Nobody will read this, I know. But a writer writes so here goes.
So much has happened since last a post was posted here. I’m now widowed and retired (independently wealthy, not bad for a lowly pastor). I served and then was sacked after a short stint at Christianity Today as Editor-in-Chief (it proved to be a poor fit), and have just completed as short a stint as an interim minister at a local UCC church, completing something of a circle having grown up in a small local UCC church in the south (the UCC being a reason CT was a poor fit).
I’m enjoying listing to the Emerged podcast produced by friends recounting the salad days of 1990s youth ministry and our introduction to postmodernity and its effects on evangelical theology. Teaching at Gordon-Conwell at the time, I remember leading a class on inductive Bible study, using the old InterVarsity formula of approaching a text: what does it say, what does it mean, what does it meant to me? The postmodern critique on any objective approach to a text led me to add the question: who am I? to the mix, the implication being that our own peculiar perspectives matter even at the most basic level. What a text says is affected by what we know, our experience and even what we feel in the moment. (Less true in areas where replication repudiates bias, but the scientific method doesn't apply to Biblical interpretation.)
Anyway, changes in attitude and approach changed my approach to ministry in Boston, and my burgeoning congregation of hipsters found their Jesus in a myriad of ways, all mostly divergent from the nineteenth century ways our church had operated since its nineteenth century founding. (One of my favorite memories is from the old pastor who hired me, who, upon his own retirement, remarked how he was most proud of the fact that “nothing changed” during his tenure—though in fact plenty had).
But then I decided on a winter whim to log into that church for a worship service (one thing you couldn't do even in the twentieth century) only to find that the young pastor there now sounds exactly like that old pastor (rest his soul). All we thought to be so radical and cutting edge turned out to possess the power of a butter knife.
Not many of the emergent dudes go to church anymore. Like our young charges, once you’ve tasted the Promised Land, nothing really compares. Besides, if everything is mostly particular and personal anyway, and spirituality is primarily about self-betterment (as evangelicalism implicitly teaches), then why not the DIY app approach—nature beats a church sanctuary (or warehouse), the music is better with airpods and you definitely don’t need a congregation to experience community (as Trump has proven).
As the grief counselors teach, life goes forward and whatever God is up to will happen in God’s time. In the meantime, I’m mostly cooking and housekeeping for my kid, my partner and her kids, letting the days troubles be sufficient for the day and still hoping for That Day when all things are made new and make sense.
