Written by: rhbaker275 on January 18, 2014

We are confronted with significant challenges in navigating through multiple fronts of change. Understanding challenges and overcoming confrontation is the substance of good leadership. But how can leadership address change that is global, a new world order? It is change that impacts all levels of leadership in every sphere of living. We have experienced discontinuous change in the late decades of the twentieth century and the move into the twenty-first century; it comes rapid, relentless, and from every direction as it threatens things held to be secure and requires great adaptive risk.

Ultimately, my personal caring and concern is with the leadership in the Western Christian faith; specifically in North America and locally in NE Ohio. The spectrum of leadership, including those leading a local community of believers through key leaders at national denominational offices, must confront the challenge of revitalizing community, casting new vision, and stemming the tide of those leaving or becoming marginal in their commitment to the Christian faith. Recent statistics show that between 3,500 and 4,000 churches close each year and of the remaining churches, 70% are in decline or stagnant.[1] In my own faith heritage, the number of congregations that are marginalized or in decline in NE Ohio is at 87% and many have lost a spiritually vibrant faith.[2] These numbers are almost too much to fathom.

As we seek to revitalize the church and reestablish a vibrate community of faith, the work by Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, provides, on the one hand, an understanding of the new modern moral order resulting in the philosophical shift from pre-modern to modern society while on the other hand, portraying social imaginary as the enabling concept that models the societal practices of moral order. The modern moral order moved from the hierarchical social order of the pre-modern period to the premise of the rights of the individual and the obligation that individuals have to each other. The underlying moral order tells us “how we ought to live together in society” (3). Modern society today is based on the moral principle of individual rights that do not interfere with the rights of others.Generally society exists to insure, as best as possible, that right is achieved or realized or at least there is the opportunity “to strive for and realize the right” (8). Taylor presents this new modern moral order as becoming more expansive and intensive to include all of western society over the three-four hundred years of modernity up till now. Perhaps the fact, in terms of the modern period, that is most significant today is that the underlying moral order fosters a wellness and a wholeness that is characterized by justice and equality (21). This underlying moral order, Taylor notes, provides “that the members of society serve each other’s needs, help each other, in short, behave like the rational and sociable creatures they are”(p. 12).

The question is, “How in modern society can the underlying moral order be practiced?” It is according to Taylor, through the complex “yet normal expectations” characterized through our social imaginaries “that enable us to carry out the collective practices that make up social life.” Our social imaginaries are the shared experiences, common heritage, stories, and legends that make life social and create society. The size of the societal group is not the determinant, it could be large or small, rather it is the common understanding that leads to common practices and encompasses the total community. This commonality does give “a sense of how things usually go, but this is interwoven with an idea of how they ought to go, of what missteps would invalidate the practice”(24).

I glean from this that truly shared social imaginary should result in equality, unity, peace, through the practice of the underlying moral order. I believe Taylor advocates that this is the social order where the Christian Gospel can flourish. This order, he states, “[G}enerates the idea of a community of saints, inspired by love for God, for each other, and for humankind, whose members are devoid of rivalry, mutual resentment, love of gain, ambition to rule, and the like”(6).

These concepts relate to all aspects of life. Taylor relates to the political, religious, public and private sectors of life. Because social imaginaries are conditioned by culture, history, and a multiplicity of differing experiences, we ought to expect that the imaginary will be different depending on the societal group(153). The diversity will refract and redact differently resulting in various (plurality) modernistic encounters – but, the underlying moral order remains intact. Taylor suggests that we must learn to speak our own narrative. The common and ordinary things that naturally bring society together, such as, language, history or culture are the things out of which we practice “moral order, freedom … the right” (178).

Taylor never mentions the philosophical, cultural, and societal shifts that are swirling around us today. There is only the pre-modern and the modern – there are no “Posts…” yet they do exist. I see the shifts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as worthy of consideration and reflection.

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rhbaker275