Get Morphed
The Multiverse

Everything and everyone is in movement, and everything and everyone in movement is morphing.

The Barna Research Group estimates that 9% of all Americans are intimately involved with more than one local church on a regular basis. Another 30% are less regularly involved with multiple churches. That’s one example of religious morphing.

But morphing has many non-religious forms as well: economic, political, biological, social, literary, even body morphing.

If we could shrink the Earth’s population to a village of 100 people, it would look like this:

57 Asians, 21 Europeans, 14 North and South Americans, and 8 Africans
70 would be non-white
70 would be non-Christian
70 would be unable to read
50 would suffer from malnutrition
80 would live in substandard housing
1 would have a college education
50% of the entire world wealth would in the hands of 6 people
All 6 people would be citizens of the US

The world is becoming a single place. It is inherent in the medium of cyberspace to break down barriers. Postmodern children are playing in cyber-neighborhoods and forming friendships which have nothing to do with ethnography or ethnicity. Their world is global, interconnected, 24-7-365, with new concepts of space and time and neighborhood. The children of cyberspace are pioneering a global youth culture that blurs racial boundaries, a blurring that Benetton, Nike, Calvin Klein, and others are exploiting as an exchange of commerce.

In may ways, the armed services (which are based on rank not race) are doing better than the church in pioneering a multiracial society.

The distinctions and variables of the future are less political, ideological, or even racial; they are cultural -- issues of language, religion, customs, history.

Boundaries are both collapsing and expanding at the same time. Our connections are to multiple places: shrinking to tribal locales and expanding to planetary boundaries. As the funeral of Princess Diana make clear to everyone, for the first time in human history, people are having global experiences. We are living in the whole world. But the more we know the same things and share the same experiences at the same moment, the more we experience them differently according to our particularized customs and circumstances.

God is the creator of the cosmos, the ruler of the universe. Yet God calls you by name, knows the numbers of hairs on your head, and feels the pain of every bird that falls.

The motto "Think Globally, Act Locally" must become "Think Globally and Locally, Act Globally and Locally."

If the church cannot come to terms with the profound changes wrought by globalization and intercultural contact of a degree unknown in all of history, then what right do we have to claim that word "church?" Isn’t the story of Pentecost (Acts 2:1-12) not the rolling back of multiplicity but the ability of singularity to emerge out of multiplicity, and the ability of any and all human languages to communicate the divine?

"God likes a lot of things I don’t."

Don’t do normal: It is getting harder and harder to slot people into easy categories. One of the worst insults you can hurl at postmoderns is to accuse them of being "normal." Postmoderns don’t "do normal." They "do ab-normal." They "do morph." Postmodern culture has declared war on bland and normal. Postmoderns want to be ad-normal. Why else are our foods showing higher spice levels?

This is one of the greatest problems the church -- "the bland leading the bland" -- is facing. Too many sermons fall easily into the broad brackets of the nauseatingly normal.

"Diversity without unity makes about as much sense as dishing up flour, sugar, water, eggs, shortening, and baking-powder on a plate and calling it a cake." C.
William Pollard

God must love diversity. God made an infinite variety of it. C.S. Lewis once said the one prayer God does not answer is "encore." God does not like copies.

Now What? Net Notes

1. For a sampling of world-beat music, visit http://www.globalmusic.com/ and listen for yourself.

2. Pull up the cover of the special Fall 1993 issue of Time magazine.

3. ColorTool is a software program tracking color associations in 32 cultures. The e-mail address of its creator, Surya Vanka, is s-vanka1@uiuc.edu.

4. See if you can find Age, Gender, or Race on the Internet.

5. The Aryan Nation, based in Hayden Lake, Idaho, contends that it is committed to "the ongoing work of Jesus the Christ regathering His people, calling His people to a state … to bring in His kingdom." Visit the Aryan Nations Web site at http://www.nidlink.com/~aryanvic/ and discuss your findings. How would you witness to a member of this group?

6. Consult the Phonological Atlas of North America at http://www.ling.upenn.edu/phono_atlas/home.html.

What are some ethnic differences in pronunciation that are peculiar to your area? Should these be preserved, or would their loss not really diminish anything?

7. Compare the 1990 and 2000 census forms and the options for race classification. In 1990 there were five choices; in 2000 there will be 64 possible racial combinations. The Office of Management and Budget’s Revision to the Standards for the Classification of Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity report is available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/WH/EOP/OMB/html/fedreg/Ombdir15.html.

For more information on the new system, see the Census Bureau’s official Web site at http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/race.html.

8. Pick your favorite Bible verse, then choose one of these languages: Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, French, German. Now contact http://babelfish.altavista.digital.com. How long did it take to translate your favorite Bible verse into the language of your choice?

9. To render your English more perfect, you can find help with some online English experts:

"The Grammar Doctor" at http://www.one.net/~sparks25/gdoctor.html
"The Grammar Queen" at http://www.grammarqueen.com
"The Grammar Lady" at http://www.grammarlady.com

10. For building bridges across racial, cultural, and religious divides, see htttp://www.oudc.org, which brings together Jewish and African-American high school students for intensives and trips.