Can the Church Reach Our Postmodern Culture?
By Marlee Alex
Friday, August 15, 2003Can the Church Reach Our Postmodern Culture?
Marlee Alex
Postmodern evangelism doesn't say to the world, "Come to church." Rather, it says to the church, "Go to the world." Postmodern evangelism is recognizing that God is already at work in people's lives before we arrived on the scene, and that our role is helping people to see how God is present and active in their lives, calling them home.
—Leonard Sweet, Soul TsunamiSally Morgenthaler, author of Worship Evangelism: Inviting Unbelievers Into the Presence of God, is a church consultant on worship evangelism, Creative Design director at Pathways Church, Denver, Colo., an urban congregation committed to reaching the unchurched under 35, and she is president of SJM Management Company Inc.
Marlee Alex: Sally, many of us are just tuning into this thing called postmodernism. How did the shift from modern to postmodern take place, and what does it mean for the church?
Sally Morganthaler: French philosophers in the '60s and '70s were saying existence is random, and there is no God to make sense of it all. In America, the Vietnam war ground to a horrific end, the first time a super power had not been able to defeat the enemy, and the big question was why were we even there? There were many more elements creating the shift in our country, but the yellow smiley face as it was used then was one of our last hopeful symbols that things were getting better and better—a "modern" idea Baby Boomers grew up with. Modernism began to come to a screeching halt.
Like many others, I cut my teeth on Christianity in those decades, being taught to focus on the victorious in our Christian walk and the great things God does. Those are important, but were emphasized to the exclusion of grief and brokenness in human experience. I think in many cases the church became irrelevant, stuck in modernism as our culture careened past needing to experience the sacred in ways that were different. Our formulas as Christians and the manifestation of what we call faith have not been an answer.
In the last 20 years, mainline denominations went the route of discounting Jesus as God incarnate, gone the route of social justice faith without the scent of the divine. Evangelicals kept the jargon of a personal God and a personal relationship with God, but couched experience of God in "how-to." We no longer encountered that transcendent God in whose presence Isaiah was driven to confess, "Woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips." We no longer encountered a living Christ, but rather concepts about God that became synonymous with secular culture.
That's why ministers could take Stephen Covey's book Seven Habits of Healthy People and preach it. Our worship was reduced to warm fuzzy music, preaching was reduced to lists. We took out the story of conflict and struggle, along with characters of the faith, and replaced them with principles that could be shifted around like elements in a scientific laboratory. The gospel became simply a message of pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps instead of the transforming supernatural work of Jesus in his life, death, and resurrection. All we have left is a system of belief not much different than any other religion in the world. As I read Scripture, that was not what God had in mind in Jesus Christ.
Alex: So a "modern" church was not meeting the hunger of the human soul?
Morganthaler: When even kids who have been in Sunday school and youth group for 15 years are hitting the wall and going through incredible phases of self-medication, drugs, sex, or whatever, people start to see that lists are not the answer. They can't simply go to a small group study on parenting or marriage and get it all together. The unchurched admitted that the world doesn't fit into neat boxes, and that we human beings are in no way able to control our universe. They were hungering for a God bigger than themselves.
Among American adults the Notre Dame study of three years ago tracks church attendance at just 26 percent, a big decline. If you believe that, you know something is going on. What people who are leaving churches are telling us—and we have been deaf—is that there is a God and we are not him. We are all a mess and we need each other if we are going to get through this mess. As if we should have to tell the church that!
In the evangelical experience what happens so often is that we are left with ourselves as the answer. When we hit the church doors our family spreads out to different programs, just as we do when we go home. Not only that, but we can sit next to the same person in the same pew for two decades and not know their story. Church is a depersonalized experience. We have no place to express our grief, to unload our baggage. Only Jesus can transform and heal, yet we no longer know how to be the body of Christ, much less to be communion for those not yet grafted into his body.
Alex: Are you saying we need to embrace our brokenness to counteract the de-personalization of our churches?
Morganthaler: Life is lived in the in-between. More and more people are understanding that life is difficult, life offers no ready promises. People under age 35 say, "Don't give me the pat answers or formulas because I've been lied to. I've been disappointed by politicians. My parents said they'd always stay together but broke up, and my father's been married three times."
Just yesterday, at our church, a young man recovering form a bone marrow transplant told a story just like that. At 25 he's experienced more trauma than most of us will experience in our lives. His testimony wasn't, "Look at me, I've recovered and I know I'm going to be great. I'm going to walk out of here." His message was, "I know the grace of God and the love of God and I have peace and joy." Our congregation of 20-somethings were on the edge of their seats. If he had just said, "Trust Jesus and your life will be great," I don't think that would have flown. They were hearing a message that rang authentic to them.
I am also on a journey into, through, and in the present tense of brokenness. I had an intact family in the '80s and two wonderful children. Not long ago all that came crashing down. I had to take over our family business and run my business, too. I would have been the last person to say I would go through a separation, a divorce, seeing my husband in a courtroom wearing handcuffs and chains, visiting him in jail week after week. As the only Caucasian visitor, I saw how Latinos who did not speak much English were treated in a condescending way by the guards. I saw wives crying, spoke with them, and knew they did not have enough money to feed their children. I not only saw where the rest of the world is, I experienced the humiliation. God was breaking my world apart. I saw that I had lived in an unreal world; it's been an unexpected journey.
It was only by the grace of God I came through those dark times. By his provision it has knit my children and I together in a way that I could never have strategized. This present darkness, and God's light illuminating that reality has far out-speeched my own theology. So the postmodern experience is about entering into what has been our reality since Adam—that is our fallenness. The modern world would have put a mask over that.
Alex: How might Christians be more present for each other and rise to the challenges of unmasking our true faces?
Morganthaler: The church has been on its own spiritual journey for the past 20 years. If something or someone doesn't fit our formula, we show our inability to be present, to listen, to acknowledge people's spiritual journey. We are quick to try to press them into our box. In our lack of attentiveness to what's been going on for 20 years, we say to people, "We've found it, and we're going to show you so you can have it too." That is human-centered. That doesn't talk about a transcendent God who is the hound of heaven finding us.
Postmoderns don't respond to that very well. Many may not grasp the idea of Christianity as the one grand story that makes sense of life, but in America, unlike the British or Scandinavians, many will say there is a supreme Creator. This represents a window of opportunity for the church in our country. We have so many spiritual seekers; all you have to do is watch Oprah or go to your local movie theatre. Dr. Leonard Sweet would say that right now we are experiencing the greatest spiritual awakening in the history of the world—but the church is not leading it. The culture is leading it.
To move from human-centered religion toward transcendence we need God, brokenness, and communion. For example, we might go back to the many forms of prayer and repackage them in a language reflective of our own community. Prayer is illumination. That is really important for why people come to church. Assuming that we need a God bigger than us to guide us makes a huge statement. In the '80s, I noticed a shift in church-goers. The people we were reaching at Pathways Church were responding to other parts of the service than the outline form message. People were wanting less information about God.
People simply wanted to sit in a transcendent sacred space and feel held, nurtured, and beckoned in that place. Talking to them about what impacted them most, they spoke of celebrating the Lord's table, anointing for healing, longer periods of prayer, or the more intimate type of singing that we were doing. They seemed to enjoy songs that lead into times of confession or even songs of lament where we would take Psalms and reword them. God is omnipresent, but when you worship corporately, even embracing each other's brokenness, something will happen that you can't experience anywhere else.
Marlee Alex is a writer and editor in Sisters, Ore. From her serene cubbyhole between the mountains and the desert, she enjoys research on postmodern thought and the church (well, whenever she isn't fishing, hiking, snowboarding—you get the picture). She can be contacted at marleebooks@aol.com.
Related Reading:
Apologetic Preaching: Proclaiming Christ to a Postmodern World
How do we effectively proclaim Christ to a "postmodern" world?Challenges and Opportunities: A Review of Two Books Exploring Postmodernism and the Church
Helping Christians understand how changes in North American culture affect their lives and the life of the church, Postmoderns and Culture Shifts identify the challenges and gifts of living in today's world. These books explore the nine culture shifts that have shaped the lives of the 62 million Americans born between 1965 and 1981.Church: Why Bother? My Personal Pilgrimage
One of five books in the Growing Deeper series, Yancey's book attempts to address the earnest question of postmodern seekers.Generating Hope: A Strategy for Reaching the Postmodern Generation
Reaching Generation X is more than youth evangelism. It's a downright cross-cultural experience! In Generating Hope: A Strategy for Reaching the Postmodern Generation, Jimmy Long explains how the postmodern mindset has affected today's youth and how we must adjust for it in our outreach efforts.Historical Lessons to Engage Our Postmodern Culture
Can we find ways to engage in meaningful conversation with our unbelieving culture without appearing arrogant or manipulative? In this excerpt from Curits Chang's book, thoughtful scholars, pastors, teachers, and evangelists will see how important it is to preserve the lessons and legacies of history as we seek to engage our culture.Pastoring Post-modern People
In this interview, Pastor David Fisher, author of The 21st Century Pastor, explains how "popular postmodernism creates wonderful opportunities for witness and especially for living a community life that authentically displays the character of the Christian faith."