Isaiah 42:5-9; Matthew
9:14-26
I praise God for the
many inspiring, faithfully challenging conversations and experiences I had this
past week. These happened while attending the national
Presbyterian Church (USA) Evangelism and Church Growth Conference held in St.
Pete Beach, FL. And I thank God for the support of both FPC
and Newton Presbytery that made this ministry shaping trip possible. Last
Sunday, I indicated that I’d come back today and offer a big summary for you
all. Well, I confess that I can’t truly
summarize it all in this space of time!
I’ll be deciding on some additional ways to share and foster open space
for conversation, so please stay tuned.
I know to really process everything it’s going to take me a good deal
more time in prayer, study, and honest conversations with brothers and sisters
of our faith and particular tradition.
This said, it’s very much on my
heart to start some place with you all.
So this morning I do have one perspective to share from this time away
where we addressed how we can take heart in the face of the continued dramatic
decline in our denomination. Did you know
the PC(USA) lost over 100,000 members between 2011 and 2012[i]? And on our local level, I very much share with
many of you the web of concerns that accompany the fact that FPC is not
experiencing much growth.
We begin taking heart by turning to
Jesus, trusting Him to lead us by the power of the Holy Spirit because He knows
us better than we know ourselves. Our
Gospel lesson today is witness to this, especially with regard to how hard it
can be to present new ideas and new conceptions of holy truth. He knew well that we tend to have an ardent
attachment to traditions. So when the
Jewish Scribes and Pharisees cried out, “We’ve never done that before!” he
fully understood that new ideas were actually considered sinful and not just
mistakes. He knew that every one of
our minds can grow as hard as old wineskins lacking the elasticity needed to
hold fresh wine.
We also begin to take heart in the fact that our Lord taught that remarkable transformations happen when people aren’t afraid to reach out to Him no matter what others in the crowd may think and say. Much like the suffering daughter of God in Mathew 9:20, we need to trust every time we faithfully reach out to touch the cloak of Christ, we will be acknowledged and be made healthier.
So, with fresh wine in one hand and the other hand reaching for our Lord, let me confess to you all that I totally didn’t see the gorilla. I think I need to explain this carefully!
My experience of the seemingly invisible gorilla happened Wednesday morning during an hour and a half presentation by Pastor Doug Pagitt, our second keynote speaker. Fortunately, a real gorilla did not pass through the several hundred of us gathered in a big reception tent. Neither did a person in a campy sort of gorilla suite saunter through. If either of those had happened and I’d missed it, I’d be super worried about my ability to pay attention to what’s happening right in front of me in the life of our Lord’s church!
The guy in the guerilla suite that I didn’t see at all instead appeared in a very short video that was shown to us on a large screen. I saw everything else in the video – the three young women and three young men standing closely together in front of three closed elevator doors, frantically passing a basketball back and forth to one another. Half were wearing white t-shirts and the other half black t-shirts. I was specifically instructed to count how many times the folks in the white t-shirts passed the ball. So that’s all that I did. Afterwards, our speaker asked a couple times for a show of hands about the ball count. Then he asked how many of us saw the gorilla -- as in the fake one that walked directly into the middle of the ball passing group, briefly paused for a mug shot, and then sauntered straight to the other side.
I sat at the table feeling
incredulous. My wife and ministry colleague
Stefanie was sitting right beside me and saw it just fine … so too did all but
one other person seated at our table.
I did not believe it had been in the video until the video was replayed
starting at the point of the gorilla entrance.
All true. I just completely
didn’t perceive what was directly in front of me. I’d
been too intensely focused on the one specific task I was asked to do.
And this, of course, was our keynote presenter’s big point. Just like the psychology researchers who created the video, he wanted us to be aware of our “selective attention,” which is a way of saying many people miss what is going on around them and they really have no idea they are missing so much.
What Doug Pagitt then led us through was an intensive, rapid fire discussion about how many churches and church leaders are not seeing the cultural shifts going on around them and thus really don’t know they are missing so much. Noticing the cultural shifts is critical for church growth. They can bring about changes in the way we talk about faith, how we understand and house authority, and how we choose the “tools” used to live out our values. Again, unpacking how this might relate to us will take more time than I have allotted for this worship service. But let me give you the thumbnail version he offers regarding the three major “ages” of American culture over the past two hundred years. Then we’ll make note of the one we are in right now and ask ourselves how well we’re able to see the gorilla here at FPC.[ii]
The distinct “ages” of American
culture are as follows – the Agrarian Age, the Industrial Age, and the
Information Age. We are now in a new era, one Pagitt has dubbed
the “Inventive Age.” In his book on
this topic, he notes that “Few cultural institutions have been able to move
through all these shifts with their central identity intact.” and that “the
church has been a steady – though not unchanged – presence in each age.”
Our congregation began in the Agrarian Age. Speaking broadly, this was an age when the “majority of human beings lived pretty much as their parents, grandparents and great-grandparent had. They worked the land, rarely lived more than one hundred miles from where they were born, and knew they’d be luck to see their 50th birthdays.” Success was measured by survival, this church was regarded as a local parish, and our church leaders were viewed as Pastors, akin to Shepherds.
With the Industrial Revolution in
Europe and the United States of the late 1800’s, we would have likely begun
referring to my predecessors as preachers.
It was a sermon by preacher William Otis Ruston (1875-1877) that offered
invaluable record for our FPC history book.
Perhaps he recognized how critical it was to document our history from
1747 – 1876 before it got lost, for this was an age when people began moving
from farms to cities to work in factories.
Manufactured goods became the currency of the culture. The manufacturing mindset impacted local
parishes, as they found themselves shifted into major denominational groupings
and their preachers charged with maintaining and repeating the denominational
“brand” (Presbyterians, et al.)
With the Industrial Age still booming (these shifts don’t happen in neat succession), came the start of the Information Age in the 1920’s and 1930’s. The Industrial Age made it possible for more and more people to have access to “books, newspapers, radios, and eventually televisions,” so “knowledge and information became the most valuable assets of our culture.” Our denominational churches were viewed as learning centers and their leaders regarded first and foremost as Teachers. We added Christian Education wings to our worship and fellowship spaces, such as we did here at our Community House in 1965 under the leadership of pastor-teacher John Cooney. Success in this age was synonymous with expertise.
I know this is going long, but here I find myself pausing to assess my call in ministry. I go by the Agrarian Age title of Pastor because my heart most connects with Jesus shepherding the marginalized and because of my love of small “flocks.” And I have been trained through a Master’s degree to be both the denominational “brand” representative preacher as well as the information age knowledge dispenser of Bible and theology. I believe these three identities fit my service with you all in FPC’s ministry. Following this conference, however, I’m wondering how best to continue in this way (as I believe is necessary given the ways our church family reflects the first three ages) while also helping to lead us all in reaching out to the present age of American culture with the Good News of Jesus Christ.
Presently, we are in the Inventive Age. These are days built around big ideas being fueled by rapidly changing computer and communication technologies. These technologies create a remarkable, immediate sense of global interconnectivity. I think that smart phones are the best symbol of this cultural shift. As Doug Pagitt put it at the conference, we’ve moved from people who didn’t know anyone beyond one hundred miles to instant Twitter updates on our mobile phones from people we don’t really know reporting from the middle of the Arab Spring. These are days of quick discovery, constant creativity, pluralistic perspectives, “inclusion, participation, and collaboration.” It impacts all of us, but I find it especially frames the way my school aged children and most all young adults think and interact. It’s an age of personalization that is not narcissistic, but instead about a “longing to attach meaning to experiences.” So we have 24-7 personalized Google news instead of an entire newspaper delivered to our doorsteps every morning. I read and hear the word “relevant” a whole lot.
Co-op models are most authoritative and abound everywhere, including the church. To quote Pagitt’s book, people who are living out and into this cultural shift “don’t want to simply use resources created by and controlled by others … [authority] isn’t in the wisdom of the village leaders or the deep pockets of the factory owners or the knowledge of the corporate executives. Authority is found in the way our experiences come together and create reality.” It is found in relationships and is “user generated.” The values of previous ages still exist, but in different, even subservient, roles. Knowledge, for example, is important, but only as a means of discovering something else. In the view of the Inventive Age, church leaders such as myself thus do well to identify ourselves less as pastors, less as preachers, less as teachers, and more as facilitators.
The overall implications of this Inventive Age are still emerging, but we can be sure that new norms have and will continue to be created. This is why I am now in the middle of reading Pagitt’s book Evangelism in the Inventive Age and will be putting it into conversation with what I learned from the conference workshops, clinics, and the other amazing keynote speaker. Then I hope to put all this in further, less formal conversation with many of you and your loved ones and your neighbors.
I understand why I didn’t see the gorilla, how my mind was trained on only one thing. The one thing I’ve been most trained to be is pastor as “brand name” preacher and pastor as knowledge-disseminating teacher. In other areas of my life, I’m deep into the Inventive age. But aside from my creating and maintaining our church website, my being able to text and email, my having a personal and somewhat pastoral presence on Facebook, and a few other inklings of what to do … I’m on a journey to discover how to be more of a pastor-as-facilitator church leader. How will we as a church family in and for Jesus Christ truly start to see and engage the Inventive Age happening right in the middle of our passing the ball around our predominantly Industrial and Information age FPC framework?
So I hope many of you will join me on this journey of making connections between the dominant ages of American culture so as to better understand the implications for church growth in 2013 and beyond. Together in the Spirit, we’ll take heart by putting the wine of salvation in fresh wineskins and we’ll reach out to touch the strengthening cloak of Christ! Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment