Get Deconverted
De-Everything

What prevents the church from being future-fit is less its installed base of industrial plants and factory-model facilities, but its installed base of obsolete thinking and low-grade, even bad information.

One of our greatest challenges is how to come to terms with what we don’t know, and the too many things we know that aren’t true. Because the church has failed to be both a learning organism and an unlearning organism, our intellectual capital is steadily depreciating. We stand now at the bottom of the information food chain. We live now in the Digital Dark Ages.

As we seek to live and minister in the Information Age, the quantity of information has never been greater, but its quality has become problematic.

What does it profit a postmodern,
if he/she gains an Information Age,
and loses quality information?

Let’s talk about the quality of global connectedness, the quality of inner consciousness, the quality of commitment to Christ, etc.

A herbicide kills because it is a hormone that gives the plant bad information. It tells the plant to grow faster than its capacity to absorb nutrients allows. It literally grows itself to death because its information base is wrong. For the church to do ministry any longer out of the information base of "re" words and "growth" concepts may be toxic to the body of Christ.

"Re-naissance," "Reformation," "Re-volution:" The modern era was structured around "re" words. The doors of the postmodern era are being opened up to new experiences and expressions by "de" words: "decoherent histories," "decolonization," "deinvent."

As a seminary leader, I am living through what some are calling organized religion’s "Second Great Depression," an era of institutional decline and degradation. Establishment religion now looks back nostalgically at a wonderful past and looks forward anxiously at a frightening future. No one need be told about the massive membership losses of the old mainstream Protestants in the past 25 years. The problem is even deeper than the statistics reveal. Just because numbers of churches aren’t withering away does not prove that it is sacred needs rather than secular needs that are being met by these churches. There still remain secular, civil reasons for going to church. In some locations going to church still brings secular rewards.

As a historian of American religion and culture, I am privileged to live in one of the greatest spiritual awakenings in American history, a time some are calling America’s "Fifth Great Awakening."

What irony that in the midst of a spiritual heat wave in the culture, in the church it’s a deep freeze.

Top 10 De-Words for a Postmodern Reformation Church:

Deconstruction

Dematerialization

Decentralization - the difference between creating a church which reaches out to the world, and creating mature believers who team together to reach out to the world

Deconversion

Dealignment

De-Moralization

Democratization

Deprivatization

Dedifferentiation

Demassification

Small inputs/massive consequences:

Set aside 15 minutes a day to read a book. You’ll read two dozen books in a year!

That increases your lifetime reading by 1,000 books; five times what you read in college.

In a world of bits-bites-bots, you can be small and global at the same time. Small things can have big effects.

"Give up your good Christian life and follow Christ." Garrison Keilor

The future promises to even be more democratic – the Net is the most democratizing medium ever invented.

All boundaries of space and time are coming down or blurring thanks to telecommunications and the microchip. The Economist magazine devoted a special issue to The Death of Distance.

The key to ministry in this Next Reformation is intellectual capital in general, and innovation and creativity in particular. In the new world one thing is certain: What works today won’t work tomorrow. The most successful corporations in the world today weren’t even a glint in some guru’s eye 20 years ago. In 5-7 years, 50% of the job definitions that we see in the classified ads won’t exist.

There is no way to "manage" such a world. Over-managed corporations, like over-managed churches mired in old paradigms, are teetering and toppling all over the landscape. The need to prepare for ongoing adaptive change makes innovation and creativity the key survival skills in navigating the chaotic world of the 21^st century.

How embarrassing that the institution that worships the Creator is so often bankrupt of creativity. Where ought the world’s most creative space to be if not the church?

Learn to Triangulate. "Magic Eye" art is the first low-tech vestibule to virtual reality available to mass culture. The methodology for "Magic Eye" seeing is precisely the methodology of doing creative ministry in a postmodern world. If one masters these three steps, a whole new world of meaning and understanding opens before one’s eyes. The choice of ministry is this: deep vision or shallow perception.

Lose Focus (fuzzy is good)

Lose the "M" word.

Lose Control (relax; look through the picture, not at it. Peer into the distance.)

If you pass through these three stages, your perception changes. What appeared at first glance to be a flat, bland surface of random dots suddenly becomes a 3-dimensional universe and ministry. The key to navigating postmodernity’s choppy, crazy waters is not to seek some balance or "safe middle ground,’ but to ride the waves and bridge the opposites, especially where they converge in reconciliation and illumination.

These are the best of times for ministry.

These are the worst of times for ministry.

We must live the two together.

Through the power of the Logos, we can do it.

The Lord’s Prayer: 65 words.

Gettysburg Address: 286 words.

10 Commandments: 179 words.

Now What? Net Notes

1. Visit the Simple Living Journal Web site. If you are not sure how to find it, consider creating an intergenerational activity in your home, congregation, or Sunday school to learn more about the Internet. When you have found the site, pick an article, perhaps Marilyn Mayer’s "What Simple Living Means in Our Homes." What do you think of her six ideas for domestic simplicity? Would you consider preaching a sermon or giving a lecture on her suggestions about Sabbath keeping?

2. Try typing the word "niche" into Yahoo or another Internet search engine. How many hits did you get? Was your church’s or ministry’s web site one of them? Do you think it should be?

3. Take a virtual field trip, including a tour of the White House, The Smithsonian Institution, World Surfari, Odyssey in Egypt, the underwater world of the "Lost in a Forgotten Sea," or the San Francisco Zoo.

http://members.aol.com/RedheadFox/trips.html.

4. For the truly adventurous postmodern tour-ons, how about a virtual field trip with multiple computers? To set up a virtual tour with up to 11 travelers, see the chat program called Virtual Places. When your fellow travelers join the tour, you enter a URL and all the computers on the tour open that Web site. You can download a copy of Virtual Places at

http://www.vplaces.com/index.html.

5. To explore some more "de" words, and what they mean, we can list these online, with definitions, and then have the reader visit some Web sites that illuminate what they mean. Here are the ones I would pick:

Degeneration—Since addictions lap hungrily around societies under siege, postmodern culture ramps quickly downward and is obsessed with downward slopes socially, culturally, and morally. When the extreme cases become the common ones, there is no more dramatic evidence of enormous social, economic, and political dislocations taking place in the culture. It is not just faith in "the American Way of Life"—individualism, optimism, nationalism, idealism,—that is degenerating all around us. Even the American Way of Life itself is degenerating. No wonder Berkeley political sociologist Ken Jowitt calls our era the New World Disorder. The more choices there are to make, the less common ground there is to share.

Deontics—An ethical system in which the logic of moral obligations determines right and wrong, not by ethical guidelines ("Sermon on the Mount") or ethereal guides (the Holy Spirit), but by virtue syllogisms.

Deideology—Disillusionment with ideology of any kind—communism or socialism or materialism or whatever. We live in a time of hyper-reality and lost referents. Events become pseudo-events; fictions become fact; imagination, reality. It is a culture of surfaces and appearances, as exemplified by the Batman genre of movies, with their equally violent good-bad characters and their shadowy world of anarchic playfulness and comic pastiche.

Demystification—Science, like everything else, has undergone a process of stripping away its authority until it is seen as just another artificial or imagined construction of reality. No one can see the world "pure." Leszek Kolakowski says, "Every sentence we utter presupposes the entire history of culture of which the language we use is an aspect …. spoken of, the world is never naked."

Deterritorialization—Expressed most powerfully in Guattari’s notion of the effects of a rupture in cultural theory between signified and signifier, leaving the relationship between the two in a constant state of flux.

Deculturation—French cultural critic Tzvetan Todorov’s phrase to describe the new phenomenon whereby the world is producing a generation that has no stake in the preservation of the society in which it finds itself. Indeed, the pervasive intellectual posture is one of ironical detachment, with irony the "muslin of the mind" through which one strains all of life. After deculturation comes disintegration comes disorder.

Declension—Since the early ’70s, depressions have descended on USAmerica's major social institutions. In higher education, a great depression fell in the ’70s and ’80s, characterized by a shortage of internal resources (research grants, doctoral fellowships), a dearth of jobs (especially chairs for senior faculty and entry-level teaching jobs for graduate students), an erosion of public resources for higher education (with federal funds and state legislative apportionments as a proportion of institutional revenue continuing a downward slide that began in the early ’80s), and a fragmented undergraduate curriculum.

6. Experiment with some online stereograms. You can find some at http://www.magiceye.com/index.htm.

Also see http://www.vision3d.com/ and http://www.mit.edu/people/changkai/stereogram/stereogram0.ht. Perhaps the most fun is at the 3D riDDLE home page, where you solve a puzzle hidden in a stereogram. See http://cvs.anu.edu.au/andy/rid/riddle.html.

7. For an experience of a variety of online scholarly journals, including one in particular on Postmodern Culture, visit http://muse.jhu.edu/muse.html.