Postmodern Super Friends
POSTMODERN SUPER FRIENDS
A Discussion Board has gone up for "The next new thing...bored with being "postmod"?. My half-finished blog entry was posted there by Charlie Wear - thanks Charlie. I should really finish what I was going to say. So let me respond to David Hopkin's excellent article at Next-Wave in which he dares to challenge Young Leaders/Emergent, the Annointed Ones, God chosen bearers of postmodern answers, the group he refers to as "Super Friends".
1. It gives me a buzz to have someone from the church write something with attitude. Most Christian articles are too wussy to stomach. In the name of not offending anyone, their articles get NedFlanderized beyond any degree of interest or tension or offence. Not so for Dave's article. It sparked me to think and write again.
2. It is healthy for Christians to blow torch each other. Iron sharpens iron. After the fire, what is eternal remains and the flammables disappear. David's blow-torch, his article, is fired in a good spirit. You can tell by the tone. I wish there was more of this. If Next-Wave is going to publish more thoughts that have bollocks, then I will have to visit the site more often.
3. The Young Leaders group (now Emergent ) is NOT offended. I suggested that Brad Cecil might be upset. Not the case. Brad wrote yesterday and said
"I am not upset by the editorial at all - I think his words "But your job is to teach me, and help me carry your dreams. We don't need seminaries. We need mentors. You are those mentors." rings true with me - I want to mentor these young bright thought leaders. Brad"
My apologies to Next-Wave if I stirred things up prematurely.
4. Are people bored with "postmod"? Yes, but they have been bored for a really long time. The world had this discussion light years ago. The arts world even longer. The church was slow to pick it up and maybe they are slow to drop it. On the conference circuit, we also got bored with it. One conference I did with Doug Pagitt, we determined to make it through the whole seminar without saying the "post" word. And I think we suceeded.
Having said that, you are probably asking why I am coming out of retirement to write a series on Postmodernity.
This is why. Most of my work is outside USA and the converstation is hitting the churches around the world. They are crying out for teaching in this area and I am giving it to them. Also, there are some churches that are still catching up and want to jump into the conversation. Also, there is a lack of non-copyright, brief summaries and syntheses of postmodernity and its relation to ministry. I am writing them and they are getting translated into many languages and will appear on web sites around the world over the next few months.
5. The Natives. They have been around for a long time. I have been mentoring them. Their churches do not look like churches and they do not attend Christian conferences like the ones we put on. Dave is correct - these ideas are not foreign to them. They do not talk about postmodernism (nor do I when I am with them) but postmodernity is a present reality to them. Sometimes I would invited one or two to our conferences and they thought they were really lame. But what is helpful for them is to think in the modern mind and find new concepts and vocab so that they can explain what they are doing to church people.
6. If that was a criticism of Young Leaders (and Dave says it was more of a "challenge") then it was lame beyond healing. There is much to criticise us about but Dave didnt go there. The thing that bugged me most was about our conferences is that the conversation stayed in the philosophical and never leaked into ecclesiology. I was waiting for the conversation to turn to church structure but it never did. And it still hasn't, yet. I usually kept quiet about the house churches and churches without worship services that we were starting because I didnt want to introduce yet another foreign concept to church leaders that were struggling to catch on the fact that the worldview has radically shifted. But my time will come. Soon.
Enough on this. I will pick up on his idea of 'making money on postmodernism' in another blog.
Thanks Dave for your thoughts. Keep on blow torching.
A Discussion Board has gone up for "The next new thing...bored with being "postmod"?. My half-finished blog entry was posted there by Charlie Wear - thanks Charlie. I should really finish what I was going to say. So let me respond to David Hopkin's excellent article at Next-Wave in which he dares to challenge Young Leaders/Emergent, the Annointed Ones, God chosen bearers of postmodern answers, the group he refers to as "Super Friends".
1. It gives me a buzz to have someone from the church write something with attitude. Most Christian articles are too wussy to stomach. In the name of not offending anyone, their articles get NedFlanderized beyond any degree of interest or tension or offence. Not so for Dave's article. It sparked me to think and write again.
2. It is healthy for Christians to blow torch each other. Iron sharpens iron. After the fire, what is eternal remains and the flammables disappear. David's blow-torch, his article, is fired in a good spirit. You can tell by the tone. I wish there was more of this. If Next-Wave is going to publish more thoughts that have bollocks, then I will have to visit the site more often.
3. The Young Leaders group (now Emergent ) is NOT offended. I suggested that Brad Cecil might be upset. Not the case. Brad wrote yesterday and said
"I am not upset by the editorial at all - I think his words "But your job is to teach me, and help me carry your dreams. We don't need seminaries. We need mentors. You are those mentors." rings true with me - I want to mentor these young bright thought leaders. Brad"
My apologies to Next-Wave if I stirred things up prematurely.
4. Are people bored with "postmod"? Yes, but they have been bored for a really long time. The world had this discussion light years ago. The arts world even longer. The church was slow to pick it up and maybe they are slow to drop it. On the conference circuit, we also got bored with it. One conference I did with Doug Pagitt, we determined to make it through the whole seminar without saying the "post" word. And I think we suceeded.
Having said that, you are probably asking why I am coming out of retirement to write a series on Postmodernity.
This is why. Most of my work is outside USA and the converstation is hitting the churches around the world. They are crying out for teaching in this area and I am giving it to them. Also, there are some churches that are still catching up and want to jump into the conversation. Also, there is a lack of non-copyright, brief summaries and syntheses of postmodernity and its relation to ministry. I am writing them and they are getting translated into many languages and will appear on web sites around the world over the next few months.
5. The Natives. They have been around for a long time. I have been mentoring them. Their churches do not look like churches and they do not attend Christian conferences like the ones we put on. Dave is correct - these ideas are not foreign to them. They do not talk about postmodernism (nor do I when I am with them) but postmodernity is a present reality to them. Sometimes I would invited one or two to our conferences and they thought they were really lame. But what is helpful for them is to think in the modern mind and find new concepts and vocab so that they can explain what they are doing to church people.
6. If that was a criticism of Young Leaders (and Dave says it was more of a "challenge") then it was lame beyond healing. There is much to criticise us about but Dave didnt go there. The thing that bugged me most was about our conferences is that the conversation stayed in the philosophical and never leaked into ecclesiology. I was waiting for the conversation to turn to church structure but it never did. And it still hasn't, yet. I usually kept quiet about the house churches and churches without worship services that we were starting because I didnt want to introduce yet another foreign concept to church leaders that were struggling to catch on the fact that the worldview has radically shifted. But my time will come. Soon.
Enough on this. I will pick up on his idea of 'making money on postmodernism' in another blog.
Thanks Dave for your thoughts. Keep on blow torching.
