Postmodernism is an idea that is bandied about so much these days that it has been stripped of its edge. Gen-X pundits use it to speak about the relational style of today’s young adults. Conservative commentators use it to describe today’s rampant relativism.
But trying to put a sharp definition on postmodernism is a very “modern” thing to do. Try to categorize it and it loses its postmodern essence.
For many churches, trying to ride the currents of postmodernism has become an obsession, a rationale for throwing out the Sunday-morning dress code or forgoing the hymnal in favor of PowerPoint. But reaching postmoderns is more than using pop-culture sermon illustrations or changing your music.
As pastor of an urban-based church comprised mostly of college students, I find myself smack in the middle of questions about postmodernism. I have to stay up-to-date on what’s happening, but the question is: Having identified the trends of postmodernism, what do we do with them? How should they inform our ministries?
Rather than mimic the trends of the postmodern world, we do better to figure out what those trends say about the needs and desires of our culture, and then use those insights to strengthen the incarnational nature of our ministries. Like Christ, the church is called to live in the world, to engage it, to love it. For my church, being “incarnational” has meant responding to the postmodern desire for close-knit community by adding a second service and discussing the possibility of a new church plant rather than moving into a larger building, which would take us out of the inner-city neighborhood where we’ve been developing a physical presence. For other churches, it will mean examining themselves to determine how they must live out the gospel in their unique situations.
Head, heart, and hands
Strip away the dependency on technology, the cynicism, and the relativism often tied to postmodernism, and you have a yearning for something more, something spiritual that only God’s people can supply.
We planted Cambridge Community Fellowship in 1996 with the support of my former church in Maryland. We began with about eight people and have steadily grown. Today we have 250 regular attenders.
For services, we rent space in a small Nazarene church in the Central Square neighborhood of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Located off Massachusetts Avenue, between Harvard and MIT, we are two subway stops away from Tufts University and a couple of bus stops from Boston University. Many of our attenders come from these four colleges. Another contingent comes from Wellesley College (about 20 miles away), a handful from Northeastern University, and then the rest is our post-college population, people who work in the Boston area year-round.
The building next door to us is a low-income housing project. Government subsidized housing is sprinkled throughout the community, along with apartment complexes and rowhouses occupied by young professionals and students.
Because we draw so many thoughtful college students, who are bent on inquiry, it’s hard to be superficial at our church. We have to dig deeply into issues and think through things carefully.
Ministering to a congregation so intellectually driven keeps a pastor on his toes. One Sunday I was preaching from a text and made a verbal slip about the translation of a Greek word. One of the members here is a Harvard linguistics major who knows Greek better than I do. He very kindly came up to me afterwards and said, “I’m sure it was just a mistake, but this is a better translation of that word.” Fortunately, his correction was done with great love and concern. But such an atmosphere keeps me growing.
One challenge of ministry to a young “postmodern crowd” is to move people away from a strictly intellectual phase, to allow them to experience God at the same time that they’re studying about him. We aim for a worship and prayer time that ministers to the heart as well as the head. Thus our worship time allows for free expression and asks for participation from all. We also try to ensure participation in the life of the church beyond Sunday services and weekly small groups. For instance, we urge the congregation to get involved in the city: they visit the residents at local senior-citizens’ homes, tutor area high-school students, and serve meals at a nearby soup kitchen among other activities.
Outreach to the surrounding community helps keep us grounded. Our annual Vacation Bible School draws scores of neighborhood children. And kids come to church activities throughout the year. Most come without their parents, but they often are an opening to reach the rest of their families.
Ministry to postmoderns must be connected to real-life needs and provide opportunities for them to serve as well. Being located in the city offers many chances for this type of engagement.
Disconnected desires
One fascinating thing about the city is our cultural desire to escape it. Many of us come into the city just long enough to work our jobs or visit a museum, then it’s back out to a less-populated area. We desire space and distance from others. Today people are moving much farther apart from each other in both bodily and psychological ways.
Those of us who grew up in the suburbs know that the real goal with living in the suburbs is not a cul-de-sac or endless strip malls, but having one’s own space. Suburban dwellers want sufficient distance between themselves and their neighbors.
The relentless pursuit of the American Dream has disconnected us from others. And when we become disconnected, we’re less likely to see their needs or to engage them in a substantive way. In many ways, this suburban desire for physical space is responsible for the postmodern desire for emotional and spiritual intimacy.
While longing for intimacy, however, many postmoderns have a strong appetite for motion and speed. A body in motion continues to distance itself from those around us who are in pain. Because we’re so used to moving at high speeds, we fail to connect with people because all we’re doing is moving quickly from one point to the next.
I worked for a number of years in the D.C. area, and I lived an hour away in Columbia, Maryland. I took public transportation, and in that hour that I was on the train, I didn’t have to connect with anything because I was moving so fast. The neighborhoods blurred by. At every stop, the conductor would announce the neighborhood, but it wouldn’t matter—it was not a neighborhood to me; it was just a stop on a subway route.
Our society’s obsession with speed creates a disconnection. As I move at high speeds, I rarely come into meaningful contact with others. But if I’m walking to work, I see the neighborhood people. I say hi. I see the homeless person. I see the kid out on his own. I see the drug dealers.
Moving at a slower rate, things appear differently to us. Yet our society prefers to rush on by. As Christians, we should be concerned about how these rituals are being brought into the church. Are we buying into these “postmodern” values? It’s easy to attend huge services where people don’t have to engage others if they don’t feel like it. But is this truly living out the demands of the gospel?
Post-modem values
The Internet is both a metaphor for and a contributor to our detached culture. Constantly shifting from one screen to another at such high speed, you have little time to make lasting human connection.
I first got hooked up to the Internet about five years ago. I had a 9.6 modem. You would log on, it would make that familiar screeching noise, and you could literally walk away, eat dinner, and come back before you were finally connected. Then you began the process of downloading e-mail. Again, you could go have dessert, and 45 minutes later you finally had your three pieces of e-mail.
Today speed rules on the Internet. We went from 9.6 modems to 14.4—and that wasn’t fast enough. So we went to 36.6 and then 56.6. Then you had to have a T1 line, or a cable modem, or a DSL which is advertised as being “100 times faster” than 56.6. And it happened in just five years.
Such rapid change can’t help but affect how we view ourselves and how we view life.
Today there’s such impatience that, if an Internet screen doesn’t come up instantly, we say, “I’ve got to get a new modem.”
The Internet exacerbates our short attention span. When we move from screen to screen, nothing impacts us. This is true with television as well, but it has become even more so with the Internet. There are literally millions of screens and Web sites to surf through. And it’s impossible to make meaningful connections with that many distractions. You may glance at a story about the famine in North Korea but decide that you would rather see yesterday’s baseball scores, so you switch with the click of a mouse.
This has shaped the way we view life. It’s easy to switch off reality, to click through other people’s pain. But the church cannot afford to let this happen.
Pastors cannot let their people become short-attention-span Christians. We must be long-suffering. Like Jesus, we must connect with and care for the people around us.
In our postmodern setting, we have to almost re-teach social skills and re-teach human contact. So our goal as a church is not to become as high-tech as the world; it’s to offer what the high-tech culture does not provide. We’re out to re-establish genuine human connection, not the fast-paced, Internet lifestyle. For us, this means emphasizing the importance of small groups, taking time to develop relationships with the people in our neighborhood and with other churches. What’s more, an increasing number of our people are making conscious decisions to move into Central Square permanently as visible representatives of Christ’s body.
Of course we use technology in the church as tools—e-mail and cell phones and computers—but ultimately, the gospel is about incarnational outreach—the human touch.
Beyond abstract faith
In many ways, the concept of God is abstract. But God chose not to remain in that abstract world of heaven, which is beyond our human comprehension. In the person of Christ, God came in flesh and made his dwelling among us. So Jesus made a transition from that which was comfortable, safe, and glorious for him to something that was uncomfortable, challenging, and extremely painful. Yet he did it because of his great love for people.
The theology of the Incarnation is powerful. It forces us to ask ourselves, If we are the body of Christ, should we not have those incarnational values as well? We’re not meant to live in an abstract place, separate from this world. We are meant to be incarnational, to make a human connection.
In urban ministry, this means we’re going to move into the neighborhoods—where there are places of pain and struggle—and we’re going to be involved in people’s lives. Most of our lives are spent avoiding pain; incarnation goes against that. Incarnation means we make our dwelling among people in pain.
La-Z-Boy culture
As a child, I read books about kids growing up in colonial New England. On Sundays, they would sit on hard, splintery wooden benches. They were uncomfortable and built to be that way, so that they would keep the kids alert as they learned about God.
When you compare that to the modern convenience of a La-Z-Boy recliner, or even the office chair that I’m sitting in right now, there’s a world of difference. My chair has lots of padding; it tilts back, and it adjusts up and down. It’s comfortable.
In its most rudimentary sense, comfort is not so much about feeling good—it’s about feeling nothing. When you’re really feeling comfortable, it takes away from having to feel anything whatsoever. The goal of a La-Z-Boy and the goal of form-fitting bucket seats is for you to feel as little as possible. Everything is supported and pushed in a certain way so that you feel minimum sensation.
Comfort is yet another value of our postmodern culture that goes against incarnational ministry.
We don’t want to have our La-Z-Boy lives interrupted by people in pain, because we have worked so hard to make ourselves comfortable. This postmodern desire to “feel nothing” is contrary to what the Scriptures teach. Christ opened himself freely to the pain.
“For the joy set before him,” says the writer of Hebrews, “Jesus suffered the pain of the cross” (12:2).
As a church, we’re trying to recover the biblical motif of the suffering body of Christ in order to minister to the suffering body of a postmodern culture made passive by motion, comfort, and individualism. In part, this means making a concerted effort to connect with people—the lonely child, the single mom, the prostitute, the drug dealer. Remembering the suffering Christ moves us to embrace the suffering ones among us.
Loving the ‘other’
A big part of a pastor’s responsibility is to challenge people to grow. If we are disconnected, passive, aloof and separated, there is no spiritual growth. So we teach concern for the homeless, concern for the lost, concern for those who are hurting in our world.
At times, the values of the postmodern world go completely against such unselfish compassion and mercy. But part of any pastor’s role is to increase that sensitivity.
As church leaders, we would do well to study the various characteristics of postmodern culture. But our goal is not to uncritically adopt the trends. It’s to understand what the people pursuing the trends are actually hungering for.
What people are really hungering for is community, authenticity, and genuine faith. The only way we can give this to them is to follow Jesus’ example, becoming incarnational Christians.
Soong-Chan Rah is senior pastor of Cambridge Community Fellowship Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts.srah@erols.com
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