In my recent posts I’ve expressed my belief that we are living in the midst of a massive cultural shift that is changing everything about how we experience life. This shift is called A Fourth Great Awakening by author Diana Butler Bass. Author Phyllis Tickle reads similar data and refers to the transition as The Great Emergence. These authors and others describe the deep challenge that we all face as we live in these times of massive transition.
Personally and at an institutional level, this transition is having impact. It is easy to see that government, education, business, law enforcement, and church are institutions that are struggling to know how to serve effectively in this transition. And in the face of the struggle, we all get anxious. The presence of anxiety makes clear-headed thinking more challenging than it normally is. I believe that one evidence of this is all the polarizing public conversations that fill the news and the social media.
This is not new. You can look back to the 1517 and the years that followed and see the same kinds of polarizing experiences. Leaders of the movement that we now call the Reformation (Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, etc.) were profoundly hostile to one another and to one another’s adherents. You would find the same kind of stories in the schism between the Roman Catholic Church and what became the Eastern Orthodox Church.
How do we respond?
All of that makes me wonder, then how do we respond? Transitions of this magnitude produce chaos and tons of anxiety. We can’t change that, so what can we do.
My first answer to that question is that we can manage our meaning making. That may not seem like a very spiritual answer, but it actually is. Please keep reading and let me give you two examples of that from my recent experience.
How do we respond to transitions of this magnitude? Start with managing our meaning making. Click To TweetTwo different people dealing with the exact same information…
As noted, I’m reading Bass’s book, Christianity After Religion. In that work she shares a ton of data to validate her sense that we are living through this massive transition tells this story.
In her book Christianity After Religion Bass shares a wide variety of information where she is seeking to demonstrate the new awakening that is emerging. In describing reactions that people have to the data, she tells the following story.
I stumbled across a website. The home page headline announced in large, bold print, with “Decline” in red. “Revealing Statistics: America in Decline: The Present Costs of the War Against God. The anonymous Baptist author used much of the same information that I have given in this chapter to prove that “an undeclared war is being waged against God” and argued that poll data help “ quantify the earthly expense” of this spiritual battle. Sound the alarm!
The day after I read Bass’s anecdote, I attended the ATCO conference in Houston. The guest theologian was Alan Roxburgh, the author of numerous books about cultural trends and how the gospel interacts with those trends. In his opening presentation, he said something that stands in stark contrast to the previous anecdote. Let me be clear that this is what I heard. I did not get a written quote from him. I heard him say the following.
Many people say that the transition we are in is due to the work of secular philosophers who introduced postmodern philosophy into the halls of academia and then it spread throughout our world. For these folks, these people – these philosophers and those who have been blinded by their teaching – are the source of our difficulties and we must do battle with them. But, I do not believe that is true. I believe this is the work of God. I believe that God is messing with the church because God is always giving life to things so they can die and be reborn.
Two different people dealing with the exact same information but responding in profoundly different ways. One sees the activity of an enemy to be defeated and the other sees the activity of God to be embraced.
Trying to do a hard thing really well
Here is a final story that comes out of my own experience. As our parents (mine and Betty’s) died, we worked really hard in each of those experiences to be really present to them. We worked to help each one die with dignity and with as little pain as possible. We tried to celebrate each one’s life while she or he was still alive, to tell that parent how much we loved them. We grieved individually and together. We knew that each death was inevitable. Rather than fight against that or rail against God because death is a part of life, we embraced the transition and tried to do a hard thing really well.
In fact that last phrase came from one of my sons. Several weeks after my mother’s death, he said to me. It’s been really hard to go through this with Mom (his grandmother), but I’ve been really grateful. You and momma have helped me see how to do a really hard thing well. I think what we did was help them make positive meaning in the midst of a painful experience of what was happening.
How do I respond in the midst of dying? I choose to trust God is doing a new thing that is good and life-giving! Click To TweetMy best sense is that we are well into this transition. My best sense, based on the five stages that Bass describes in these transitions, is that we are in late stage two or early stage three (see my previous post). I believe that this transition is an inexorable work of God that I am working to embrace. The chaos and confusion scare me at times, and sometimes I act badly in the face of my fear. But, I keep returning again and again to my deep conviction that at the heart of the universe is a loving God who loves me (and us) more than we can possibly imagine. I keep reminding myself that this loving God did not wake up this morning wondering what to do about what is going on in our world. God is a God who is always making things new. Life, death and resurrection are built into the essence of the universe. I can fight that if I choose to, but it’s not a battle I will win. Instead, I choose again and again to trust that in the midst of this dying, God is doing a new thing that is good and life-giving!