The Modern Crisis for Churches . . . And What LPCC Will Do About It.

  In this post, I’ll explain why, if we don’t make some changes over at my church, it will die. 

Before I do so, however, I should paint, in a few broad brushstrokes, the world’s larger religious picture, as context. All the big world religions are growing. Islam, the world’s number two religion by size, is growing fastest, because it has the largest birthrate. Islam will equal Christianity in size within thirty or forty years. 

Christianity is growing too, though not 

Art Show Weekend at LPC

as quickly, due to a lower birthrate. One large unknown that might impact this picture is China. Christianity is growing rapidly there—perhaps exponentially. This could eventually add significantly to Christianity’s world numbers.

One important thing to note about both Christianity and Islam is that while both are growing in absolute terms, their inner makeup is also changing. Three types of Christianity are growing in the world. First, Pentecostalism that emphasizes healing, ecstatic worship, and the presence of the Holy Spirit. Second, and overlapping Pentecostalism to some degree, is the “health and wealth” brand of Christianity. It promises earthly riches and rewards to the faithful—especially the generous faithful. Both of these types of Christianity also have traction in the United States, and to a lesser degree, in Canada. Third, Christianity that mixes elements of African religions are declaring independence from World denominations. 

Meanwhile, Islam is being reshaped by its encounter with Western culture, especially through mass media. Partly as a result, Islam is fracturing into new movements less dependent on traditional authority. This includes a significant Fundamentalist backlash in Islam, as well as more secularizing tendencies. At the same time, nearly all Muslims are deeply and negatively impressed by American support for Israeli Zionism, and especially the occupation of the West Bank and the siege of Gaza. Islamic hostility to Israeli policy and American support for such policy goes a long way to explaining the feeling we all have that there is a great deal of tension between Islamic and Christian peoples in today’s world.

In contrast to most of the world, however, in North America and Europe, religion—and especially Christianity—is in crisis. Fewer and fewer people are going to church in these places, even when those people self-identify as Christian; furthermore, the decline has been more pronounced among Mainline Christians than Evangelical Christians. 

In Canada, more people avoid church than go. Canadian sociologist Reginald Bibby notes that thirty years ago forty-five percent of Canadians claimed to be religiously committed and active. That’s down to thirty percent today—less than one in three Canadians. What’s more, probably not more than fifteen or twenty percent of Canadians can be found in church on any given Sunday. Most religious “nones,” are not militant atheists. Instead, even though many will claim to be nominally Christian, they really haven’t given religion much thought, or drifted away from participation. What’s more, the younger you are, the more likely you are to belong to the “nones.”

So there you have it, a snapshot of where we’re at in Canada. Lawrence Park Community Church has not been immune from these trends. We’re located in an upper middle class neighborhood on Bayview across from Sunnybrook hospital. In the fifties and sixties we were a thriving congregation where as many as three hundred met weekly. 

Children listening to youth band "Pancake Lunch"
play Buffy Ste. Marie's "Universal Soldier."

These days, Lawrence Park averages about 100 weekly. My guess is that more than half of our members attend, on average, every third week or so. We have an active Sunday School and Youth Group.

Lawrence Park isn’t a stuffy church. No smells or bells or ancient prayers. Our near-professional choir, which includes paid section heads, sings every Sunday. We mostly hew to classical church music, but regularly mix it up with Jazz, secular rock and roll, and Broadway standards. This month we’re doing four weeks of all-Canadian music, from Buffy Ste. Marie to Leonard Cohen to celebrate Canada’s 150^th anniversary. We’ve come in costumes to a sanctuary decorated as the Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz, had famous Canadians like Paul Henderson speak as guests, and sprinkled our pulpit with a fair showing of Jewish and Muslim speakers on topics like Sports in modern culture or how social media is reshaping Canada. We sponsor refugee families and raise tons of money for local and international charities. People come early, stay late, and take their coffees into the sanctuary. Our motto is, “United, Unlimited, Unorthodox.” 

Still, a Toronto marketing guru recently explained to us that if present trends continue and if we don’t make changes it is very likely that within twenty or so years Lawrence Park Community Church will die. 

But why? Why is Christianity in decline in the West? Why do fewer and fewer people go to fun and relevant churches like Lawrence Park Community Church?

In what follows, I’m going to focus on two basic kinds of issues that contemporary Christianity faces, especially in the West. One set of issues is more philosophical or ideological and the other set is more practical. And finally, I’ll say a word about the changes I hope we make at Lawrence Park to face up to these issues.

So first the ideological issues. In the secular West, there has been a society-wide switch from a modern outlook to a postmodern outlook. A thousand academic books, including my own Not Sure, have been written about this switch. Trying to sum it up in a word is treacherous. But the story goes something like this. 

Once upon a time people believed in science and progress. They believed in institutions and trusted people—mostly men—in authority. People experienced the postwar years as a boom time where they did better than their parents and exceeded their own expectations for themselves. The fifties and sixties were a consumer paradise of unexpected riches, of V8’s and bungalows, of Disney or cross country vacations, of near-universal university education and longer, healthier lives. Life was mostly good.

But some very ominous shadows clouded this post-war paradise. There was the memory of the holocaust and a fear of the human potential for evil. The Cold War confronted everyone with the possibility of nuclear holocaust. Vietnam and Watergate poisoned trust in politics. Between Elvis’ pelvis, hippies, tuning in and dropping out, long-held sexual or cultural mores came under sustained attack. Along the way there were several severe economic downturns too, along with growing alarm about urban crime, racism—or, as the case might be—civil rights; assassinations of leaders like Kennedy and King, and unending bad news on the environmental horizon. 

Over time, though people rarely remarked on it, the optimism, the belief in progress, the trust of science and authority that had marked North American life through the eighties was quietly unravelling. New cultural and spiritual trends marked our life together.

The first was a growing mistrust of authority. Polls began to note that the trustworthiness of religious ministers, politicians, lawyers, and captains of industry was plummeting. From Watergate, to the Sponsorship scandal; from Vietnam’s fake body counts to the residential school genocide of First Nation culture, from Canadian Aimee Lee Semple’s many bizarre scandals to Jimmy Swaggert’s or Jimmy Baker’s sexual escapades people had ample reason to distrust their leaders. 

Similarly, institutions came under suspicion, especially if they were large and powerful. Institutions, after all, had given us residential schools and depressions and pollution and wars and racism. They were impersonal and unresponsive to our needs. They gave us planned obsolescence and bureaucratic insensitivity. This distrust was perhaps best summed up in the words of Pink Floyd’s famous song from its album “Another Brick in the Wall.”

We don't need no education 

We don't need no thought control

No dark sarcasm in the classroom

Teachers leave them kids alone

All in all it's just another brick in the wall

The problem here is that distrust in institutions and the power they wield in our lives is very hard to act on. What are you going to do? Not send your kids to school? Not be a Canadian citizen? Stop banking? Ditch OHIP? In fact, the one institution that people had little problem blaming and they could leave in large numbers was the church. And, expressing their new doubts about all leaders and institutions, people took the easy step of leaving the church, in droves.

A third feature of the shift from modern to postmodern attitudes is the growth of what I’ll call radical perspectivalism. The word of the year, in 2016, according to Oxford Dictionary, is post-truth. Nobody seems to care, anymore, what the fact checkers say. 

Now, instead of belief in god or progress or democracy, people tend to believe in anything but, with little or no reason for such far out beliefs than their prejudices. Creation out of nothing five thousand years ago? Global warming denial? Vaccines cause autism? Obama isn’t an American? It is all good. Modern people are spiritual—that is, they will believe in any touchy-feely spiritual intuition—but they are not religious. That is, they won’t let any tradition or scholar or church leader tell them anything about what really matters.

Add these trends together—suspicion of authority, including clergy; suspicion of institutions, especially felt by churches; and radical perspectivism, where everyone’s brand of post-truth is as good as what experts think—add this all together and you get a perfect storm for the churches. 

Now interestingly, all this hits mainline liberal churches much harder than it does conservative evangelical ones. People tend to say that this is because conservative doctrine makes more sense, is better grounded, than liberal theology. I’d argue, however, that conservative churches tend to do better than liberal ones because many people, upset or concerned by postmodern trends—often without understanding them—experience conservative churches as a refuge from postmodern trends. Liberal churches, on the other hand, have a much more nuanced view of both modernism and postmodernism—neither rejecting nor accepting either option whole, but engaging both. For a significant subset of the population, that sort of thoughtful engagement is exactly what they don’t want.

Furthermore, conservative churches have done better than liberal ones because they are willing to exercise a number of social and spiritual sanctions against those considering leaving. From shunning those who dare think on their own, to threatening the wayward with hell, conservative churches have the ability to call on what I see as unpalatable, but very effective means for keeping people on the straight-and-narrow.

I said earlier that there were a number of more philosophical or ideological issues facing the church, but there was another set that was more practical. Let me quickly run through those.

First, mainline churches, and especially the United Church, was ahead of the curve, compared to most of society, on cutting edge issues of sexual identity and practice. One very practical reason that the United Church lost so many members in the eighties was because it was one of the first important Canadian institutions to drop traditional condemnation of homosexual practice, and in fact, embrace nontraditional sexual mores. Ahead of the culture on this, and willing in a postmodern way to question old authority, many, many shocked people left the United Church. And by the time society largely had changed its own mind on homosexuality, society was ironically too busy painting all churches as hypocritical and judgmental on sexual issues to remember that it was not so in the United Church. 

Second, the unprecedented wealth of Western society, by historical standards, is a practical problem for Christianity. Suspicion of wealth is writ in Jewish and Christian genes. Writers of scripture have always guessed that too much wealth made people think they didn’t need God. Remember the prophet Amos, who is typical? "Hear this word, you cows of Bashan on Mount Samaria, you women who oppress the poor and crush the needy and say to your husbands, ‘Bring us some drinks!’" Now, ironically, I would argue that thinking you need God to succeed in a harsh world is not actually a good reason for believing in God. Still, there is more faith in foxholes than in Yorkdale Malls, and when people are drinking and dancing, they have never ever been prone to religion. 

        Third, there has been a steep decline in deep word literacy. For a large number of reasons, people don’t read as much, as deeply, with as much understanding as they did only fifty years ago. I carefully examine the history of this phenomenon in my book, Not Sure. As a result of a loss of deep literacy the reasoned discourse that is so important for making judgements about institutions and the deeper threads of culture—this sort of rationality has all but evaporated except for an educated elite. The evaporation of this sort of rationality means that more and more people are willing to believe whatever preposterous things their religious or political leaders, or their intuitions and prejudices tell them. Loss of deep word literacy is a requirement for living in a post-truth society.

Fourth, our school system, over the past two-hundred years, modelled itself on the church. Schools were places where wise leaders poured knowledge and facts into the waiting receptacles of their students—like pastors and priests did with their congregations. The emphasis on status quo thinking, authority figures, and institutions was very modern in both school and church. 

However, the whole point of school, ultimately, is to graduate. And so the church model for school has come back to bite the church. These days, once youth get to the end of high school, or grad school, even if they love church, they tend to assume it is time to graduate—be confirmed—and leave. 

Other historical—indeed ancient—models for church that stress community, doing good for neighbours, and mutual support and encouragement have been forgotten in the mists of time. Remember, for example, that the church described in Acts didn’t meet so that a pastor could pour truth into empty vessels sitting in pews—no, they met every day to break bread together and to share with each other as each had need. These ancient models for church might well have more traction in a postmodern society than our traditional models.

Finally, although it is easy to miss this, it is probably as important a factor as any other. Life today, for all the material plenty many of us enjoy, life is often experienced as way too complicated and full of pressure. We work on our backhands, we are stuck in traffic, we don’t have enough time at home, we have to take kids to hockey or soccer practice, modern media keeps us tied to work twenty-four/seven, both parents work so time alone with family at home is a premium. What’s more, the two best times for doing church are in competition with other family survival activities. After work—church committee time—we’re stuck in traffic trying to get home to spend a bit of time with spouse or kids; and Sunday mornings, if we’re not into house league hockey, are one of the only times both parents can be home with the kids or truly away from work. So why leave home to sit in a school-like setting? 

So what will we do at Lawrence Park Community Church to deal with these trends? I’m pushing two initiatives. The first recognizes that what we do now is working pretty well for older folks still comfortable with the folkways of modernism. Our worship is both relaxed, but in terms of quality, sort of highbrow. I think we should admit that culture is fractured, and so go after specific segments rather than try to please everyone. I think we need to focus on the highbrow, educated, and well-healed crowd we already have on Sunday mornings.

     My vision is for a Sunday morning service that: 

     1. Always has a guest musician, one that usually does high quality music in a non-traditional church genre, such as jazz, folk, world music, and so on; 

     2. Regularly makes liturgical dance as part of our services. Such dance is done not only to music, but to the themes of that Sunday’s worship. It is inspiring, beautiful, and emotionally rich;

     3. Makes a concerted effort to bring more two- and three-dimensional art into our worship space, for short rotating “shows” in the sanctuary. The art should engage culture and spirituality;

     5. Includes drama. A church troupe can act out parts of the morning’s themes on a monthly basis and provide a rich multi-generational activity opportunity;
includes a high-quality children and/or youth choir that is a destination for parents who want their kids to learn to sing under the direction of a pro.

Why might this work? Because in a city of 6 or 7 million, for example, a subgroup usually called “cultural creatives” probably represents about 10% of the population. At LPCC we’d like 1% of that ten percent, or perhaps 6,000 people, to at least consider visiting sometime to see whether our combination of various high arts and thoughtful reflection on meaning is for them. Note, by the way, that this model for church breaks out of the church-as-school mode. It doesn’t trade on the value of church as authority so much as the value of church as a window on mystery and meaning. 

But it is my second proposal that is most radical and most important if Lawrence Park Community Church is going to thrive in our new cultural context.

I propose that Lawrence Park Community Church start a second worshipping community within our congregation, one that offers a real choice to the broader community with respect to how they might worship. 

This second worshipping community is designed to engage a younger demographic: parents with small children, teens, and young adults. This community will meet in a service designed around socializing before and after supper. The evening might look like this: 

1. At six pm on Sunday night, people gather for coffee, healthy cold drinks, and snacks.

2. At six-thirty everyone sits down for a meal. A healthy, catered, buffet is on offer for all.

3. By seven pm, those who wish may move to the sanctuary for a half hour of worship. Music is contemporary and secular, with spiritual themes, professionally played. The pastor offers a brief seven-minute meditation; a prayer, and then it’s over. Meanwhile . . . 

4. At six pm, as people gather to socialize, babysitting is available for children aged 0 to 4. Babysitting remains available until everyone is gone, perhaps nine pm. This offers parents a break from family responsibilities to be with people their own age. If parents prefer, of course, they can take these tots to supper with them.

5. At six pm, structured play and sport activities are also available for older children and young teens. A coffee shop lounge is available for older teens. 

6. At seven, after supper, Sunday story time for kids through grade 5 goes for half an hour. There isn’t a youth program for older kids, as we would like them to attend the brief time of worship. It—the music and the message--relates to them.

7. After worship, Babysitting continues so adults can choose, if they like, to sit in on a movie discussion or a book club. Youth will meet for sports and socializing on a varied schedule—dodgeball, basketball, maybe drama or choir practice.

8. The structured activities end at 8:30, and people have another half hour to mingle, have refreshments, including a glass of wine if desired, and pick up their kids from nursery.

This sort of plan would allow those returning from skiing or the cottage to get a meal, worship, and bring the family home well fed and ready for bed without further cooking or chaos at home. It would provide young parents with three hours of not having to worry about their youngest children if they so choose. It’s a free meal and socializing for young professionals. And it would build meaningful spiritual community in a lonely city, at the one time in the week when more people have little to do compared to any other time—all without having to fight traffic. 

     One more thing needs to be said. These proposals also reflect the fact that LPCC is a liberal church. It sometimes seems like nativist, reactionary, simplistic, fear-based, moralistic attitudes to all that is going on in the world are on the rise. We refuse to follow that route. We embrace a liberal theology that emphasizes following Jesus over trying to explain what really happened during Holy Week. We wonder about God instead of trying to put him (or her!) in a box where we can command God to do what we want. We shy away from letting yesteryear's moral benchmarks define what we must be today. Following Jesus also requires more than personal morality; it requires pursuit of social justice, inclusivity based on neighbourliness, and having a heart for the least and the last.

At least, that’s what I’m thinking, right now. It will be different and a great risk, for sure. But doing the same thing over and over has already proven to be a great and unwise risk, anyway. And that is how I hope LPCC will face up to the modern crisis in religion.

Lots of Thoughts and Ten Pastoral Suggestions on Postmodern Interpretation of Scripture

            Once upon a time—long before modernism or postmodernism, long before even the Renaissance or the Enlightenment, the world was a very different place than it is now. People – including theologians and preachers—just didn’t think the way they do now.

            So, for example, when they had to write a creed that all of them could agree on, the underlying philosophy of the creed was based on a long Greek tradition of substance theology—on the theory that all that is divine, and all that is material, has to be made out of something. It was this substance, according to the creeds, that can’t be confounded or confused. Today you will be hard pressed to find any scholar, Christian or not, who has any use for such “pagan” philosophical presuppositions (with apologies, of course, to the Thomists among us). And yet, for most Christians today, these documents still define how the three persons of the Trinity can be one God, and how the one person of Jesus can have two natures.

            Or again, there was Saint Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, and a great hero to both Martin Luther and John Calvin. He was a scholar in the old mold, too—a thorough-going Platonist with Manichean prejudices. Augustine was a dualist who believed in the Platonic myth of the superiority of soul to body. And Augustine was sure that Plato learned much of what he later wrote after visiting with Jeremiah, in Egypt.

            In his magisterial but idiosyncratic book on Biblical interpretation and preaching, On Christian Doctrine, Saint Augustine commends to us the seven laws for interpretation as handed down by Tychonius the Donatist. For example, Augustine explains a rule described as “Of the Lord and His Body.” According to this interpretive rule, people in the Bible sometimes should be understood to symbolize both Christ and his church. So when scripture speaks of a bride adorned with jewels, even though only a single person is mentioned, the bride must refer to the church, and the jewels that adorn the head, to Jesus. If you are not sure that this interpretive rule is really helpful, and if you therefore have some issues with Augustine’s hermeneutic, you are in good company.

            I raise these three cases: the creedal dependence on Greek notions of substance, Augustine’s Platonism, and Augustine’s affirmation of Tychonius’s allegorical hermeneutic to make a point before I wade in with some criticism of both modernist and postmodernist approaches to scriptural interpretation. The Christian church has a long history of orthodoxy that predates today’s modernist notions of what orthodoxy must be. The point to keep in mind, then, is that no human intellectual movement—premodern, modern, or postmodern—likely has a corner on the truth.

            During the premodern era, before Saint Thomas Aquinas’s Aristotle delivered us of Augustine’s Plato, Christian life was very different. However, that first thousand years of the church’s history was also incredibly successful. The church spread from Jerusalem to Antioch to Rome, and even as far as India, China, and Siberia.

            At the same time, the vast majority of Christians could not read or write. So, even as priests and academicians and politicians wrestled with what scripture taught about a host of difficult matters, most Christians had an extremely simple faith. It had to be, because Christians only knew of Jesus what they could remember. Most made do without the doctrines of atonement, sanctification, inspiration, or election. People only knew the best of the stories their priests told them, or the moral lessons traveling bands of actors taught them, or the passion plays acted out before Stations of the Cross. Ancient Christians depended on paintings, music, relics, sculptures and windows to remember the old, old story.

            Before modernism, most Christians believed because the church told them to. Doubt is an intellectual project few could imagine. One didn’t discuss doctrine, but merely gave assent to the few one learned about from the pulpit. It was the rare Christian who had ever heard of Armageddon, or a personal relationship with Jesus, or predestination.

            But again—this church—one we now have a hard time valuing, because it was so alien to our modern ways—this ancient, odd church thrived before modernity. Oh, sure, there were excesses and weaknesses. Clergy sometimes preyed on the vulnerable, church leaders often became rich, and the church and secular politicians were often in bed together (or maybe, some things never change).

            When modernism took hold of the European mind, modernism forever changed that ancient form of Christianity—sometimes for the worse, but not always. Still, before I get to modernism, I want to reiterate that the premodern church of these “ignorant” peasants, of these bumbling church leaders, this premodern church was historical proof against any claim that orthodoxy needs modernism.

            In any case, scholars offer many, sometimes conflicting, accounts for the triumph of modernism. I’ve already mentioned one, the effect of Europe’s rediscovery, largely on account of the work of Saint Aquinas, of Aristotelian rationality. On a popular level, the rise of modernism was, at the very least, bolstered and encouraged by another development—a key development for us Christians, who are people of the Word. I’m speaking of the invention of the printing press. Over the space of one or two hundred years, most Europeans became literate as books and pamphlets proliferated. They fell in love with the current ideas—Aristotelian—ideas about rhetoric, about persuasion, about power, about rationality, and about what humans are all about. Science, in particular, flourished—and human ability to do good, and evil, with technological flourish, multiplied.

            Over time, this modernistic seed inspired most of the great philosophies and movements of the past several hundred years: from Scottish Common Sense Realism to Communism and from Reformation to the “God is Dead” meme. Modernism is so big that it is difficult to define, so confident that its one word slogan might be “progress,” so triumphant that it is difficult to see any competition, and so pervasive that, like fish in water, we hardly realize anymore that it surrounds us all the time.

            Still, a hundred word summary is called for. Modernism insists that the right combination of reason, objectivity and Western colonial or military intervention will inevitably lead to human progress on all fronts. Modernist Biblical hermeneutics presumes that as long as you apply the right grammatical and historical—that is, “scientific” or “rational” instruments, ancient texts will reveal authorial intention. Modernists suppose that most scholars can be objective, and that people have always been pretty much the same. That means that even if the horizon between the ancient text and the modern interpreter is huge—say 2,500 years—human nature being constant, we can make the jump.

            Brian Walsh and Richard Middleton, writing in Truth is Stranger than it Used to Be (IVP) suggest that a nice symbol for modernity might be the Tower of Babel. The builders said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens and let us make a name for ourselves, otherwise we shall be scattered over the whole earth” (Gen. 11:4). According to Walsh and Middleton, modernity believes that there is only one way—the scientific method—to guarantee progress and joy and peace for one world and one humanity recreated in the image of North America and Europe. This culture of progress is built on the foundation of rationality, rises from the earth on walls of technology, and is crowned with the jewels of a one-world market economy. Modernity is an exercise in humanist pride.

            Ironically, biblical scholars—whether of the most liberal or the most conservative type it matters not—have generally adopted these sorts of modernistic presuppositions to scriptural studies. Among liberal Christians, this has led to the treatment of scripture as a history source book rather than the revelation of God, who cannot be known by science, in any case—a problem with theology that the likes of Kant and Schleiermacher struggled whole life times to figure out. Liberal theologians focus on ethics, on the psychology of religion, and on the history of scripture and the veracity of its stories—the search for the historical Jesus, for example.

            But, according to the evangelical scholar Hendrik Hart, “To counteract the rational infallibility of scientific propositions, [conservative] Christians responded with the (equally rational) infallibility of revealed propositions. But a focus on [rationalistic] propositions was common to both sides” (Setting Our Sights By the Morning Star, 95). Thus Haddon Robinson, for example, argues that “expository preaching is the communication of a biblical concept, derived from and transmitted through a historical grammatical, and literary study of a passage in its context, which the Holy Spirit first applies to the personality and experience of the preacher, then through him to his hearers” (Biblical Preaching, 21). The same emphasis on truth, the same emphasis on method, on rational propositions, and interestingly enough, on experience, or psychology that characterizes modernity characterizes most of contemporary, Western Christianity. Where this is a conflict between the two, conservative Christians, using modernist-looking methods, create their own private parallel worlds—everything from Creation Science instead of evolution, Theophostic Therapy instead of EMDR, Premillenial Prophecy instead of Futurists, and Christian Contemporary music instead of just plain good music. 

            But more should be said of modernity. Modernity has given us freedom of movement compliments of Honda and Boeing, but also so much pollution that our oceans are dying, people in cities like Manila are choking, and skyrocketing skin cancer. Modernity has given us modern medicine, but also WWI’s mustard gas and WWII’s first use of atomic weapons by the United States, and now military drones unleashed not against mere military targets, as Augustine’s premodern just war theory would require, but mostly civilian targets as the exigencies of pragmatism ruled. Modernism has given us great cities but also British concentration camps in the Boer War, as well as even more terrible Japanese and German concentration camps in WWII. Modernism has given us the bureaucratic efficiency that has allowed me to put together a family history based on Dutch records conveniently put on line; but also efficient holocausts of Jews, Serbs, Croats, and Cambodians. Modernity, to put it bluntly, has failed.

           

            Many years ago, I visited Rwanda. I saw bodies left to rot in a church, only hair and rags clinging to their skeletons. Their pastor betrayed these people when they sought refuge in the church, as one tribe of Rwandans mercilessly tried to kill all members of another. In Bissaro, Rwanda, I saw a mountain made up of the bones of 50,000 murdered Rwandans. The genocide was encouraged via speeches broadcast on the radio, it was carried out with the help of guns and knives forged in modern factories. Rwanda’s conservative Christians—more than 90% of the population—gleefully participated in the carnage, often with the encouragement of conservative, Western educated pastors who knew all about hermeneutics and objectivity and atonement theory. What is more, the tribal animosity that sparked the genocide was largely the result of Belgian racism and exploitation. 150 years ago, the Belgian colonial conquerors set one Rwandan tribe against the other by favoring the Tutsi tribe over the Hutu tribe. You see, the Belgians thought the Tutsis looked more European, and so they thought the Tutsis could more easily learn new European methods of colonial management and oversight. Another gift of modernity. Those same pastors are now, in countries like Uganda, encouraging their parishioners to believe that gay people should be imprisoned, or killed.

            After Rwanda, I will never be the same again. I agree with Hendrik Hart, who says that, “The overriding concern of our times is not so much to understand right doctrine as it is to find our way. Our concerns are more pastoral than theological” (Hart, p. 13).

            Enter the postmoderns. They are united by a deep and abiding suspicion of the secular humanist premises of modernity. How they deal with that suspicion differs, from one postmodernist to another—just as moderns differ in their affiliations to Marxist or Freudian or Democratic or Republican visions of how rationality can deliver on progress. Still, there are some presuppositional themes common to postmodernity.

            First, rather than faith in reason, postmoderns are suspicion of the ways reason and its stepchildren—science and technology—has been used to oppress, to trick, and to rationalize on behalf of the powerful. I’m reminded, once more, of Plato and Aristotle. Both recognized the power of words to persuade people. But where Aristotle the modernist hero worried little about how rhetoric might be used for good or ill, and merely explored its power, Plato—premodern Augustine’s hero—constantly fretted about how rhetoric could be used for bad ends. Postmoderns recommend intuition, faith, passion, experience, and love as better guides to action than reason.

            Note that postmoderns do not deny reason’s power to create new things, discover new cures, or for that matter, develop new weapons. It is just that Postmoderns suspect that reason is mostly used by governments and corporations and texts to enslave rather than liberate, to deceive rather than illuminate, and to invite surrender rather than empower—as Aristotle’s rhetoric would be.

           

            Second, rather than faith in human progress, postmoderns mourn human loss, suffering, and inequity. They are concerned for the weak, the minorities, the hurting; they groan, with all creation, over what progress has meant for the environment, for ocean life, for city life, and for warfare. They resonate with Christians and Marxists and environmentalists—just about anyone who is willing to put principal ahead of profit when it comes to social justice, people, and the earth.

            Third, rather than trust in methodologically secured objectivity, postmoderns believe that all data, all texts, and all of creation is value laden. We usually see what we want to see, what our prejudices have taught us to notice, what our pocket books think will be profitable—we see whatever will keep the status quo on our side of the table. Postmoderns deny that there are scientific methods of exegesis that can guarantee a true reading of scripture. They point to the Christian failure to agree on matters such as the role of women, baptism, the relative importance of charismatic gifts as evidence that not even the a rationalistic, rule-bound hermeneutic can guarantee people will agree on key doctrines. So postmodern Christians want a new hermeneutic, one that focuses on the poor, the widow and the least of these; one that challenges the status quo, the rich, and the powerful that the old hermeneutic usually figured out how to excuse.

            Rather than submit to the powers, to the rational bureaucracies, to parties or corporations or denominations—all rationally and scientifically conceived to keep people in line, postmoderns tend to be very suspicious of human institutions and the power the wield. They think of Vietnam War and Fundamentalist Islam and Communist China and of cover-ups of sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic and other churches when people try to defend institutions. Instead, postmoderns are preoccupied with self—self-discovery, self-empowerment, self-fulfillment.

            But finally—why does this all matter? How, in view of the face-off between modernism and postmodernism—against the backdrop of premodern Christianity, might this matter for preachers? I have ten pastoral suggestions.

·      First, something about the interpreter. Postmodernity has made a forceful case for pointing out that every interpretation, every observation, every reading of the text is inseparable from the interpreter’s personal prejudices, priorities, and philosophical presuppositions. Ultimately, you can’t hide behind the grammatical-historical method, or the best commentaries, or how you were raised, or what you think must be the plain sense of the text. If you try to do so, you’ll just be kidding yourself. And there is nothing so dangerous on the pulpit as a pastor just kidding himself. Postmodernity is a movement that takes seriously something that we Protestants have confessed for a long time—that as much as the image of God and his grace resides in great measure in many of us, we all struggle with sin and prejudice and stupidity too. What we need is a lot more humility about our interpretative skills.

·      Second, something about the author. According to the most postmoderns, people like Roland Barthes and Paul de Man, the author is always dead to the interpreter. Little to nothing can be known of the intentions of writers because words are slippery when it comes to passing along meaning, motives, and are always prone to misunderstanding. I think we need to be humble about what we can know of authorial intention in light of these assertions

·      Third, something about the audience. Never forget that sermons are for audiences often reeling under the blows of modernity—people who have been downsized out of work, people who have asthma or bronchitis on account of the pollution, and people who have experienced—or engage in—violence of every kind, people who feel like a number, or a bar code, or dehumanized by the system. Remember that for modern audiences, the message of gospel is basically simple. Jesus loves them, embraces them, and wants to use them in his world to make it a better, more loving, more heavenly place.

·      Fourth, modernist science insists that the data can mean only one thing. The church doesn’t insist, however, that a text can mean only one thing. Long ago Augustine pointed out that any interpretation of scripture that accords with scripture’s central message is appropriate. “Whoever finds a lesson [in scripture] useful to the building of charity, even though he has not said what the author may be shown to have intended in that place, has not been deceived, nor is he lying in any way” (I:36). Postmodernity never totally rejects traditional hermeneutics. It does, however, insist that restricting ourselves to a single, literal interpretation based on what the author meant limits our understanding of the endless depth of scripture. Of such literalism, Saint Augustine wrote, “There is a miserable servitude of the spirit in [the] habit of taking signs for things, so that one is not able to raise the eye of the mind above things that are corporal and created to drink in eternal light” (III:9). Let’s not get hung up with finding the one true interpretation for any one text; let’s enjoy the multiplicity of meanings in scripture that are consistent with the heart of God revealed throughout scripture—lets learn from the premodern saints in our tradition and let’s use some postmodern interpretive techniques like intertextuality and strong readings as heuristic means for multiplying interpretations, and thus our depth of understanding, into scripture.

·      Fifth. Let’s learn from postmodern advocacy for God’s favorites, the poor. I suspect that pastors who work in inner cities or with marginalized communities will resonate more with postmodern concern for the poor than with the modernist concern for maintaining the prerogatives of our great institutions and programs—like free trade and free markets—that most obviously benefit the middle class and rich in the most powerful nations on earth.

·      Sixth. Let’s focus on orthopraxis—especially when it comes to love—rather than orthodoxy. The orthodoxy I've been talking about to this point is a mirage, homage paid to a "true," meaning that always recedes the sharper we hone our rationalistic, interpretive tools. Church institutions, in particular, need to engage in social justice, in advocacy, and in love of neighbour - orthopraxis rather than orthodoxy. My favorite book on this topic is actually a study of Christian orthopraxis in the premodern era—Gerhard Lohfink’s Jesus and Community.

·      Seventh. The best way to preserve the gifts of modernity is to make sure that literacy belongs not only to those with power but to the people. Beware of how television and the Internet and poverty and poor schools rob people of the analytical tools then need to take on the principalities and powers. Remember that ultimately, in both literate and in illiterate societies, it is the highly literate who are inordinately represented among the rulers and among the prophetic fringe. As people of the Word, having once received the gift of literacy, we should not turn our back on it now, like most are in the habit of doing.

·      Eighth. Postmodern readings of scripture will always need to consider the church’s traditional interpretations and exhibit a deep respect for authorial intention. But postmodern readings are also a way of looking at texts in new ways, revealing new things, encouraging new prophecies, dreams, and visions. Scripture is full of play, reversal, laughter, irony, as well as darkness, fear, oppression and reversal. From Abraham and Sarah—two old crones who should have been looking for grave plots to buy but had to settle on a baby crib instead; to Moses who was chosen to speak a liberating word on behalf of the Israelites to Pharaoh—even though he had a speech impediment; to the righteousness of Tamar, who played the harlot . . . scripture should not be boxed in by our insistence that it play by our rationalist rules.

·      Ninth. So try on some postmodern readings and question modernism’s notion that it is the only kid on the block.

·      Tenth. And play. The right attitude to interpretation is that interpretation is a playground, not an exam. Have fun, and if you trip and fall, count on someone bigger and wiser to pick you up, dust you off, give you a hug, and send you back for more fun.