Saturday, September 30, 2006

Exploring Postmodernism

I didn't create a link to this piece when it was published because, well, mainly I'm insecure about it. I mean, writing an introductory piece about post modernism... that's just opening a can of worms.

But some of you have been asking about it.

The piece is here, and if that link fails, you can still read it here.

That is all.

4 comments:

  1. That is an interesting (meant literally, not sarcastically) view of postmodernism. Just a couple of comments - not criticisms:

    "Today we are faced with a group of people who simply refuse to support the systems and structures that their more modernist forefathers created to help make disciples. In postmodern thinking, meetings get in the way of relationships, and relationships are the way of making disciples."

    Many of the structures present in 'modern' churches including committees, diaconates and even normal evangelical church meetings seem to have been inherited from a culture that pre-dates modernism.

    "With the modern church there has been a sense that there are secular places and there are sacred places."

    This feeling is inherited from the historical church, which polarises those feeling more strongly - I'd suggest the modern church has tended to reduce this difference and a key feature of postmoderism is a desire to re-establish the mysticism of a secular and sacred partition of reality. Rather than use a building as a symbol of a sacred place, instead the PM would use a ritual or a liturgy, preferably one with a long history, in order to create the impression of sacredness.


    It's a nice article. I'm not sure it's entirely fair to mix the emerging church and postmodernism together, and particularly not without critiquing the postmodern worldview. However, if as I suspect it was designed to help covenant people feel less threatened and more understanding toward PMs and the EC then it should work fine. I can see your heart of love covering a multitude of (other peoples) sins.

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  2. I wonder if its not a critique of how our parents were the church. Maybe esp. in the western world. Many are choosing not to ba a cog in that wheel.

    Or maybe they are learning from their boomer parents who ususally got church the way they wanted it...

    And you know, this would be a much more enjoyable discussion with you two, sitting in some place with a pint, talking it over.

    :)

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  3. Sorry, that should say, 'the "format" of church is always, to some degree, about how I want it'

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  4. Hmmmm...pint. No kidding.

    You have a point there: church is always, to some degree, about how I want it. Our parents didn't have a neutral, objective framework for church that was "how it should be". Neither did their parents, and so on. Neither do we.

    Church always has an element of us in it, doesn't it? Good point, Randall.

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