Also the sad thing is that I can’t move across the subscribers from this site, so if you have subscribed here you have to subscribe again on the new site which is quite easy, just click on the sidebar on the right. Often bloggers give away books or gifts to people for subscribing on new site when they move blogs. Instead of giving away books, I am going to humiliate myself for your amusement by posting a photo that I have been trying to hide from the world for years, It is of me in Venice aged sixteen and trying to look like Morrissey from the Smiths, your laughter at my expense will be your reward. If we get to 200 subscribers moving from this site the pic will go up.

Ok time to move across, there is a new article there provocatively entitled ‘Is Religion the New sex?’ for you to read, plus an amazing picture of me sitting at a collapsable table drinking water from three cups at once, it will change your life! Come across here 

The Christian faith at different times during its history has had to confront differing concepts of individuality, each of which deeply shapes how we do ministry and which presents the Church with unique challenges. The Church of the early medieval period ministered in a culture with a very different understanding of self. Our modern day sense of radical individuality would have seemed strange to medieval individuals. The early medieval individual saw themselves as part of a great chain of being.

Europe was Christianized not soul by soul, but rather by decree as rulers declared their kingdom’s Christian. This sounds unusual to us, but not so to a culture with a weak idea of personal freedom and individuality. The entire shape, structure and apparatus of the medieval Church was built around this collective idea of culture and faith.

Of course this view was sharply challenged and changed by one Martin Luther as he stood in front of Emperor Charles 5th at the Diet of Worms. Luther made a stand for his right to read and interpret the Bible under his own conscience. Luther did not just begin a new chapter in the history of the Western Church by birthing protestantism, Mark Noll notes in his book Turning Points that,

Luther also intimated a whole new sense of the self against…the settled wisdom of the ages.

The individuality that we live out in the West was born. This new understanding of the self would have a gigantic effect upon the Church in the coming centuries. Secularism would twist and restrict this understanding of individual faith, pushing it into the personal and the private realm. The tendency of modern life to separate our lives into compartments of work, play, family and so on, combined with a flood of information and pressures to self create has given birth what Kenneth Gergen has labelled the saturated self, a mosaic form of being human.

Thus while the medieval church faced the challenge of doing ministry in a culture which held a collectivist view of the self, and the late medieval to early modern Church was confronted with a culture which understood the self through a prism of radical individuality, the Church is now challenged with an emerging understanding of the self which is fragmented, diluted, and ethically contradictory. This form of the self, like multiple internet avatars, sees the individual spilt into multiple selves.

The key is for us to be proactive, to respond to this challenge by calling the citizens of the West back to an integrated, whole and holy understanding of what it is to be human. If we fail to do this, we will be shaped by this new understanding of the self, in which the individual is split into multiple selves. Those who go by the name Christian will be parts atheist, parts religious and parts pagan; and new reality will dawn where the Church will simply provide religious muzak for a secular culture. Instead we must live out a reality in which the gospel touches every part of our lives.

Gen Y/Millenials are now officially old. Well maybe not old, but old enough to no longer be the new kids on the block. Definitions of when Gen Y/Millenials were born vary widely, but sometime around 1980 seems to be the general consensus. Which means that most members of the generational cohort have turned thirty or are in their mid to late twenties. Many Gen Y’s tell me that they do not feel ‘grown up’ but the raw data of their lived years tells a different story. Despite our culture having a liquid idea of maturity, Gen Y’s are well into adulthood.

This ageing of Gen Y changes everything. Whilst society has critiqued the perceived shallowness of Gen Y, it also has placed huge expectations upon them. Just as Gen Xrs and Baby Boomers were feted as generations who were going to shake up the status quo. Gen Y’s have also been told that they will change the world in radical ways, that they will reshape government, social policy, organisations and the Church. They have been told that they are gifted, special and connected and indeed many of them are. But such promises actually tell us more about our society than they necessarily tell us about Generation Y.

Despite our cultures supposed postmodern outerwear, we still hold to the myth of progress. Thus we invest huge amounts of hope in the young. We expose our Greek roots here, our fear of ageing, our obsession with physical perfection, are all rooted in the Hellenic idea that youth will save us. Rousseau reinvigorated this idea during the enlightenment, it is still just as strong today. We fear youth but we also want them to save us, to make a better go of the world than we did.

So what does this mean? Well I am sure that as we speak a must read book is being written describing the generation that comes after Y. I have an office bet that in the next year Time magazine will run a cover story on Gen Y’s younger, cooler siblings, which places upon their shoulder the mantle of changing the world. Gen Z will all of a sudden be in the shop window and corporations, churches and NGO’s will be scrambling to understand, motivate and recruit them.

If you are Gen Y, you will suddenly realise that there is a hipper bunch of kids who are ten years younger than you, who think that the bands that you listen too are too commercial or too passe. Kids who don’t have the emerging wrinkles that you have around your eyes. Kids who see the world in different ways than you. Kids who look at you wondering why you are at a summer dance festival at your age.

Then you will look into the mirror and feel an existential gnawing deep inside, as the dawning realisation comes over you that you are no longer young, no longer the centre of attention. But don’t worry, do not fear. This is a sublimely liberating moment.

Despite culture telling you that ageing is a bad thing, the ancient and tested wisdom which oozes from the book of Proverbs tells a different story. The lands that you will soon fully inhabit, filled with responsibility, commitments and the limitations of mortality are the fields in which God truly shapes you into his vessel.

Once you realise that your life mistakes seem to count double after the age of twenty five, you are offered a God given opportunity to replace culturally acquired hubris with biblical humility, you are now ready to be a disciple. Once you realise that you are not so much defined by the things others have done to you but rather now the things that you do to others, you are now ready to be a disciple.

Once you realise that life is not about crafting an all conquering career path, or collating a portfolio of incredible moments, but rather about self denial, loving the unlovable, and living within a web of covenantal relationships, you are ready to be a disciple. Once you realise that you are not going to change the world under your own steam, but that God is interested in changing you in order to change the world, you are ready to be his disciple.

Proverbs 16:31

Dear Twitter,

Ok I will admit it, I did see you saunter into the place. At first I thought you looked like your bimbo sister Facebook. Sure you did have a sleeker style, and did not blab on like her, but I still did not trust you. Pretty soon everyone in the place wanted you, they hung on every 140 character sentence that came out of your mouth. But the more I listened the more I did not like you and your inane tweets. I did not care that you just had a mocha, or if you could not sleep at 4am.

So I settled down with my head in Postman and McLuhan books and decided to ignore you. The more I read the more I became wary of you. So I began to talk about you behind your back, exposing what a vacuous creature you were. You were reducing language, turning conversation into soundbites, infecting ordinary people with the virus of celebrity.

I should have known however, the popular ones always liked to be ignored. So used to being lavished with attention you could not resist my aloofness, you wanted to get your head around why I hated you when the rest of the world loved you.

That is when it began, you started with sweet little nothings, a few lovely tweets about my books, some kind words about my speaking. Then you really turned on the charm and started sending more and more people towards my blog. Soon you became my blogs biggest advocate.

Despite your advances however I still resisted, others around me who had held out against your cyber magnetism gave in, but I stayed strong.

I steeled myself on the other side of the room, but more and more I found myself glancing at you. After all I have had a thing going with your sister facebook for sometime. Why her and not you?

Maybe I had gotten you wrong? Maybe you could be a force for good? Maybe you could help me get my message out there? Maybe you have matured, grown up, gotten beyond the pointless Oprah retweets and mundane musings? Maybe I had to control you and not be controlled you. Maybe I had to stop using the word maybe?

So ok I am going to finally let you take me out for a coffee, just as friends. No funny business ok?

Follow the possible trainwreck here @sayersmark

Richard Sennett notes in his book the Fall of Public Man that as our culture secularised, instead of looking for meaning in the transcendent realm, we looked to the immanent and the immediate. Relationships became one the main arenas to which we looked for a sense of purpose. In contemporary culture the world of relationships, of sex, friendship, family, and marriage must now provide the solace and transcendence that God and religion did in the past. Sennett writes

‘When the relations cannot bear these burdens, we conclude there is something wrong with the relationship, rather than with the unspoken expectations.’

This is one of the factors behind the contemporary high divorce rate. A spouse must be intimate best friend, provide the emotional support of a therapist, be a supplier of constant sexual fulfilment, posses the economic security of a banker, and the moral guidance of a priest, whilst allowing enough relational distance so as not to impinge on their lovers personal autonomy.

As I read Sennett I began to wonder if we had done the same thing to the Church. Do we now attend Church with unrealistic expectations? Today there is a set of expectations that float around in which Church is meant to be mind blowing, to offer us incredible worship, life changing preaching, transforming community, intimate relationships, and awe inspiring opportunities for service. Ministers and Pastors feel this pressure, and increasingly their time is taken shaping Churches which promise us the world if we only will attend. This dynamic does not fulfil the great commission to make disciples, instead it only creates fickle consumers of religious goods and services and insecure, anxious and exhausted Pastors.

As I pondered all of this, I could not but help think of that classic old seventies feminist horror flick The Stepford Wives (don’t even bother with the remake) in which a small town society of men turn their wives into robotic objects of perfection. The women are shaped to become nothing but conduits for their husbands desires and wants, are eventually fully objectified, no longer human but robotic. Their is no chance of true relationship only a master slave dynamic.

Could we have done the same to Church? Have we turned the Bride of Christ into a Stepford Wife? Have we objectified Church? Do we now look to Churches as tools to aid us in our quest for therapeutic self actualisation rather than to Christ himself for Salvation?

To contemporary sensibilities it seems ludicrous, but in the past people attended Church through a sense of duty and responsibility. A decision to attend Church was not made with individual wants, desires and needs in mind. Rather Church attendance was part of the fabric of spiritual discipline. Worship was God focused, not individual focused. Maybe we need to get back to an understanding of Church which bluntly is not about us. Maybe we need to understand that the Bride is not there to make our individual dreams come true, but to teach us patience and self discipline.

The book of Acts does not present us with a pristine image of the Church, only a few chapters after the triumph of Pentecost we are present with the treachery of Ananias and Sapphira. Paul’s letters illuminate a Church which struggles with sin, with disputes and false teachers. The New Testament Church is imperfect because it is filled with imperfect people. But this is precisely where grace enters the picture, the Bride although imperfect is chosen through grace to enter into covenant with Christ who is perfect.

We need Christ’s grace, but we also need to show grace to our friends, our spouses, our children and our families. We must relieve them of the unrealistic expectations that we place upon them to be the sole conduits of meaning in our lives. I think that we also must offer the Church grace, removing the unrealistic expectations that we have placed upon on her. Instead of approaching her expecting to be satiated, stimulated and entertained, we must approach as servants and worshippers. Instead we must look to Him him offers perfect grace, then maybe the Church will have a real chance as she is allowed to be what God intended her to be.

Scripture Union, Fusion, Bendigo Baptist Church, Praxis, Anglican Diocese of Bendigo and Cornerstone are bringing me up to lovely Bendigo for a day of training on Saturday, July 30 · 9:30am - 3:30pm. You can register on the facebook event page or at the praxis website.  See you there.

Sunday just past I preached on the Shock of the Christ.

The world has always struggled with Jesus. Sure it likes guru Jesus, revolutionary Jesus, and wise Jesus; but it has little stomach for God entering in to the world and incarnating amongst us.

I showed the above video (what from 5.00 in) in which Oprah Winfrey tried to convince her viewing audience that they cannot understand Jesus as god who came to earth to die for our sins. Instead the worlds most powerful woman insisted that we see Jesus as someone who embodied what it is to be human, who taught us ‘christ consciousness’. As Oprah spoke you could almost feel her trying to turn Jesus in to simply an intellectual concept to aid us in our quest to be happy modern consumers. When Jesus is simply a concept, when we perceive him as ‘christ consciousness’, we stay in control. We can mold the idea to suit our styles and lifestyle.

However when we open the Bible and experience the shock of the incarnated God, we struggle to twist Christ to suit our agenda. Instead we are confronted with a God who reduced himself to come and serve, to suffer how we suffer, to be tempted as we are tempted, to walk in our shoes. We follow a God who is holy and just but who also understands our brokenness, our rejection, and our hurt. He is not a God who is distant, He is a God whose path to glory followed the road of suffering. This is the shock of the Christ.

For the last ten to fifteen years a great fallacy has clouded debate around the future of the Church in the West. The fallacy goes something like this. At some stage (depending on who you talk to), but most likely in the nineteen nineties the post modern era began. All of a sudden everything changed and a line was drawn in history. On one side were the postmodernists and on the other the modernists. The modernists were enslaved to a highly cerebral, hegemonic view of the world. They were obsessed with progress and holding the world at a cold calculated distance. They were beholden to technology, and if they were religious were either dogmatic fundamentalists or materialist liberals. They hated anything non-Western or from the past, and lived in Le Corbusier designed buildings where they almost suffocated on their own sense of hubris.

Then there was the postmodernists and apparently they were coming so we had to be ready, or had to become postmodern ourselves. The young were postmodern and the future was postmodern. The postmodernists were everything that the modernists were not, they loved spirituality instead of religion, were embracing of the non-West, the past, and anything experiential. They had piercings and hated objective truth. The implications were clear, soon Western culture would morph into a giant rave where we would find ourselves dancing to tribal techno with an dreadlocked Austrian backpacker/Yoga practitioner named Helga.

So the call was clarion, the future was postmodern and we had no choice but to enter into its cleansing baptismal waters which would rid us of any traces of sinful modernism, expunge our enlightenment values, and heal us of the illness of being from the West. Once transformed and having shed our modernist selves we now could begin the task of shaping a postmodern faith, postmodern churches (whoops sorry Christ centred organic communities) and a most importantly a postmodern (whoops postcolonial) theology.

So like Pol Pot declaring year Zero, a new era begun. Anyone offering any opinion from 1650-1990 was suspect, any book published during that time was in danger of carrying the dreaded virus of modernism. J.L Packer? No! Modernist ! Julian of Norwich? Amazing! Ancient Future! How did we build a faith or a church for postmodern times? Well we were not sure, but if postmodernism was a rebellion against modernism then we needed to make sure that it looked nothing like modernism. The anti-movement was launched.

The lines were now drawn, on one side were the modernists, they were into objective truth, long dogmatic sermons, biblical proof texting, management structures, order and the mechanical. On the other side of the trench were the postmodernists, they were  into poetry, organic structures, chaos, doubt and mystery. The narrative that we bought told us that eventually because we were in postmodern times, that the modernists would lose out and the postmoderns eventually would win as the world realised the sea change that had taken place. All of sudden Christians started referring themselves as postmodern even though technically speaking this made little sense.

But then as the nineties ended and real life knocked us of our skateboard. The giant rave never eventuated (Helga went back to Austria to raise her kids and work in a bank), but the postmoderns vs modernists narrative has stayed. It feeds into the current Christian culture war, it is the mythology that fuels the current Bell vs Piper, emergent vs new reformed cyber melees.

The problem was that things got messy when we saw postmodernism as an epoch. Yes there was and is a philosophical movement known as postmodernism, propagated predominately by French intellectuals, and that was born out of the frustration of neo-marxists at the failed attempts at social revolution during the student riots of May 1968. Although now passe in French intellectual circles, the movement still holds sway predominatly within academic circles around the world. But like a very large man trying to fit into an XS t-shirt, postmodernism was stretched beyond its limits. The label was attached to everything. Christians particularly used it to describe the era we were living in. Postmodernism was a philosophical movement never an epoch. A whole host of confusions emerge when we examine some of the cultural trends of our day that have been described as postmodern.

For example we are told that postmodernism is about an embrace of the non-western, but as we look at history, Western people have been obsessed with the non-West for centuries. For the last three hundred years Western consumers have had a hunger for all things non Western from Japanese woodcuts to Indian tea to Arabesque architecture. We were told that modernism only wanted the future not the past, thus postmodernists appreciated the past. Well what about Neo-Classicism and Gothic Revival? What about postmodernity being about spirituality? Well a case can be made that the nineteenth century showed a greater appetite for the occult, or for ‘spirituality’ than our own.

Look at a figure like the early nineteenth century poet Percey Shelley, a vegetarian atheist committed to non violence, off his dial on drugs, living in a share house of young adults, and his feminist wife Mary Shelley who wrote Frankenstein a dystopic science fiction work which critiques science and progress. The Shelley’s were part of a movement called Romanticism, a movement which embraced nature, the mysterious, the poetic, experience, the past, the sublime, the exotic. All traits which we atttach to postmodernism.

In fact the traits that we use to describe the so called postmodern era could be found in a whole range of movements and individuals who have lived or existed over the last few centuries from the pre-raphalties, to the arts and crafts movement, to the dadaists, to the surrealists, the impressionists, to Nietzsche, to Picasso, to Joyce, to Kierkegaard, to Burroughs and so on.

A much better way of understanding our culture comes from noting that what we are observing in the current wars within contemporary Christianity and the broader contemporary culture is more a struggle between a modernism A and a modernism B. Modernity is better understood not as a clearly defined monolithic structure but rather as an ongoing conversation. There are claims and counter claims within modernity. A case will be struck for progress, a counter claim will raised and the conversation will continue. Both sides of the current culture wars express different shades of modernity. Realising this reality forces us to get off our cultural high horses.

Building a Church or a faith, or a ‘new kind of Christianity’ for postmodern times was always problematic when you consider that no one could agree what the term even really meant. It was impossible to build a movement or a philosophy upon an anti-philosophy. The sooner we realise that we are not in postmodern times the better. Then we can really get on with the task of being the people of God in the West.