The Quest For Community
Leonard Sweet | posted 10/01/1999
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I am an eBay addict.
I may need help. My most recent purchase is one of the first books published
by my Ph.D. adviser. It has been missing from my library for 20 years. I
got this copy for 50 cents. The postage cost more than the book. But for
$2.50 I reclaimed my pedigree. At eBay, I feel like a kid in a candy store.
The online auction house is one of the wonders of the last decade. From 1995
to 1998, eBay did no outside advertising; yet it boasted 3.8 million registered
users and grew from 289,000 items in 1996 to 2.2 million today. With a
$23-billion market, eBay is now worth more than Kmart, Toys R Us, Nordstrom,
and Saks combined.
eBay is so effective because its owners understand postmodern culture. It
also alerts us to what the church must do to get the attention and attendance
of postmodern people.
Just do it!
eBay makes shopping an experience. Journalist Stewart Alsop, analyzing the
phenomenon, calls it "nail-biting, thrilling fun." eBay works in our
experience-oriented economy. What keeps shoppers returning to a store? Not
just the products. As one patron said, leaving a new Greenwich Village eatery
called Peanut Butter and Company, "This is very much an experience; it's
not just a sandwich."
Postmoderns are not willing to live at even an arm's length from experience.
They want life to explode all around them. And the more extreme the better.
Tom Beaudoin, a Gen-X Christian with a theology degree from Harvard and a
body piercing, says that piercing and tattooing "reflect the centrality of
personal and intimate experience in Xers' lives." Tattooing is branding
in a brand culture, the marking of a spiritual experience.
The pursuit of dreams, emotions, and extreme experience is not unique to
this era. Every expression of romanticism in history has tilted toward the
experiential. But never before has experience become the currency of a global
economic system.
|
American Demographics (April 1999) esteemed the quest
for experiential faith one of the nation's most important cultural trends.
Yet the numbers turning to the church for guidance in this soul quest are
becoming fewer and fewer. A spiritual awakening is taking place largely outside
the Christian church because churches, in the words of journalist Chip Brown,
"were more interested in repressing ecstatic experience than in nurturing
it. Rapture (the emotion), not to say healing, was certainly not on the agenda
of the church I was packed off to each Sunday morning." |
Living in
EPIC Times
To connect with postmoderns, the church will become more:
Experiential
Participatory
Image-driven
Communal
|
To be sure, experiences can become idolatrous as well as addictive. Postmoderns
collect experiences like moderns collect stuff. The church must offer
Christ-initiated—or what Donald Whitney calls "Scripture-induced"—experiences.
Count me in
A fellow eBay-er calls the auction site a "participant sport." I felt such
an adrenaline rush during my weeklong bidding war over an 1827 pewter communion
token. eBay has made me into a global trader. It's exhilarating.
At eBay the power belongs to the people, not to the producers. In electronic
commerce, the buyer sets the price. It's the medieval bazaar come to
life in cyberspace.
Some call this haggling the "age of participation." Others call it the
"horizontal society." Postmodern people take cues not from those above them
but from others around them. There are no more bosses, only clients.
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