A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [6]
But on the future side of the transition, the old modern paradigm, with its absolute scientific laws, consumerist individualism, and rational certainty, was giving way to a new postmodern paradigm of pluralism, relativism, globalism, and uncertainty—or at least a different kind of certainty, at its best more akin to humble confidence. Modern Protestantism in both its liberal and conservative forms was being lost in transition and lost in translation. Both forms of modernist Christianity seemed equally clueless in understanding the nonmodern and postmodern people outside their stained-glass windows. Roman Catholicism found itself in a situation remarkably similar to Protestantism, having seized two opportunities to disembed from its medieval paradigm and reboot itself as a more modern religion, first through the Council of Trent and then in Vatican II. Just like their Protestant cousins, Catholics made this adjustment in a bipolar way, splitting themselves into left/ liberal and right/conservative parties, both sides increasingly reacting to one another and losing touch with the changing world outside their religiously gated community.
This modern-to-postmodern transition, this colonial-to-postcolonial cultural shift, was a major obstacle in the path of my spiritually seeking friends, and it had become my own struggle. Meanwhile, unbeknown to me, it was also becoming a struggle shared by millions of lifelong Christians around the world, many of whom were drifting away from church and the faith. When I began writing that first book, I didn’t know a single author or pastor who saw what I was seeing. But during the writing process, I began to find a few (notably Sally Morgenthaler, Brian Walsh, Stan Grenz, and Leonard Sweet).5 When the book was published, people started coming out of the woodwork, saying, “I thought I was the only one who had these questions. I’m not alone after all.”
I discovered that many new networks were forming to grapple with the same kinds of questions I had felt so alone in asking—groups like the Younger Leader Networks (which later became Emergent Village), theooze.com (created by spiritual entrepreneur Spencer Burke and friends), the Center for Action and Contemplation, and Gospel and Our Culture Network in the United States, the Alternative Worship networks in the United Kingdom, Evangile et Culture in France, and La Red del Camino in Latin America.6
In spite of our diverse backgrounds, we all agreed: something isn’t working in the way we’re doing Christianity anymore. And although we didn’t know exactly what to do about it, we knew that we needed to keep talking and searching together—through the Internet, conferences and retreats, books, and networks. So our quest for a new kind of Christianity had begun.
Meanwhile, groups like the Lily Foundation and the Barna Group were sponsoring street-level statistical research on church life.7 Study after study confirmed our shared intuition that something was seriously wrong and needed to be addressed. In mainline Protestant churches, numerical decline had been well documented since the 1960s. Not only were historic Protestant denominations shrinking numerically, but the remaining churchgoers were wrinkling. The average age rose as young people dropped out after high school or college. Episcopalians, for example, were losing the equivalent of a diocese per year, and the average age had crept up to sixty-two—almost twice the age of the average American (thirty-two). The decline and aging of Roman Catholic churchgoers were masked to a degree by immigration, but without immigrants the news was similarly alarming. “Protestant churches say they have no young adults between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five,” one Catholic sociologist told me. “The truth is, we Catholics have largely lost the generations between eighteen and fifty-five.”
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