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about the author...  Eutychus Bailey Born in 1974, Dr. Eutychus D. Bailey served as a pastor in the early decades of the 21st century. He "now" writes a column on the state of the mid-century church & culture which is being retrieved by us from the future because of recent technological advances enabling us to retrieve his articles 40 years before they are published. Depending on your time-travel ISP speed, you may be able to reach the old codger by e-mailing him at EutychusBailey@pastors.com
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Preaching to the Postmodern Choir by Eutychus Bailey
(Editors Note: The following article was written on 2 March 2044 by Eutychus Bailey, author and former North American pastor. Because of amazingly quick internet access and the exponential growth of micro-processing speeds, we are now able to publish this column forty years before it was actually written.This gives us the chance to get an unknowingly futurist perspective on where things are heading from this pragmatist writer observing his own times.) 2 MARCH 2044 Eutychus Report: Many of us now laugh at ourselves when we look back at the last 40 years of ministry. Near the turn of the century all the postmodern stuff was really hot. It was so foreign to the generations that came before us that we spent a lot of time talking to ourselves and to them about it. Now, for sure we needed to flesh out what it meant. I think we might have been too confused to really take it to the streets much because we were so freshly running away from the Evangelical Epilogue (or were we running away from its multi-colored foam mic covers, I forget?) But there was a real sense that for about a decade we were mostly preaching to the Pomo choir. Here's what we were preaching to the choir: 1) IT'S NOT ABOUT DOING CHURCH, IT'S ABOUT BEING THE CHURCH We taught that much of the way people thought of following Christ was about doing church. It was too often about certain actions (legalism) that qualified you as in and others as out. We justly strove to be the church in a real and authentic way instead. Unfortunately, for a long time we were preaching this more forcefully to other postmodern leaders on web-sites and at conferences than to ourselves. It took a while for us to fully teach this to our OWN churches. We found it was a lot harder for the church to be the church than it was for us to re-fashion our vision around the idea of being the church. But eventually we did change our focus from preaching this self-evident but somehow lost truth to the choir (for being so linear and logical Modernity still made little common sense to us). We started to bring it to our communities and that's when the real change started happening. Or you might say it started when we ourselves as leaders started to be the church instead of just doing church. 2) IT'S NOT ABOUT GOING TO A SERVICE, IT'S ABOUT A LIFE OF SERVICE This was a huge shift for people back in the day, believe it or not. At one time there was a general sense that church was not only a place (church building) but also that it was the thing that happened on Sunday. Again, very justly we early postmodern leaders cried out regarding this violation of holistic ecclesiology. But most of our crying early on went again to the choir. And unfortunately we still spent most of our time on that thing that happened on Sunday. We changed their names from services to worship gatherings which was such a key term change. Our glossary was right on. But the life of service we were to be living out from Monday through Saturday didnt receive as much emphasis in our time as it should have early on. We still spent the majority of our time on crafting a worship experience for our pomo audience. The other serving stuff took a back seat because of the tyranny of the urgent. Sundays and Saturday nights came every week and we had to deliver. That delivery still had so much of the service baggage in it but we didn't pick up on it very quickly. It took us a while to teach old dogs (ourselves) new tricks. 3) IT'S NOT ABOUT POINTING THE WAY TO JESUS, IT'S ABOUT LIVING THE WAY OF JESUS We felt as though evangelism was totally messed up in the Modern Church. We felt that the idea of targeting post-Christians or disillusioned generations was contrary to pomo sensibilities. We thought evangelistic programs or evangelistic events were wholly inauthentic. We were right. Especially when you consider that the Modern Church was much better at pointing the way to Jesus than living the way of Jesus. Unfortunately, we started out by doing neither. Too often we were lured by the limelight of cultural relativity and we began to live the way of culture. The counter-cultural Way of following Jesus that is so well-developed in our mid-century church was still in its infancy. And the early postmodern church wasnt all that counter-cultural. It didn't set trends much it mostly followed them. Becoming trendy didnt have the negative bite to Christians that it does today in 2044. Many of us sort of liked being trendy and forgot to forge past being in the world to the not of it part. But we figured this one out eventually, and people really began to live in a counter-cultural Way. The Way of Jesus that is. 4) IT'S NOT ABOUT THE POWER OF POSITION, IT'S ABOUT THE POWER OF STORIES The church of Modernity seemed to be completely focused on power. Power got things done. Those that had it were to be envied. Those that didn't had to get out of the way. We, of course, were NOT in power in those days. None of us had stations of real positional influence. We didn't care, obviously. Instead of chasing after power our whole lives as our fathers and grandfathers did we simply turned the value system on its head. Power was evil. Power was the problem. Power was to be released, not grasped. This sounded much more like Jesus to us. And it was and is. We felt like the only real power for the church was the power of stories. Our stories counted. The stories of those around us. The Grand Story of God. These held power. But our stories often lacked spiritual vitality in those days, and we didn't know many of the stories of the post-Christian pomo people around us either. Perhaps we were too busy formulating our ideas to get away from updating our blogs and actually chat with someone across the street. Perhaps we became so focused on the idea of story that we forgot our own story and why Jesus meant so much to us personally. But eventually we figured this one out too. We started to live the story, and tell it, and find it out in others. And we realized we had marginalized the Redemption Story too much in our re-designed worship gatherings. We re-discovered its centrality and that returned us to the true power of story in our churches. I'm glad we rebounded from our preaching to the choir season as postmodern Christ-followers about 35 years ago. I suppose we were only human, and we found out like so many before us that preaching what we should do to those already mostly convinced was easier than really living it. Of course, our preaching was on blogs and discussion boards and at conferences. But it was preaching and screaming to the choir none-the less. We called it an emerging conversation back then. boaiguua srkixbay http://djvkipmz.com zfxvoyva yqeuggzk [URL=http://tdaihrqr.com]gjltoryi[/URL]
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I think you are absolutely right. "Meeting in homes" can be a huge step forward if its part of a larger move to greater simplicity, community, and most importantly, learning to rest in our union with Christ. In recent years, many Christians have heard the call to start meeting in their homes. This is good, but it may not be enough. The full benefit of meeting in houses will only come, if Church members live close to each other. If we have to travel by car to get to our home meetings, strong Christian community will still be very difficult to achieve. Print-friendly version of this page Mail this article
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