Google is up to its old tricks again. This time its Google Insights for Search, a nifty tool that reveals who is searching for what, where.  I typed in “Jesus” and here are the results:

(click to expand the image if its too small)

El Salvador nabs the number 1 spot for Jesus, making them the nation God will bless…Ahem.  This kinda gives you a shift in thinking to know that the United States didn’t even make the top ten list in regional interest!  FYI, when I searched for “Jesus Christ” the top country was Eritrea in East Africa.  America is not the hub of the Christian faith, the global south is.

Just for fun, I searched by city, and Chicago came up as #10 worldwide - way to go you spiritual seekers (or searchers) you!  In a city where there is the lowest proportions of evangelical Christians of any US city and a church attendance of just 11% county-wide, (the city is only 8%), there is a lot of interest in the man Jesus!  What might these people be like?  How can we befriend them, and in a natural way, present to them this Jesus in their own context and language?

It was also interesting to see WHEN people search for Jesus - as predicted, its always around December and April.  Why then do some churches down play the Christian calendar, when it is obviously the time when most people are “searching for Christ?”

Just thinking…

Two weeks ago I was graduating with my masters. One week ago I was back in the classroom. Yeah, I’m asking the very same question you are! “WHY!?!?”

ACU was “nice enough” to let me graduate 3 hours short of my degree, so long as I took and passed a summer one-week intensive course. I naturally picked a class right after my regular semester ended, to get the course completed as quickly as possible. I chose “Emerging Culture & Emerging Churches” with Dr. Chris Flanders. Flanders got his Phd from Fuller Seminary, and before that was a missionary and church planter in Thailand. Since he’s been in Abilene, he’s joined the chorus of professors describing the postmodern shift, but he alone seems to think that such shifts might at all change how and what church looks like.

The class was very engaging, and also very affirming. It helped me think through some of the principles of thought in postmodernity (reading philosophers like Derrida, Foucault, Caputo, etc) and then talking about what that might mean for communities of faith. We looked at churches trying to explore a post-foundationalist theology…all very heady, but also very interesting stuff.

One big take away was an axis continuum Flanders showed us from Mary Douglas. It looked something like this:

Grid and Group Theory:

The two axes, Group, and Grid, show the progress of institutions (which was defined as a coordinating group of any kind) as growing inevitably and increasingly higher in “Grid”. The higher you go in Grid, the more structure and levels of authority there are. The rules and roles are more clearly defined. The other axis, Group describes the degree to which the collective controls the individual and degree to which people are bonded to particular social units - the sense of “family” the group feels.

Church examples of each: Hierarchy (Catholic Church), Authoritarian (Roman Religion; Emperor is God), Individualism (consumerist mega-church Christianity), and Egalitarianism (Quakers).

At first I wasn’t sure how I felt about this chart. Hearing that communities, the longer they are together, always move “up grid” and wake up one day a huge franchised corporation did not settle well with me. But is it possible to be meaningful, to make a difference that matters, while not selling your soul? Where do you find the balance so that lives can be changed, while remaining as structurally flat as possible to keep remain centered on mission and people rather than on preserving the institution.

What if instead of a chain of command (a la Roman Catholic Church), there was a web of relationships. Individuals networked together for the common good. Organic, family-style churches networked together as a coalition in a local context. Servant leaders of these church networks that network together to work as a resource to one another and provide training for new leaders that focus on a region. As church networks grow, is this a potential way to go “up grid” without having to distribute power to individuals, but rather power to communities? What am I missing here? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

So I’m wondering: is it possible for a community to hold to both efficiency AND authenticity?

We see the virtue of efficiency running deep in everything Americans participate in. We want our food quicker, our PDA’s cheaper, and home appliances are there to make housework easier. We even have a timer for our lights - so we don’t have to get up to turn them on ourselves!)
We want our relationships more efficient too. We funnel into a niche online and find the person or two that meets our needs and focus in on them without having to worry about ever really meeting them in person. Teens today dodge the awkward stage of having to get to know people at their high school because they can go home at the end of the day and login as WARRIOR2122 and kick butt in a video game. We even have online SIMS, a virtual family with virtual neighbors, while our proximal neighbors sit at home alone; just as alone as we are.
As efficient as we’d like to be, there has been a major push among postmoderns (and people in general) to seek authenticity. We want organic food (real, no preservatives or steroids), we want the truth when purchasing a car (picture the “used car salesman” stereotype, and cringe). And of course we want authentic relationships. Much of our journey into “organic church” is a search for authentic relationships.

But can this journey be an efficient one? Last September I heard George Barna speak about leaders in the “revolution” he sees spreading across the North American church scene. More and more people are moving toward “authentic” expressions of faith in community.

But one thing he said struck me funny. He said that leaders of this “revolution” were not “efficient”. “Not efficient?” I asked myself, “how can this be any kind of revolution without efficient change?” It took me until just a few days ago to put it together. Every single revolutionary in history fled from the “efficient” path, but took instead the radical path that was filled with twists, u-turns, and challenging hurdles.

Living as a revolutionary on a quest for an authentic faith and authentic relationships is scary, because we must give up one of the central virtues of the American lifestyle: efficiency. In our house church this past year, we’ve found our gatherings to be fairly “inefficient”. Sometimes we leave wondering if anything happened at all. Other times we feel like we’ve been on a long journey with each other and we leave exhausted. It’s confusing, we make wrong turns, but on our best moments we feel like we’re a part of the revolution.

So is it possible? Can we be efficiently authentic?

What is it we’re doing when we work in the world for the sake of the kingdom?  Is it that we are working for God, that our labors are actually helping God accomplish his goals?  Probably not, since he is the maker and sustainer of the universe.  Is it that we are being used by him to do good works of service and love to the world?  Maybe, but does that really mean?

I’ve heard it said recently that our actions in the public life of the world are acted prayers for the kingdom. This is a powerful paradigm shift in my understanding of both prayer, and social action in the world.  In prayer, I realize that everything I do in the public world is a petition that the Lord’s will be “done on earth as it is in heaven”.  I am on display before all people to live as if I were living under a different system altogether.  This living is in anticipation of the kingdom that is to come, and so my actions form prayers that it be realized in me today.

Social action is not just another goal to work towards, its actually a divine operative!  I can act as a secret agent for the Gospel of Jesus Christ doing things for the world that bring meaning to our future.  America is a fully pluralist society, and there is no real meaning to our history, and no goal for the future.  (Just take a look at what we do to the environment.)  But when what we do is viewed as prayers for the kingdom, it puts it all into a perspective that this is all heading somewhere incredibly awesome.

Among the curses of collegiate education is the various jargon that is disseminated throughout professor-lingo, book vocab, and ultimately systemically saturated in the conversations seen in students. *Yikes, see my point?*

If there has been one concept that has stuck with me more than any other, it is “postmoderism”. Living in an age of postmodernity, I am struck by the mystery surrounding this “ism”. Professors seem to think that the postmodern culture in which America is quickly finding itself will make all the difference in the way we understand church in the world of tomorrow. (Insert trumpet solo here.)

I am particularly intrigued and personally invested in what ideas authors and professors have to give when speculating the future of the church. What characteristics might a postmodern church exhibit?

(Points based from Stewart Murray’s Church Planting: Laying Foundations
1. Doubts and Dialogue.
I believe authentic faith looks more like a winding maze than a “straight and narrow”. Of course, Jesus is the center - what keeps us pointed towards God, but the road from ‘dead in sin’ to ‘eternal life’ is a terribly complicated one. More often than not my most spiritually growing moments happened when I was bold enough to share my doubts with some friends.
2. Spirituality.
The road to a postmodern’s heart is through his soul. The mind was the vehicle of modernity, and full was the well of cognitive arguments and sound reasoning. Postmoderns will find their faith in Christ primarily through spiritual experience, followed by a divine truth that grounds them.
3. Story.
We become part of a bigger story. That is the Good News in a postmodern world, which is deeply fragmented and culturally suspicious of itself. Our learning will be seen through testimony and reflecting together on our place in the next chapter of God passionately pursuing his people.
4. Community.
It would be difficult to conceive of a story without characters. The community of faith are the characters that make up the redeeming story of God. There is truly no place to holistic belong in a postmodern world. Each network of relationships defines itself, thus limiting an authentic expression of its individuals. In our acceptance of Christ, we are clothed in him, wearing his “school colors” denoting our allegiance. He becomes completely how we identify ourselves.

In my next post, I’m looking forward to considering Post-Christian, (the OTHER word I’ve grown to love hearing all about!) and ways churches might characterize themselves in a post-Christian context.