The pastor just returned from Estonia. When he travels, a conversation eventually come up about shrinking and aging churches and feeling disenfranchised within the culture.
Evangelical Christianity rests on three pillars:
1. The Bible is God's revelation.
2. We are separated from God by sin.
3. The death and resurrection of Jesus is the key event in the Bible.
Evangelicals has grown and been enormously successful in the past century. They moved into the gap left by shrinking mainline churches.
But now, something has changed. Unfortunately, Evangelicals created a bubble to live in that separated them from the larger society. This bubble was built on blessing and certainty.
In viewing the Bible as immediately talking to us about our current situation, we misuse scripture.
This bubble is collapsing today. It is no longer answering the questions people ask. It causes us to think about things differently and we become insular.
The world rests on four pillars:
1. A new way of being human. One aspect of this is facing life and death on our own terms. The world views people differently and we need to understand that. Evolution and a scientific view of humanity permeates nearly all our attitudes. When we talk about being blessed as God's children, it doesn't resonate.
2. A new way of understanding truth. Ancient wisdom has little place in a society where truth rests on scientific data. Even so, people are still interested in spiritual truth; but, they want truth that can be measured and demonstrated. If our bubble is based on the idea of God as someone who wants to make us happy, then we miss the mark. C. S. Lewis wrote about this.
3. The morality of self-fulfillment. This is different from selfishness. It is the idea that we are meant to be the person we are meant to be and develop our talents. It is more than simply trying to avoid sin and be a good citizen. Think Parable of the Talents - the world convicts us for burying our talents.
4. The collapse of the center and the sacred/secular compromise. We lost a sense of order and tradition in our lives when we separated the spiritual from the secular.
We are in the third Great Awakening as a society, but it's not Christian. We need to come out of our bubble so that we can meet others and dialogue with them. We need to move beyond blessing and certainty and embrace mystery and mission.
I get the image of a small child on the first day of school.
The greatest crimes in life are committed by the certain.
We need to live a provocative faith. Real faith is looking at the mystery, asking questions, and being open to change. In a world of certainty, faith is mental - in a world of mystery, faith is active. We can't cling to our certainty and avoid God's mystery. We cannot try so hard to keep God small because God cannot be put in a box or on a bumper sticker.
Mission is living into that mystery. Study the history of Christianity, do not shy away from ancient wisdom and the experiences of those who are not like us.
There are three priorities and values as a community are engage, transform, and respond. We need to live an expansive faith.
Your spiritual life can only grow as large as your emotional life and Christian practices of prayer (many ancient) help with that. Spiritual directors can also be beneficial.
We also need to be peacemakers. Do not objectify others, seek reconciliation (your neighborhood is your parish), and bring the Kingdom where it is not (do not be so focused on bringing people to church, let helping them where they are be your witness).
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