Its always dangerous to try and put a structure to God's work, in doing so we run the danger of (re-)making God in our image. In fact, we all do this to some degree or another, ranging from projecting our parental experiences onto our understanding of God, through to selective construction of a god from all the elements we like (the buffet god), or like the good post-modernist we simply hold the contradictions of syncretism without apparent discomfort. However, in my current disconnected status from the church I have been forced to think about new ways to view what it means to live in Christian relationship with the world. There's the human side, there's the spiritual side, and then there's the complication that all is fluid and changing. When all around is unstable, when one is adrift, what constants can one find? What framework can help me sense the sensibility underlying these shifting sands? Of course there is the alpha-omega narrative of God's progressive work. Of course there's the "same, yesterday, today, and forever". These are amazing realities, and I do not want to belittle them. But what do these mean on a Sunday morning? What does this mean for the new year. So I search for a shape to help me put words to the mystery of God's work. I search for a useful epistemology to bound the possibilities of decisions, and for a helpful ontology to bring clarity. The global institutional church, as a generalization, is mired in rigidity, slowly working its way into obscurity. Of course there are exceptions to the rule. And of course I can trust God to never stop acting. But on the human level the institution of the church has, in the space of a few decades, lost its connection to a deeply relativist society, and has instead become a defensive circling of the wagons around its rituals and traditions. What does this mean? Throughout history the church has undergone seismic structural shifts as the surrounding society fundamentally changed. Just think back through the ages of empires, the reformation, or the industrial revolution. In parallel with these changes the church has painfully restructured, splintered, altered, both in form and expression while retaining its core of orthodox theology. In the recent decades, more so perhaps than ever before, society has been fundamentally altering in ways few ever imagined; a globalization of culture and economy, deep dependence on technology (with attendant vulnerability), a fragile global connectivity of trade, information, knowledge and culture. Each generation is now more different in their views and values than any two generations have been perhaps in all of history. We even label the children by the decade they grew up in. So it is not unreasonable to expect that the church MUST undergo seismic change. But the church wears a skin that has calcified over the centuries, an exoskeleton of rigidity. Changes are thus necessarily difficult and accompanied by much cracking, dust, and damage to the shell in order to allow the living interior to shape-shift into a new position. There is a useful concept called the Cynefin framework which helps me make sense of this fluid landscape. God is a God of order, however in a time-evolving world there are different forms that his order can take. For decades at a time the church operates in the order space of "Simple" (lower right quadrant in the figure): we sense developments, categorize these within an unquestioned theology, and develop a proportional and measured response. Best practice is the order of the day, and the church for the most part keeps pace with the changes in the world. We can see this stable state evident across the different ages of history.
Then something fundamental shifts in society, and the church finds itself in a space of societal "chaos" - the context changes so fast that order is seemingly lost, traditional modes of response fail, comprehension of what's happening is lacking. In this space the church has two choices; to look inward and isolate itself in the impossible hope of protectionism, or be forced to experiment with change and endure the pain of many failures. Perceptions trigger response, and many times the perceptions are wrong. In time the chaos settles and new emergent forms appear into a space of complexity. Here there comes a growing recognition of a new face to the church, a collective surprise as if another creature is emerging from the same chrysalis, although there remains ambiguity of what is a butterfly and what is a moth. The former will eventually fly over the landscape of society, the latter will burn in the flames of the world's many attractive candles. Then, this space of complexity ... this space of unresolvable dynamics ... settles into a new semi-stability of something that is now merely complicated. In this space solutions are tested, refined, and solidified. New understanding helps frame theological orthodoxy into a different expression, and the church morphs into a new age of function and engagement with a lost world. But when one enters the stage of chaos, it is hard to see where the cycle will end. In our current time we have lived in simple stability for decades; the Roman Catholic church, protestantism, and the strands of evangelicalism. Each generation in the 20th century largely succeeded the prior with near total adoption of church culture and practice. I would argue that in the 1990's we began to enter the space of chaos. The church has been slow to recognize this. Today as we approach the end of the second decade of the 21st century, I suggest we're moving through the chaos and into the complex space where emergent forms begin to show through. Some areas of the world lead or lag others, but it is my suggestion that shadowy forms of a new church expression are becoming apparent. The core remains unchanged, orthodoxy is a strong and vibrantly beating heart of faith in an unchanging God. But the skin is changed, changing, forming, settling. There are some moths, but there are also butterflies. I don't know what that the final forms will look like. But I do believe they will be effective in becoming what they need to become in order to reach our transformed society. This excites me. God is doing something, and the question I face is whether I will pull back in search of the rapidly vanishing "simple", or in faith step into complex emergence of God's relevant church.
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Why?
Probably the best therapy is to express yourself. Why do you think psychiatrists make you lie on the couch and talk, while all they do is murmur "hmmm", "uhuh", or "go on"? Archives
May 2017
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