Comments on: Velvet Modernism

by: pentamom

Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

I clicked on the Emergent Church link, and I couldn’t get past the breathless, eager tone on the front page.

“Look at this stuff! It falls out of the sky! It lies around in puddles, and you can like, DRINK IT, man! And wash in it! And like, EVERYTHING!”

That’s what it reminds me of — like a teenager who thinks he’s the first person ever to discover the importance of dihydrogen oxide.

Chill out guys, and you might find out that the people who’ve been knowing Jesus for 30 years in the Baptipiscopoterian church down the street just MIGHT have something worth listening to. Maybe not everything, but something.

by: pentamom

Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Oh, and BTW, they remind me strongly of myself 20 years ago.

by: Tim Berglund

Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

And there’s little shame in having been like that as a high school senior. No, wait, I mean a ten-year-old girl! Yeah, sorry: ten-year-old.

And your breathless discovery of water made me laugh out loud, literally. (LOLL?)

by: pentamom

Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Very swave and deboner Tim, but I was in college then.

by: Rusty Lopez

Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Good analysis Tim. I’ve been attempting to say much of the same thing in my posts on the Po-Mo Em-church fad. What is especially troubling is their apparent rejection of rationality in favor of emotionalism. A movement based primarily on feelings will soon find itself on shaky ground.

by: PSan

Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Hmm. You’ve got a point when it comes to the faddishness of the PoMo movement. But, hey, let’s not be PoMophobic either.
As you acknowledge at the beginning of your blog, they’ve got a point. There were excesses of modernism that needed to be exorcised. But you don’t go beyond the rejection of past errors. That’s not the only point that PoMo folks make. Their bigger point is that there are, in fact, real changes that have taken place in the last 40 years. We do, in fact, live in a different world.
What exactly that world WILL look like is yet to be known. One thing we do know is that it will have some similarities and some differences with what went before. To say “Let’s not get swept up in the fad” may sound quite grown-up, but is it really?
If cars replace buggies, we don’t embrace carism. If TVs replace radios, we don’t embrace TVism. If CDs replace LPs, we don’t embrace CDism. We don’t embrace these things and determine our lives by them, but we do live in a world filled with them and therefore have to deal with them and they way of life and thinking that comes with them.
That is what I think those in the em-church movement are trying to get us to realize.

by: Adeodatus

Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Oh, no, Psan. From the sites I’ve waded through and the books I’ve read, those who grasp the title Postmodern Christian are embracing the philosophical underpinings of that system, not just trying to point out the obvious cracks in the walls of the house that Modernism built (because if you look carefully at the cornerstone of that house, it really wasn’t crafted by Modernists anyway. Neo-fundamentalism Evangelicals, perhaps). Cdism, Starbucksim, TVism - those are all welcome planks in the E-church culture.

by: Mark Byron

Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Who among all my fellow disowners of modernism thinks the cultural changes in the past 30 years have been of sufficient magnitude to warrant a change in traditional church worship services–no really, pick anything in the last 30 years from Episcopalianism to the Vineyard–to this? Anyone? Anyone see the proportionality there?
[tumbleweed blows across stage, sound of crickets]

Sorry to break the deafening silence, but I do. There have been a lot of cultural changes in my lifetime, and those changes have impacted the church.

For better or worse, those of us who are under 50 or so grew up in an egalitarian milieu that is less formal, less hierarchical and less tied to traditions than what we saw in the middle of the 20th century. While some may like traditional services, a lot of people in this new milieu will appreciate a church that is more informal and takes the idea of the priesthood of all believers seriously. Business is less formal, less hierarchical and more group-oriented; many churches have followed suit.

by: pentamom

Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Less formal, more group-oriented, less traditional — all true.

But two questions are in play: does the worship of the church lead and teach, or follow and learn from, the culture?

Second, even if you grant that the church follows and learns from, which I don’t for a second, how do you get to this: http://www.graceway.org.nz/ which was what Tim was referring to, without minimizing the message of the gospel, which I couldn’t find on that site? (It might be there, but if it’s not front and center, I think I can at elast be forgiven for being wrong, if I’m wrong to assume that the salvation of the hopeless from sin and death is not considered primary to the gospel.)

Third question: does this speak to people who still think concretely, in logical fashion, in traditional categories and are put off by dressing up the ancient faith in pagan clothes, or do they just not matter?

by: Scott Cattanach

Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Why pick on http://www.graceway.org.nz as the one and only example ‘pomo’? I can find a traditional church you’d object to just as much if I thought the effort worth the google-time.