{"id":15850,"date":"2018-01-11T23:27:46","date_gmt":"2018-01-12T07:27:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dminlgp\/?p=15850"},"modified":"2018-01-11T23:27:46","modified_gmt":"2018-01-12T07:27:46","slug":"not-your-mamas-church-country-world-etc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/not-your-mamas-church-country-world-etc\/","title":{"rendered":"Not Your Mama\u2019s Church (country, world, etc.)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThere\u2019s no undoing the shift in plausibility structures that characterize our age. There\u2019s no undoing the secular; there\u2019s just the task of learning how (not) to live \u2013 and perhaps even believe \u2013 in a secular age.\u201d \u2013 James K.A. Smith (11)<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThe REAL problem with Millennials is that they have to live with the mess we made without the God we got rid of.\u201d \u2013 My dad (and probably someone famous somewhere) <\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat if God was one of us – just a stranger on the bus trying to make his way home?\u201d \u2013 Alanis Morrisette<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>There is no getting around the fact that we live in a secularized society \u2013 at least in Western culture. Where once the idea of NOT believing in God was unheard of, it\u2019s now considered a little weird to believe, much less actually be devoted to God. To many of us who DO believe, that feels a little like persecution (it\u2019s not) and, frankly, sets up a bit of an existential crisis. If NOT believing is normal, WHY do I believe? WHAT do I believe? And HOW can I ever explain it to someone else in a way that encourages them to believe?<\/p>\n

I grew up hearing that there is a \u201cGod-shaped hole\u201d in each of us. I started to suspect that wasn\u2019t necessarily true when I asked my high-school youth pastor if the hole ever got empty once we \u201cfound\u201d God and why people who had the hole filled still acted like they hadn\u2019t, and what about the people who felt fulfilled without God? He dismissed my questions (practically rolling his eyes) and said that those people were either in denial or lying. What he didn\u2019t get is that I was asking because he claimed to be \u201cfilled\u201d but he was kind of a jerk to all the girls in the youth group and talked smack about the senior pastor in front of us. I think his \u201cGod hole\u201d wasn\u2019t quite full.<\/p>\n

Seriously though, it was stuff like this that made me wonder if we were all missing the point. We were given tidy little tracts and maps to explain how to get to God but, as Smith notes, fundamentalist maps (atheist or Christian) are \u201cblunt instruments. They are road atlases that merely show us well-worn thoroughfares, the streets and interstates of our late modern commerce. They do nothing to map the existential wilderness of the present \u2013 those bewildering places in which we are beset by an existential vertigo.\u201d[1]<\/a> In other words, those maps rely on the inherent believability of God as has been presented for centuries. Once that believability shifts or fades, all we have are maps to ancient civilizations that don\u2019t exist anymore and are long buried under new cities and roads. We don\u2019t live in a world where belief in God is a given anymore. It\u2019s certainly an option (in a \u201cHey, you do you!\u201d kind of way), but it\u2019s just one option among many.[2]<\/a><\/p>\n

If the basic precepts of our culture have changed so drastically, what does this mean for our churches? Can our churches escape this secularism? Even if we can, should we? Most of the books we have read during our Doctor of Ministry program have highlighted the deep changes that have happened and how we as leaders can navigate these changes and help others to navigate them as well. What happens, then, when part of our congregation embraces this secularity (while maintaining a life of faith), some of them struggle to find any sort of faith in this new paradigm, and a large contingent simply long for the good old days \u201cwhen God was on the throne and prayer was in schools?\u201d These sound like stereotypes, but they represent real people in congregations and the tension created by the differing presuppositions is thick and dangerous. This is why I am looking so forward to exploring Charles Taylor\u2019s offering of telling a new story, including the history of how we got here, and telling it often. Where does the narrative of our society intersect with the narrative of God even when that society views God as simply an option \u2013 and an unbelievable one at that? I have a sneaking suspicion that love is at the heart of the story and that a society that has been force-fed ideas about wrath and punishment may well be more receptive to ideas of love, but I will know more next week when\u00a0I dive into Charles Taylor\u2019s A Secular Age<\/em>. Stay tuned.<\/p>\n

<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 [1]. James K.A. Smith, How (Not) To Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor<\/em>, (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2014), 2.<\/p>\n

<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 [2]. Smith, 21.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThere\u2019s no undoing the shift in plausibility structures that characterize our age. There\u2019s no undoing the secular; there\u2019s just the task of learning how (not) to live \u2013 and perhaps even believe \u2013 in a secular age.\u201d \u2013 James K.A. Smith (11) \u201cThe REAL problem with Millennials is that they have to live with the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":91,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1100,833],"class_list":["post-15850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-how-not-to-be-secular","tag-james-k-a-smith","cohort-lgp7"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/91"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15850"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15850\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15851,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15850\/revisions\/15851"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}