact with the Blog. Just so we're clear, I'm not against organs or oganists for that matter. And I do understand that the medium and message are fundamentally intertwined. I just reread the blog and do not perceive what I wrote as nearly binary as what you perceived my writing to be. And I certainly didn't mean it that way.
But there are different "spirits" at work in these questions. One is a spirit of religiosity: it makes stuff of human beings more important to our work as God's people than that to which we point. The Spirit of Christ calls us to proclaim the reign of God. Organs may aid in this proclamation, and blogs, and so on. What I'm saying is that if these mediums become our idols, (or to put it another way, if they become our mission rather than the one Jesus put us on), then we've become something other than Christian. A human cultural club perhaps, but not something fundamentally Jesus centered.
This is my observation; our mediums find their proper place in our lives only when God is appropriately at center--God and God's mission. When these aren't the circumstances, the "stuff" of church tends to become our God and the religious crap that God has to put to death to bring about new life.
The jury is still out on millenials I think. I know that some of them prefer the traditional. But I've not seen any definite data that says that this is an overall trend, despite what you may be experiencing on the campus of Capital University.
There is always that age old fight with overgeneralization. Take "postmodern spirituality" for example. I love how we keep on talking about "Emergent churches" when what is clear is that we are dealing with an urban phenomenon of incredibly small proportions, but faddish appeal.
I'm not talking about throwing out organs. Ours will continue to play a role in our worship life. What I'm saying is that when we ask our questions about the priorities of the church, Jesus and his mission should always be our first priority. Period. If an organ project serves that, then "git 'er done!" And if it doesn't, then flow where the Spirit of God is calling.
Again, thanks for the conversation!
Peace.
NSSR
Post a Comment