Final Thoughts

Final Thoughts

In the spirit of what I believe I have been learning this semester rather than produce a litany of the worship services I attended and books I read I am in this final post attempting to at least begin to address two of the many questions and or topics raised for me in the course of this semester. Perhaps this will be something like Jerry Springer’s “final thoughts.”

Specifically I will engage as if Postmodern/Emergent worship is a new “seeker movement” and whether postmodern worship has a particular character that can be reproduced. These questions were raised and initially addressed by myself or other individuals on this journey during our group gatherings or on the pomology blog (www.pomology.blogspot.com).

First though a word on what I think this is all about, what is postmodern/emergent. There is a lot of confusion and misconceptions about what post modernity is and many authors who have tried to address the issues surrounding it and how those issues affect the church. Anne Marie has done a find job in her annotated bibliography of outlining many of the resources anyone interested in learning more about this topic should engage.

While I will not claim to be an expert in postmodernity or the emergent movement within the church, my reading, conversations and experiences this past semester have given me an insight into what I believe postmodernity isn’t. This is one of the challenges for me when I think about postmodern/emergent worship and community, I can tell you more about what I don’t think it is, than what I do think it is. Ultimately though what I really think is that it is an attempt by a new generation of Christians, who are defined more by a way of thinking than by age, to reclaim something of Christianity for themselves.

Brian McLaren really hits on this in his book A Generous Orthodoxy. Here we see how he rejects the notion that any one tradition has absolutely nailed Christianity in their orthodoxy. For a new generation of thinkers, tired of the absolutes and doctrinal lines of modernity, this new movement allows some theological freedom and room to move away from Christianity as the status quo and instead be the radical message that it, at its heart, has always been.

Is Postmodern/Emergent worship a new “seeker” movement for college educated, under 35, computer and tech savvy, white former protestants?

The quick answer to this question is that despite appearances, certainly not. Many of the worshipping communities I visited certainly did carry this demographic trend and more than a few times I heard older visitors comment that the service was nice and that if it reached “young people” then they were all for it. Their was certainly a sense in these folks mind that this was a good “entry” point for this generation, not unlike the seeker services of their generation.

However, from what I have read, observed and seen in postmodern communities, the concepts underlying postmodern/emergent worship are certainly not intended to be seeker oriented. Although there is certainly an evangelical edge to it, it is evangelism that is sensitive to the many (mis)conceptions about Christians that exist in the postmodern culture. Dan Kimball made this point crystal clear in his presentation at the Quake conference where he should video and quotes from interviews of unchurched people in his community. Evangelism in this context then will have to be more about friendship and community than about monologue, as Brian McLaren makes clear in More ready than you realize: evangelism as dance in the postmodern matrix.

As such, I think churches that think they can start a “postmodern” service as an entry point into the main community worship will be very disappointed. Again and again in my experiences the importance of genuine community to the postmodern/emergent worship experience has been stressed. Also, these communities are not “doing” worship in ways that are setting their members up to be receptive to the big box Christianity of the boomer generation. With more intimate gatherings and an emphasis on the tactile and sensory parts of worship(notably the sacraments) the Christians that are worshiping in the emergent communities are developing their own sense of what worship and Christian community should be.

Whether this community is attractive to people outside of their demographics, I am not so sure yet. And as we discussed in the blog, individuals tend to worship with others who look like them and are relatively of the same social class as well. I don’t think Emergent should be saddled with proving themselves on this issue. However, I do believe that many of the features of emergent worship, especially the participatory and sensory elements, are attractive to individuals outside this demographic. One can see this in a renewed interest in the sacraments in mainline denominations as well as in non-denominational contexts.

What does postmodern worship look like?

Again it is hard to describe what this movement looks like and much easier to describe what it is not. As I stated before, I don’t think and Dan Kimball clearly agrees, that you cannot just produce a postmodern worship service from a can. In fact, as one of the worship experiences at Quake demonstrated clearly for me, just because the people in the band are Gen-Xer’s and the service is billed as postmodern, doesn’t mean it will be anything close to a postmodern experience.

You can’t just light up the incense, serve communion using real bread or have an artist producing a drawing while the service is going on and assume it is going to be postmodern. The mindset must be different and their must be room allowed for genuine questions to be addressed and worship of God take place on multiple levels.

Part of what I would hope postmodern worship would be about is a component of education and outreach to those who have had very little contact with the church. That opportunities would be taken, dropping the assumptions people understand our symbols and our metaphors, for education.

The postmodern/emergent movement to me, as I have seen it in this experience, is taking that time to welcome and explain and also understand that many of our symbols hold very different meaning for others. In this way worship moves away from modernity begins to take on the ethos of postmodernity. From absolutes and assumptions to questions, challenge and recognizes the anxiety within our communities.

Postmodern worship then, I believe, will ultimately be centered on contextual realities and focused on mission. It will never look the same in more than one place. Although this may make certain parts of our tradition that many have cherished (such as the very modern attempt to have a standard hymnal) obsolete, it does not in anyway diminish or neglect the need for sharing of information across geography and cross-generational borders. Different matrices for resource sharing will develop and communities, with faithfulness to the 2,000 year tradition of the church, will follow this tradition by taking the pieces of the liturgical tradition that work in their contexts and expanding on them.

This does exist I believe; many of the communities I visited are such places and the growing number of web connections shows how resource sharing utilizes the technology of our interconnected world. I think it has even existed in different forms throughout time, sometimes in surprising places.

I realized this when I thought of how native religion in Mexico became a part of the new Catholic faith upon the arrival of Roman missionaries. Although certainly not an unequivocally happy story of mission, with much conversion coming at the point of a sword, the people ultimately adopted the new faith while bringing elements of their old faith into Christianity, including the story of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Although some see this as syncretism and relativism, and it certainly can become that, I think those are the power structures of modernity telling us we can figure it all out, rather than relying on God to reveal God to us. Postmodern worship should allow space for this revelation of God, it should not be all monologue, slickly moving from one thing to the next, but engage silence and time for prayer and reflection and listening to the many voices speaking to us about God and how God is at work in their lives.

I could write many more thoughts from this experience but ultimately I think it is time to stop the monologue again and engage in listening. Thank you for your time and effort in this process and for the opportunity to do this study in com