(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Meta Modern”, originally shared on October 4, 2023. It was the 279th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
We’ve been living in “postmodern” times for
a while now. Isn’t it time for something new? Some say that’s “metamodernism”!
Today, we’re going to find out what that is, and how the Church can live in it.
A classic business school question students
learn to ask is, “What business are we in?”
An example given is that the railroads did
not thrive after new technologies were introduced because they thought they
were in the railroad business when, in fact, they were in the transportation
business.
One of the questions church leaders learn to
ask is “How do we meaningfully convey the good news of Jesus Christ handed down
from the Apostles to people in our culture and in our times?”
The question needs to be asked because the
cultures of the world are varied, and they are always changing.
For example, the Western world is arguably
now in post-Christendom. By “Christendom” I mean a Western world that was
largely influenced by Christian institutions like the Christian Church, by Christian
Universities and by Christians themes in the Arts.
Of course, it may also be argued that the
world never was actually Christian, just philosophically Christian, or
institutionally Christian, or culturally Christian, or a success-driven Christian.
That is the way Pastor Richard Halverson, a
Presbyterian minister and former Chaplain of the Senate, once described the
broad history of the Church.
He said, “In the beginning the church was a
fellowship of men and women centering on the living Christ. Then the church
moved to Greece where it became a philosophy. Then it moved to Rome where it
became an institution. Next, it moved to Europe, where it became a culture.
And, finally, it moved to America where it became an enterprise.”
Our visible influence in the West has
certainly declined, b ut I think that we
are not yet a post-Christian culture. Western values that were so profoundly
shaped by Christian values remain in place. You only need to go to a never-Christian
country and then return to a Western nation to see how profound that influence
still is today.
But almost no Christian needs to be
convinced that participation in Christian worship has been and continues to be
in decline. A Christian worldview is rarely expressed publicly. Christian
influence based on living the Christian life, and not on the coercive use of
Christian membership numbers as a tool both of the Church and of the
politicians, has been all but absent from the public sphere.
We could say that the recent Church decline
is actually a shakeout of the nominal members, the pragmatic connection-makers,
and the belongers, which leaves the active members, the genuine participants,
and the believers, but I think that there is less there than meets the eye.
We could also argue that the Bible never
tells us to expect to be the majority in any culture, much less popular.
Instead, Jesus tells us, we are like light, salt, and leaven. The small
thing that, if it retains its character, is an agent of transformation in
everything that is around it.
But then, how do we do ministry in a
place that is post-Christian?
Timothy Keller, a widely respected
Presbyterian pastor and author, who developed a growing church approaching
mega-church status in Manhattan, is quoted as saying,
“In 2000 years, we've never learned how to
do mission in a place that was post-Christian rather than pre-Christian. If
you're in ministry, it's going to take all of your life to help the church
figure out how to do this.”
I think that a good way to start is not by
trying to recapture our perceived glory days but by discerning what God is
calling us to do in our culture today, and to move forward.
And, since Christians haven’t had to learn
how to do it in 2,000 years of history, we have a lot of room for creativity. Given
that it’s never been done before, the pressure is off! 😊
How do we do mission in a visibly
post-Christian place?
How does the Church move forward to being “ a
fellowship of men and women centering on the living Christ” today?
How does it come alive with the Arts and
holy living?
We start by asking what age we live in.
We
were in the modern age, then the post-modern age. I was looking online the
other day for where we are today, and I found this: Metamodernism!
Metamodernism has been around since the late
20th century, but it has gained popularity in the 21st
century, especially in the past few years. It’s a means to describe a culture
that is no longer postermodern, but understanding that culture using postmodernism
(hence the “meta”, which means understanding something in terms of itself, or in
a way that is self-referential. Or where understanding a part of something
requires the application of the whole, and understanding it requires many
successive executions).
“Meta” is a Greek word that literally means
“after”.
It also happens to be the new name for the
parent company of Facebook. It’s a reference to the Metaverse, a digital
reality that refers to, but is something other than, reality. It’s augmented
reality. It’s virtual reality.
The English artist Luke Turner wrote, in “Metamodernism:
A Brief Introduction”,
“Whereas
postmodernism was characterised by deconstruction, irony, pastiche, relativism,
nihilism, and the rejection of grand narratives (to caricature it somewhat),
the discourse surrounding metamodernism engages with the resurgence of
sincerity, hope, romanticism, affect, and the potential for grand narratives
and universal truths, whilst not forfeiting all that we’ve learnt from
postmodernism.”
Does any of that look like progress? Or is
it just random change, the nihilism of postmodernism?
Either way, we have much to offer the
current culture of the West in the context of Metamodernism.
Early 20th Century humorist Fred
Allen said that the most important thing in Hollywood is sincerity. So when you
can fake that, you’ve got it made.
We say that God sees the heart, so there is
no point in living any other way.
Are metamodernists looking for hope? We have
good news in Jesus Christ.
Is “romanticism” the belief that everything
will turn out well in the end? That’s us!
Is “affect” the existence of embodied
experience? We point to the incarnation of Jesus Christ and to living as Paul
said, in Romans 12:1,
I appeal to you therefore, brothers and
sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living
sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.
We point to grand narratives in the
centrality of the cross in human history, to our worldview, and to “the
greatest story ever told”.
We live by “universal truths” that can only
be “universal” if they come from outside of us, given and revealed by a loving
and gracious God in the living relationship with God for which all humanity was
created.
There is a lot that we have to say and do
that will resonate with this metamodern era.
But does all this seem like foreign
territory. Does this “meta” sound like something you’ve heard of before, but in
a different way? That’s because you have.
The
word “meta” was, almost immediately after the Greek age, taken to also mean
“beyond” or “transcending”.
Word wrangler Caleb Madison points this out
in his article “Meta Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Does” in “The
Atlantic” magazine. He says,
“As academia ran out of rationally
explainable things to study, it began to study itself. Fields of study emerged,
like metalinguistics, metahistory, and metanarrative, that attempted to go
“beyond” the traditional areas of study to discover fundamental rules
underlying all history, all language, all narrative.
The rise of the Information Age stoked the promise that, through quantitative
data and cold computational analysis, certain fundamental truths could emerge
that might allow us to transcend our subjectively limited human perspective.”
The Christian faith also brings our “meta”
in this sense to this same table.
Jesus said in Matthew 16:17-18,
17 And Jesus answered him, 'Blessed are you, Simon son of
Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in
heaven. 18 And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build
my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.
That’s the big picture! That’s our “meta”! The
big picture is that the Church belongs to God, and though it may wax and wane
like the moon in one place or another, in one culture or another, in one time
or another, nothing will prevail against it. History has a direction and that,
too, is in God’s hands. That is our universal truth, it’s our world view, our
metanarrative.
And all of it is built on the grace of God.
How do we live in this world? How do we live
in Metamodern times? How we do mission in a post-Christian place? Humbly and faithfully,
in the power given to us in the Holy Spirit, in a living relationship with the
one true living God. Jesus said, in Luke 12:32,
“Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom.
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