I’m not sure when it happened. I think it was always there, nibbling around the edges of my consciousness. The first time I really remember having a clear glimpse of this new awakening was in the early days of my work with Union Baptist Association. We completed a massive research project that told us what we all know today – that Christians are becoming a smaller percentage of the whole population and that they have less and less impact on our culture.
I got a glimpse of it when we moved to Montrose in Houston and got outside of the traditional church. My days were filled with conversations with young adults in recovery and with street kids and homeless people. I regularly had conversations where I could not say . . . “you know, it’s like the story of the Good Samaritan” . . . because neither they nor their parents or grandparents had every heard that story.
I got glimpses of it when people called me foolish and irresponsible for moving my family to Montrose – this was especially clear when they heard stories like the one of Betty being knocked to the ground at the front door of our house by a young man who was high on drugs as my then 14-year-old daughter watched it happen.
I got a glimpse one Sunday morning in a church where I served as interim pastor. A young man came to the Sunday service tattooed up and dressed in shorts and a t-shirt with a baseball cap on his head. When he didn’t remove his cap after sitting down, a woman sitting behind him and a bit to his right stood up, walked over to him, jerked the cap off his head, and angrily threw it down on the pew beside him. I got a glimpse of it as he got up and walked out.
The institutions of our culture are increasingly not delivering on their purpose to our society. Click To TweetThen I began to glimpse it through my reading and study. Perhaps the book that influenced me the most was Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America edited by Darrell Guder. This was one of the clearest and most compelling cases for me to this point that we were/are living in a seismic shift.
I got a different kind of glimpse of it through Betty’s eyes as a public school teacher in an inner-city Houston school. Day after day we would sit at the dinner table and she would pour out her heart about being in a system that, despite the best intention of many capable teachers and administrators, seemed incapable of delivering on the promises of education. Then it occurred to me that the nightly news carried similar stories about our nation’s systems of education, government, business, and law enforcement.
It wasn’t just that the church wasn’t working. It was that the institutions of our culture were increasingly not delivering on their purpose to our society.
Finally there was a watershed moment for me. I read Stuart Murray’s Post-Christendom: Church and Mission in a Strange New World. It was then that I could see this massive transition time with great clarity. We are living through the death of Christendom into something new – perhaps as Diana Butler Bass suggests, a 4th Great Awakening. We were moving from a church that has been deeply formed by the Enlightenment era and it’s commitment to certainty to something new. It wasn’t so much that the old was bad or needed to be changed. It was that the context had changed and was changing dramatically, and God was doing a new thing in this new context.
My generation and the ones on either side of me are presiding over the death of an era that in the Good News of Christ always gives birth to the resurrection of something new. As pastors and church leaders, we are supposed to know some things about death and resurrection. We have heard and taught Jesus declaration that we find our lives by losing them. We gain our lives by giving them away. The death and resurrection motif are our bread and butter.
In the past couple of weeks two things have really focused my attention. The first is the stages of an awakening that I wrote about in my last post. It provides a kind of road map that helps ground me in our contemporary context. Like the stages of grief or the stages of human development, it helps me have some sense in a generalized way of knowing how to map my way forward.
The second was a quote in today’s reading of Richard Rohr’s daily devotional. He wrote:
The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better. Just go ahead and live positively; go to the side and do it differently. Don’t waste time with oppositional energy (italics mine). In the short run, you will have to hold unresolvable tensions, symbolized by the crossbeams on which Jesus was crucified. In the long run, you will usher in something entirely new and healing. This is “third force” wisdom. Even though Jesus exemplified this third force, his followers have been very slow learners.
I wouldn’t say the church and the institutions of this past era were bad. I would say that they likely cannot serve the new era. So, I’m working daily and intensely to find ways to allow death to simply takes its course while contributing everything I can to this new thing God is doing. There are days when holding what Rohr calls the unresolvable tension of one thing (dying) and another thing (giving birth) is confusing and frustration and life-giving and hopeful – all at the same time.
I’m learning to live in that tension.