Signs of the Times
From the Series—Generations
May 10, 2003This evotional continues our series titled Generations.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, “There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation has a rendezvous with destiny.”
Every generation has a rendezvous with destiny. Acts 17:26 says, “From one man God made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live.” In other words, you were born when you born and you were born where you were born by divine design. Your birthday and birthplace are anything but accidental. They are part of God’s predetermined plan for your life. You are part of a generation and you have a generational responsibility.
In their book, Geeks & Geezers, Warren Bennis and Bob Thomas say, “The era into which we are born has a profound impact on our lives, although we are rarely aware of it day to day.” This series is about helping us “understand the times” like the tribe of Isaachar in I Chronicles 12:32. This evotional focuses on five trends or transitions that are happening in the church and the culture at-large. Some of them are glacier-like changes while others are avalanche-like. Some of them are cultural, some are spiritual, and some are technological. Some transitions are good and some are bad. But one way or another, all of them affect the way we follow Christ and the way we do church.
The Cycle
I’m neither a historian nor the son of a historian, but I do know this: history repeats itself. In one sense, history is linear. There is a creation event in Genesis and there is a judgment day in Revelation when human history, as we know it, will end. But history is also cyclical. There are predictable patterns and trends. Ecclesiastes 3:15 says, “Whatever is has already been, and what will be has been before. “
History is full of pendulum swings --generational reactions or overreactions to historical context or previous generations. The generation that lived through the depression understands the value of a dollar because they came face-to-face with poverty. The GI generation appreciates freedom because they fought for it. And Generation X is more family-centric, in part, because many of them were latch-key kids.
New Thing
Some trends and transitions are God things. The winds of the Spirit blow in a new direction and God does a new thing. Isaiah 43:18-19 says, “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing. Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?” God is always doing a new thing. But when we don’t perceive it we just keep doing what we’re doing.
Andy Grove of Intel says, “There is at least one point in the history of any company when you have to change dramatically to rise to the next performance level. Miss that moment and you start to decline.” The same holds true for churches. To stay on the cutting edge we can’t “dwell on the past.” We’ve got to perceive the “new thing” that God is doing. Shakespeare said,
There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries
On such a full sea we are now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures
Material to Spiritual
This shift is epitomized by Madonna--the quintessential “material girl.” She held a press conference last week to promote The 72 Names of God written by her Rabbi, Yehuda Berg. The material girl is becoming spiritual. It’s a microcosm of what’s happening in our culture at large. There will always be an undercurrent of materialism in every culture, but our generation is not satisfied with material or tangible or visible things. We’ve realized that the best things in life aren’t things. We’re seeking for something more--something transcendent, something spiritual, something supernatural.
One of AOL’s pop up windows on its homepage last week was “Summer of Superheroes.” X-Men Reunited and Matrix Reloaded both debut in the month of May. Hollywood is capitalizing on the spiritual thirst and supernatural hunger and turning it into box office blockbusters.
A few months ago, someone emailed an article to me titled Cinema: The New Cathedral of Hollywood. Our church was cited in the article and the article compared churches and theaters. The author said, “What we want from church is actually precisely what we get from film.” She said that “movies are an alternate form of transcendence… something that very few people are even capable of feeling in church these days.” Fredrick Buechner said,” Hollywood consistently beats the church at its own game.” The church is not in the entertainment business , but it better be in the transcendence business.
Brian McLaren says, “The spiritual resurgence I see brewing is unconventional and even irreverent at times, largely developing outside the boundaries of our institutional religion. But that to me says more about the rigidity of our institutions than the darkness of the current spiritual resurgence; it says more about old wine skins than about the quality of the new wine that is fermenting around us.”
Here is what biblical spirituality is all about: it is being filled and led and empowered by the Holy Spirit. The last Sunday of May we’ll begin a four-part evotional series titled Spirit. We’ll talk about some of the different hats that the Holy Spirit wears and how we can be Spirit-led and Spirit-filled and Spirit-powered followers of Christ.
Stationary to Mobile
In the 1st century AD, the average person never traveled outside a thirty-five mile radius of their home. Even a few generations ago, most people lived their entire lives pretty close to their birthplace. But that has radically changed for a number of reasons. Two obvious reasons for increased mobility are transportation and communication.
In 6000 BC the fastest form of travel was a camel caravan averaging about 8 mph. It took about 3400 years to double that speed. The chariot was invented in 1600 BC and it maxed out at speeds around 20 mph. It wasn’t until the late 1800’s that we eclipsed the 100 mph mark with steam locomotives. Stop and think about that. It took thousands of years for humankind to hit 100 mph. In the last hundred years we’ve broken the speed of sound (740 mph) and escape velocity (18,500 mph).
In 1915, the fourth decade of commercial telephone service, the American Transcontinental System only had the capacity to handle three simultaneous calls. Now we’ve got some guy walking all around the world saying, “ Can you hear me now?” In his novel, Timeline, Michael Crichton says, “If you were to say to a physicist in 1899 that in 1999, a hundred years later, moving images would be transmitted into homes all over the world from satellites in the sky; that you could cross the Atlantic at two thousand miles an hour; that humankind would travel to the moon, and then lose interest; that people carry telephones weighing a few ounces, and speak anywhere in the world without wires; or that most of these miracles depended on devices the size of a postage stamp, which utilized a new theory called quantum mechanics --if you said all this, the physicist would almost certainly pronounce you mad.”
Our generation has witnessed the death of distance. We live in a world that has transitioned from stationary to mobile in the last hundred years. We have mobile offices and mobile phones and mobile homes. We also have mobile churches .
If you look at the Old Testament you’ll find that the people of God were mobile. They followed the cloud by day and pillar of fire by night. Just as our setup team turns a theater into a church each week, the Israelites would setup and teardown the tabernacle every time the Spirit of God moved.
In the New Testament, the early church was simply known as “the way.” It had nothing to do with buildings. The early church was a mobile movement not a stationary institution.
In his book, Unfreezing Moves, Bill Easum says, “The twenty- first century congregation is becoming mobile again. Property is looked upon the same way the Israelites looked upon the Ark of the Covenant--it is something to be picked up and moved to wherever God is leading you.”
Easum goes on to talk about “the edifice complex.” He says, “During the twentieth century, property and place were of extreme importance.” But Easum talks about a new breed of churches emerging in the new millennium. He says, “In this time of traumatic transition, we see institutional Christianity being left behind because it is tethered to its physical moorings and can’t join Jesus on the way. In its place we see the rise of House Churches, Storefront Churches, Cell Churches, Cyber Churches, Café Churches, Bar Churches, Multiple-Site Churches, and Biker Churches.” He says, “What do these ministries have in common? They are able to pick up and move with Jesus the moment he moves. They are not tethered to place, property, and tradition.”
In the past six months, six pastors have spent a weekend at NCC because their churches are moving into theaters. Some of them are selling their church buildings to move into rented facilities. A generation ago, it was a given that churches would rent facilities until they could buy or build a permanent building. The reverse is happening in our generation. Churches are moving back into the marketplace.
George MacLeod said, “The cross must be raised again at the center of the marketplace as well as on the steeple of the church. I am claiming that Jesus was not crucified in a cathedral between two candles, but on a cross between two thieves; on the town garbage heap, at a crossroads so cosmopolitan they had to write His title in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek. At the kind of place where cynics talk smut, and thieves curse, and soldiers gamble, because that is where He died and that is what he died about and that is where churchmen ought to be and what churchmen should be about.”
NCC is in the middle of the marketplace. That’s where God has strategically positioned us. There is a cross over Union Station. But we want to take it even further. We own a piece of property one block from Union Station--it is kitty-corner to what will be the largest office building in Washington, DC. Next year we will break ground and build a first-class, fully-operational coffeehouse. The reason is pretty simple and straightforward: we want to create a place where the community and the church can cross paths.
Next week our staff will visit Mosaic --a church that meets in a downtown LA nightclub on Sunday nights. They are raising the cross in the marketplace.
Dualism to Holism
Dualism is tough to define because it has different philosophical expressions, but it can be traced back to Plato who made a distinction between the material world and spiritual world. In the 16th century AD, Francis Bacon, made a similar distinction between the “words of God” and the “works of God.” He inadvertently divided Creator and creation, body and spirit, sacred and secular.
One of the trends that I see is a move away from a dualistic approach to life that creates false dichotomies to a more holistic approach to life. There may be no greater evidence to that effect than the rise in popularity of holistic medicine. Medical research has quantified the relationship between one’s physical state and emotional state. Many sicknesses are psychosomatic. Good doctors don’t compartmentalize body and spirit and mind.
In his book, Mustard Seek versus McWorld, Tom Sine makes a distinction between what he calls “dualistic discipleship” and “whole-life discipleship.” Dualistic discipleship is when following Christ is reduced to little more than fifteen minutes in the morning and two hours on Sunday. Sine says, “In this model, we wind up with a highly privatized and spiritualized piety that is often largely disconnected from the rest of our lives.”
Sine says, “In the first century, being a Christ follower was not something you worked in around the edges of an already overcommitted life. Following Jesus was clearly a whole-life proposition that caused people in that first community to reorder their entire lives to put God’s purposes first.”
I Thessalonians 5:17 says “pray continually” or “pray without ceasing.” Translation: don’t compartmentalize God. He doesn’t want part of you. He wants all of you.
In the 17th century, a Carmelite friar named Brother Lawrence wrote a book that has become a spiritual classic. Three centuries later, The Practice of the Presence of God is just as relevant now as it was then. The singular goal of his life was to live in the presence of God. His life was an experiment in how to live in constant communion with Christ. What’s interesting is that he said that “formal times of prayer” appealed to Him less and less. He believed that prayer is not necessarily “saying prayers” but “a way of living in which all we do becomes a prayer.” He said, “Learn to see God and His glory in everything we do, say, and undertake.”
Brother Lawrence’s life consisted primarily of menial tasks. But those tasks did not divert his attention from God. He said, “Each of our actions is a way of carrying on a little conversation with God.” He said the great delusion is that time set aside for prayer should be any different than any other time during the day. “There is no mode of life in the world more pleasing and more full of delight than continual conversation with God; only those who practice and experience it can understand it.”
Cerebral to Experiential
I think this shift is typified by two best-selling Christian books. In 1973, J.I. Packer wrote Knowing God. In the 1990’s, Henry Blackaby wrote Experiencing God. The shift is pretty obvious--from cerebral to experiential.
The whole premise of Experiencing God is that God is apriori. He is already at work. And He invites us to join Him in what he is already doing. That is great theology. Ephesians 2:10 is one of my favorite passages of Scripture. It says, “We are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works prepared for us in advance.” God is already at work. We just need to discern what He’s doing and where He’s doing it.
I think Michael Slaughter hits the nail on the head in his book Unlearning Church. He says, “This is a spiritual age where people are looking for an experience of God more than an explanation of God.” I think that is good and bad. There are two dangers that we face: explanation without experience and experience without explanation. We need both/and.
Michael Slaughter says, “Too many people believe they cannot find an experience of God in the church. All they think they’ll find in a church are abstract, cerebral ideas .” This generation is looking for something more than head-knowledge. We want a hands-on experience. And that is what God offers us. Psalm 34:8 says, “Taste and see that the Lord is good.” It’s an invitation to experience.
Experience has gotten a bum-rap as something subjective. It is subjective, but I also think that Emmanuel Kant was right. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant says, “There is no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.”
Brent Curtis says, “We have lived for so long with a propositional approach to Christianity that we have nearly lost its true meaning. Modern evangelicalism reads like an IRS 1040 form; it’s true, all the data is there, but it doesn’t take your breath away.” God wants to take our breath away! He wants us to “taste and see” that He is good.
On the opposite end of the spectrum we face the danger of experience without explanation. I call it “the Samaritan mistake.” In John 4:22, Jesus makes a fascinating distinction. He says, “You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know.”
This verse establishes an interesting link between knowledge and worship. They are not mutually exclusive things. Think of a spectrum. On one side is truth and on the other side is ignorance. God doesn’t want us to worship Him in ignorance. The Samaritan mistake is mindless worship --worshipping in ignorance, worshipping what we do not know. God wants us to worship Him in truth. The more we know the more we can worship.
An ornithologist who knows that a meadowlark has a range of 300 notes and 50 songs has a greater appreciation for a chirping bird. An entomologist who knows there are 250,000 different species of beetles has a greater appreciation for the incredible creativity of the Creator. An astronomer who knows the constellations by name has a greater appreciation of the heavens.
Knowledge and appreciation go hand in hand. If we don’t know what God has done for us how can we worship him? Experience without explanation is pretty shallow. Here is what God is after. Jesus said the Father seeks worshippers who worship “ in spirit and in truth.”
Here are two warnings when it comes to experience. Oswald Chambers said, “Never make a principle out of your experience; let God be as original with other people as he is with you.” And Richard Rohr says, “The last experience of God is frequently the greatest obstacle to the next experience of God.” Rohr says, “God can most easily be lost by being thought found.”
Mainstream to Extreme
John Alexander says, “Christians spend a lot of time and energy explaining why Jesus couldn’t have meant what he said. This is understandable: Jesus was an extremist and we are all moderates. What’s worse, he was an extremist in his whole life-- not just in the narrowly spiritual areas but in everything-- so we have to find ways to dilute his teaching.”
Our culture is all about “extreme.” We have everything from extreme sports to extreme makeovers. Jesus said in Luke 9:23, “If anyone would come after me he must deny himself, take up his cross daily and follow me.” There is nothing not extreme about that statement. It is a call to extreme discipleship.
Jesus said upfront, “Foxes have holes and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to put his head.” It’s not going to be easy. In fact, you might get martyred. But the ultimate adventure is following Jesus. You never know where you might end up. Jesus took a bunch of fishermen and tax collectors and sent them to every corner of the ancient world. They went places and did things they would have never dreamed of. They walked on water. They saw miracles. They met kings and rulers. They turned cities upside down. And many, if not most of them, were illiterate and unschooled.
Francis Schaeffer said, “One of the greatest injustices we do to our young people is to ask them to be conservative. Christianity is not conservative, but revolutionary. To be conservative today is to miss the whole point, for conservatism means standing in the flow of the status quo, and the status quo no longer belongs to us. If we want to be fair, we must teach the young to be revolutionaries, revolutionaries against the status quo.”