Church Planting FuelBox

These days we are bombarded with so much stuff about what it is like to do mission in a postmodern world. And to make matters worse it's always hard to measure how we are going because most of what we read says that we are doing it wrong. I thought it might be helpful to see how my church, New Life, stacks up against what I see are the important issues involved in living in a postmodern world. So read on and feel free to make comments at the end.

Firstly I would like to think that we see ourselves as a missional church. It is certainly part of the DNA that we have sought to make a part of our church. I am of the view that despite our anxiety about living in a post-modern world, that the church still has the same job it has always had. To incarnate itself into the culture it is in. The labels might change, but the job is the same. To that end, I also believe that the church is the hope of the world and that it is up for the task.

To analyse our effectiveness as a missional church we need to engage the subject from two different viewpoints. The first is to look at some of the broad issues framing postmodernism and how we measure up against them. The second is to look at the broad trends that describe how the church is to respond to these issues and measure our effectiveness against them.

Millard Erickson in an attempt to define postmodernism says that it is best understood as an intellectual movement growing out of and supplanting modernism. Like premoderns, modern persons were looking for all-inclusive explanations of events and of reality, but believed that this could be done without recourse to anything supernatural. Erickson outlines what he sees as the tenets of postmodernism as: the objectivity of knowledge is denied; knowledge is uncertain; all-inclusive systems of explanation are impossible; the inherent goodness of knowledge is questioned; progress is rejected; truth is defined by and for the community and truth is not simply known through reason, but through other channels such as intuition. He goes on to say that the presence of what he calls soft postmodernism should be encouraging to Christians because it opens the door for believers to contend for the faith in contrast to a secular world that excluded faith of any type.

Craig Miller says that instead of standing on the street corner and proclaiming that we have the truth, the local church must create a place of integrity, compassion and authenticity in which post moderns can find a safe place to seek God. He is convinced that once post moderns discover the power and excitement of the Christian alternative they will find the truth through faith in Jesus Christ. Frost and Hirsch argue that contemporary people are searching for an inclusive community that is democratic, nonpatriarchal and compassionate. If one of the keys for living in a post-modern world and being a missional church is to be authentic community, then I think that at least positionally we are heading in the right direction. Because of our focus on the way we do small groups we are committed to meeting people at their point of interest or felt need and because of our intentional discipleship plan we are committed to helping people to develop in their personal relationships, both of which aid authentic community.

If part of the move from modernity to post-modernity is the move from information giving to information discovery as outlined above then that certainly fits our style of training and preaching. Opportunities to discuss and question are part of our training and part of our services. You are not seen as a troublemaker if you wrestle with the ideas and information that we put forward. We are certainly comfortable with being able to give a reason for the hope that is within us and our apologetics are based around this idea.

As Martin Robinson pointed out we find writers like Foucault and Lyotard explicitly attacking any notion that there might be a meta-language, meta-narrative, or meta-theory through which all things can be connected or represented. Universal and eternal truths, if they exist at all, cannot be specified. To counter this rejection of a meta-narrative we seek to offer hope and an anchor for the soul. This must be done by action, not talking. This sort of action becomes a focal point of mission, and people are experiencing grace through the actions of Jesus’ people. It allows for the “centred set” of faith to draw people into an experience of Jesus in and through His community without the slightest loss of the evangelistic edge of the Gospel. In this area I think we perform poorly. We do not have a credible strategy for being good news to the poor. We say we are compassionate but don’t deliver much outside ourselves.

In the fragile and fragmented world of post modernity, the church becomes just one segment, in a world characterised by polarisation and conflict in which each segment is fighting for its right of self determination, and can assume no privileged position. On order to understand the process of cultural and social marginalisation we need to understand the model of liminality developed by anthropologist Victor Turner. According to Turner liminality is a state not of limbo but of dynamic transition. It is the conscious awareness that society has so radically changed that it has now become largely invisible to the larger society. Given the fragmented nature of the post modern world, the church cannot hope to regain its former position in society. Instead it must learn to work as one piece of cultural mosaic, but a piece that is called to act as salt and light. As a church plant I don’t think we ever had a position of influence in this society. Church planting is always about earning your place in society and earning the right to be heard. I think that we are sound here.

This article will be continued in a later post,