The "Talent Society" and the Church

I read an interesting article by David Brooks this week.  The gist of the article is that society has changed from being deeply enmeshed communities to loosely organized and affiliated groups of people.  The author's point was that our more settled social structures often stifled "creative and dynamic people," and at the same time allowed disorganized and disadvantaged people to have supportive community relationships.

Today, he argues, we're living in a totally different world, a "Talent Society."  He says that "the fast flexible and diverse networks allow the ambitious and the gifted to surf through amazing possibilities" and to "construct richer and more varied lives," while the disadvantaged are left adrift without the community they need to feel connected and valued in society.

It made me think about what a challenge and an opportunity the church has to rise up in the midst of this cultural context.

It's the challenge that I've faced as I've worked with my Sunday night storying group.  I've known that part of our struggle of getting together regularly and showing up in each other's lives is because the group is made up of all these talented people.  And our culture teaches us the value of developing our individual talents over just about anything else.  So we show up when it works, when it feels good, when it supports our goals of self-improvement.  So our challenge as people of Jesus is to somehow instill the counter-cultural value of living in true community with other people.  Somehow we have to learn and believe and live that it's more important to serve Jesus and to serve his kingdom purpose than to maximize my own potential.   We need to learn and demonstrate that there is value to serving the community above ourselves.  How exactly to do this, to teach this, and to encourage this within the culture is a constant struggle for me.

But this is also an opportunity for the church.  It's an opportunity for the church to provide a place where people who need the community can find it.  It's an opportunity to use its strength as a remaining bastion of institutional existence in a way that serves the community around it.  It's an opportunity even for the talented ones to learn the joy of serving and sacrifice and seeking others' needs and desires above one's own.  Again, what exactly this looks like is the question.

But if we start by asking these questions, and if we acknowledge that we're bumping up against changing cultural values, we can begin to allow the values that Scripture teaches to direct our approach as we have conversations about how to put it all together.

In your face

So there's been some buzz this week about an SNL sketch about Tim Tebow and an exchange he had with Jesus while in the locker room discussing his team's recent six-game winning streak.  I've seen some headlines screaming that Christians are very offended by this sketch.  And I'm sure that some are.

But what if, instead of being defensive about the doctrinal issues, we took this as an opportunity to listen to what people are saying about Christians and Christianity?  What if we take this very clearly characaturized sketch of something that's going on in our world and see what nuggets of truth we might be able to find about how what we say and do looks and feels like to people who don't believe in Jesus?

So Tim is portrayed as a person who's overeager to please Jesus, and as someone who is really over the top in how he talks about his faith.  In fact "in your face" is used to described the way that he prays to Jesus about everything.

So my question is, what is it that SNL is highlighting here, and how does that reflect the feelings and beliefs of many people who have Christians in their lives?  What is it that we are doing that is annoying or frustrating to people?  Is any of that legitimate--does it highlight places where even Jesus would not be pleased?

In the sketch, even Jesus thinks that Tim's worship and prayer is over the top.  But if you look at the stories of Jesus in the New Testament, stories where Peter and Martha declare him to be the Messiah, or the place where the blind man falls on his face to worship Jesus, I don't think you can conclude that Tim's worship and prayer are too far over the top for someone who recognizes who Jesus is and wants to honor him.

But what about the question of the balance between public and private worship?  There are tons of stories that Jesus told about the pharisees vs. regular people--about people who do their acts of worship before God alone vs. those who worship in order to be seen.

And that's really a question of heart, right?  Of intentions.  And looking at other people, we can't know what their purpose is.  We can't really know what Tim is thinking.  Maybe he is really just thankful for the gifts he's been given, and maybe his prayers are all about praying that God will help him to honor Jesus in everything he says and does while the spotlight is on him.  Only God knows his heart.

But we can certainly take this opportunity to question our own motives.  Why do we pray in public before meals?  Why do we talk about church and the Bible?  Why do we share those stories about who Jesus is and what he has done for us?  How do we approach it--from a position of power or a position of humility?  What are we communicating about Jesus, about God, and about ourselves by the way in which we engage in worship?

The power of a chosen identity

I am one of those people who has actively chosen her identity.

In my identity formation years, those years that we typically sort of separate from our parents and decide who we're going to become, I was living in Asia.  More than that, I'd just moved to Asia.  It was my first time living outside my own culture, so I had all those thoughts and feelings and questions that you have when you move to a new culture.  But those questions and thoughts and feelings coincided with the time that I was going to be deciding who I wanted to be.

I remember realizing that I actually had a choice about that.  And that maybe those choices were broader than I'd grown up thinking.  I remember realizing that my home culture valued dark skin (tans), while all my Asian friends thought it was great that I was so fair.  They wanted my skin.  I realized that what we think is beautiful is so much informed by what our culture tells us is beautiful (or by what we don't have).  That made me think that I could choose.  If they wanted to be white, and we wanted to be dark, why couldn't I just be happy with my own skin, my own teeth, my own hair, my own body?  And that made me think about other things.  Like the political system.  I grew up believing that our form of democracy is the best in the world.  It gives the most freedom, etc.  But they don't have the same system where I lived.  And people were generally happy with it.  In fact, most Singaporeans really believe that Singapore is the best place in the world.  (I learned later in a Sociology class that this is called ethnocentrism, and every culture has it).

Anyway, moving overseas when I did really opened up my eyes to see how many things that I believed were based on my culture.  And it kind of gave me permission to question everything.  So I did.  My process of identity formation was to hold up everything I knew and question its value.  Of course, at this time I had to figure out how I was going to measure that.  How was I going to decide what was good and what was bad?  How was I going to decide which things from my original culture I was going to keep and which things I was going to adopt from my new culture?  And because I was a Christian--I already had a relationship with God that was real and personal and becoming ever more so because of how much time I was spending with him (a whole other story...)--I decided to measure things based on how they held up against what I believed the Bible showed about who God is.  God's character, I guess you could say.

So I went through that process.  When I was deciding what I was going to value or how I was going to approach things or what things were going to take my time and energy, I held them up to God's character and to the moral principles that Scripture taught.  And little by little I chose my identity.  I chose it.  I made a rational decision about who I was going to be, where I was going to go, and what was going to be meaningful to me.

If someone now introduced me to a new way of life, a new way of thinking, a new god... I don't think there's any way I would walk away from what I've already chosen.  In all my conversations with my atheist friend, I can appreciate every point that he makes.  I think a lot of them are valid--at least I can understand why and how believing there is no God leads him to make the decisions that he makes.  I can understand how another system, many other systems, can exist that give people a basis for morality and ethics and a philosophical approach to life.  But I have no reason to want to abandon my own.  I have no reason to walk away from my own.  Because I chose it.  I already ascribed value to it.  I have been living according to it now for a good 20 years.  To turn my back on it now would be to lose my identity.  A hard-fought-for, already proven identity.  Why would I do that?

If it's true that Jesus invites us into an identity--or even to our true identity--as created ones, the children of God, loved of God, ambassadors of Christ, then the fact that a person has already chosen a different identity must affect her openness and willingness to consider following Christ.  It's so much bigger for her than for people who don't have an identity yet (like children), whose identities are ascribed to them by others, who don't like the identity they have (like as a "poor" person or a "murderer"), or for those whose identity is not that much different from the identity that Jesus offers. 

What about the identity that Jesus offers is so compelling that it would motivate someone to lay down an identity he has chosen and receive the one that Jesus is offering?

. . . ?

Harold and the Purple Crayon

If you struggle to conceptually understand the different between a modern thinker and a postmodern thinker, this link may help.  It's a video remake of a book that was written over 50 years ago.  It's about a little boy who creates his own reality by drawing what he wants to see and experience.

I don't want to say much more about it because I think to truly see the differences in the ways of thinking, you probably have to experience the book yourself.  But it's as good an example as I've seen of postmodern thinking.  The book itself is available here.

marching to the beat of a different drum

I've talked before about how I believe that doing what I call the works of God helps to authenticate the message of God.  I would count things like taking care of orphans and widows, loving neighbors and enemies, living within a community of people dedicated to loving and serving one another and the world as works of God.  In my own life, I would also see working hard to help the community find justice and protect people from oppression as something that falls right in line with God's character of loving justice, which also serves to authenticate the message of God.

So I haven't been surprised when, as I have conversations about spirituality and my own relationship with God that these are the things that people who are not Christians appreciate about the way I live my life.  I have not been surprised that they sometimes want to communicate a deep respect for those activities and the kind of person that God has made me.  Now they would never put those words around it of course--they usually give me the credit instead of God.  But that always gives me the opportunity to share that it really is God working in me that allows me to do what I do even in the midst of struggle or even when I don't see the results that I would want to.

What's been surprising to me is actually that I'm finding more affirmation and acceptance and even love from people outside the church than I ever did from those inside.  The person I am becoming because of God's transformative power in my life is inherently attractive to many people outside of the church.  They want to spend time with me.  It's kind of shocking, particularly in light of how on the fringes I always felt within a church community.

And the funny thing is that my values and activities and actions don't necessarily match the people's who appreciate who I am.  I am still very much living counter-culturally and marching to the beat of my own drum, as it were.  I suppose the reality is that I'm also living counter-culturally to the culture of the general West Michigan church.  But inside the church that life creates controversy or discomfort.  Outside it appears to be intriguing and somewhat attractive.  I wonder why that is.

The Invention of lying.

Wow.

Haven't seen this movie, but will go rent it soon. Another interesting mirror to the way people perceive God.

Reflections on a culture of noncommitment

One of the biggest challenges for me that I think is driven by our culture is the lack of commitment to anything - institutions or people - that people have.

I canceled another Encounters with Jesus storying group last night because at least half the group couldn't come.  In some ways, that's ok.  I like that we're a small enough group meeting together that it matters who is there.  I like that without you, the group is not the same and we're better off postponing until later.

The reality of our culture is that it's really rare for there to be a group or an institution that people identify enough with to make sacrifices to be a part of it.  I don't think we do it in marriage, because we're basically ready to get divorced when things don't work for us anymore, regardless of the fact that there is something beautiful and important about the family.  I don't think we do it in our jobs - our companies don't have loyalty to us, and we don't have loyalty to them.  We don't have this for our schools - we are only concerned about what they give to us as individuals.

I come from a collectivist culture - that's what it was for me to live in Singapore.  It was diametrically opposed to how we do life here.  In Singapore, the family is much more important than the person.  The nation is way more important than individuals within it.  You make sacrifices so that the group can be what it needs to be.

There are inherent positives and negatives about both cultures, and ultimately neither is probably better.  But one of the struggles I have right now in my context is to build momentum.  I want to the church to be inherently beautiful and engaging and something that's bigger than the individual.  I believe that Jesus calls us to participate in mission and ministry and life that is bigger than our individual needs or desires.  I think that together, if we can be the right kind of community, we can do much more than we do as individuals.

Maybe there's a way to change the approach - maybe we should only get together when everyone can come and maybe we need to change the time from week to week.  I don't know.  What I do know is that setting it up so that group is more important than the individuals in it isn't going to work right now.  Maybe someday, when people are willing to sacrifice for group.  But I don't think that we're there yet, in my particular group.

So, we're still trying to navigate what that looks like for us.  We've got to figure out how to build people into the kind of community that becomes important enough to the individuals that we're willing to sacrifice for it.

On culture and the assimilation of new believers into the church

I've been feeling the need to talk about culture again.  I think I've written about it before, but it's come to the forefront of my mind as I read through the church planting strategy of the denomination that I've affiliated with and as I think about what I'm doing and where I'm going from here.

I find myself outside of the church, sort of.  I'm loosely affiliated with a church planting group, but I'm way more committed to the people I know in the world than I am to a church group.  I think there are a lot of reasons for this, and I'm not sure that they're important.

I'm also a just-for-fun observer and analyzer of cultures.  I moved overseas with my family when I was 13, and I spent a lot of time trying to piece together what was different there and why it was different.  Along the way I found the freedom to adopt the values and beliefs that I want to rather than being stuck with what I grew up in because I could actually see the different cultures and the different options available to me.  I tried to allow the character and person of God to inform my choices about those things, but that was it.  I didn't really feel any particular affinity to the American or the Baptist or the Presbyterian ways of doing things or believing.  So anyway, I still love looking at culture, identifying cultural values, observing conflicts as cultural clashes, etc.

So I've been walking with these people for several years now who have been outside of the church.  When we started hanging out, some of them were hostile toward God.  Most of them were hostile to the church.  I have lived beside them, pursued them, invited them to give to my life and meet some of my needs, and we have developed true and deep friendships.  I have also seen many of them move from hostility toward God and the church to a true openness to God.  I have seen God working and moving, and I have seen several take a defining step into the kingdom of God.

Now I'm struggling with what to do with them.  I mean, I feel a responsibility as a follower of Christ to invest in the people around me at a spiritual level.  I guess you could say that I have a passion to pastor people and to encourage people to grow in their ability and desire to relate to God.  So at this point, there's a question... many of my friends are now choosing and trying to follow God.  They want to know him better, they want to follow him, they are beginning to love Jesus.

If I introduce them into a church culture, what's going to happen is that they're going to get caught up in adapting to the culture of the church.  They're going to learn (before the Spirit convicts them) of all the things that they're doing that don't conform to the way of Christ, and they're going to start adapting to the culture around them before they've truly internalized or had a chance to figure out what things are really biblical.  Some of them might make the transition well, and within 3 years they'll have left behind all their relationships outside of the church, and like most church members in the area, will have no relationships left with people who don't know Jesus.  Their ability to participate in the mission of God to draw all men and women to himself will then be truncated and will never reach its full potential.  If they make the transition poorly, they'll end up walking away from the church disillusioned.  Right now, those are the only two possibilities I see here on the ground.

So what do I do? 

I just had the chance to speak at a chapel seminary, and afterward, a professor asked me what the church could do for people like me.  And I don't know the answer to that.  I know that I can't be the only Christian in a person's life.  I know that I can't be the evangelist and pastor and theologian and minister.  I know that one of the costs for me of being bivocational and living in the world as a minister is that I have very little time.  And when I'm not working or ministering I'm so exhausted that I don't have the ability to find like-minded individuals or work to fight to get a church behind what I'm doing.  I just can't.  If I have to choose between the church and investing in my friends outside the church, I will choose my friends every time.

What I do know is that I am seeing God work and move among the people I live with each day.  I do know that he desires to see them cared for holistically - not just spiritually.  My question for the church is whether you are read and willing to let go of some of your culture so that there is a place for my friends.  My question is whether you're willing to set people like me free to do what we're doing, but still somehow being committed to supporting us.  We need the church.  Desperately.

What are we going to do? 

Gospel within culture

My family moved overseas when I was 13 years old.  It's kind of an awkward time to move to another country.  It's the time in our culture where we are trying to figure out who we are going to become and what's important to us.  It's the time when we learn how to relate to other people outside of our families.  It's the time when we're trying to form an identity that's separate from our parents.

So, at 13, I picked up and moved to the fine country of Singapore.  It's very different than the United States.  The biggest difference I saw that goes to the core of how we relate to one another is that, in the United States, we are primarily individuals.  In Asia, you are primarily part of a bigger community--you are defined based on your relationship to your family, then the greater community, and then your nation.  When making decisions, the family and the community are given greater care than the individual's desires.  There were other things I noticed--like the fact that all the light switches were upside down, or that communication is much more indirect so that no individual is ever blamed for anything.  So "the glass got broken" rather than "Henry broke the glass."

I was a pretty observant kid, so I spent a lot of time watching how people interacted and trying to figure it out.  Although I didn't find the language to describe the differences in culture until my college sociology class, I definitely noticed.  I remember thinking about their governmental system and realizing that democracy was not the only way to go.  I mean, they had a pretty successful country, and they don't have the same form of government as we do.

It was about that time when I realized a couple of things:  (1) Culture affects everything we see and understand about what is around us; (2) There are good and bad things about every culture; (3) I could actually choose my own values and way of life based on something other than my culture, namely, what I believed was biblical or that flows out of the character of God.

I began to critically evaluate the teen magazines coming from the US and the messages they sent about what I was supposed to care about (clothes, boys, appearance, etc).  I began to think about what I actually wanted my life to look like and the values I wanted to use to measure my choices.  And I chose.  Because of my life experience, I was able to have a much more proactive role in my own personal development than I probably would have if we'd lived in the US all my life.

Those three principles have a huge effect on where I'm at today and why I'm doing and talking about what I am.  There's a whole lot of momentum in the Christian world right now to reject what the modern church sees as the cultural imperfections of the post-modern, post-Christian culture.  There even seems to be the expectation that, for people to truly come to faith in God, they have to leave behind their postmodern culture and go back to a rational, modern way of living and believing.

But every culture has positives and negatives.  There is a concern for social justice and the environment that exists in today's culture that did not exist when I was growing up.  Reading the stories of the Bible, those two things seem to be pretty important to God.  There's also an inherent distrust in material possessions that I'm not sure existed before.  Where we're at now is not all bad.

And what I learned from living overseas is that cultural changes are difficult.  They take a long time.  They go to the core of people's beliefs about life and their own identities.  I think that all culture should be challenged and evaluated in light of the character of God.  But practically speaking, to some extent we have to work within the context that we're in.  And that's really what my heart is.  My heart is to ask the question "how do we reach and communicate the heart of the gospel within today's culture?"  God can change culture - but he's only going to be able to do that as people's hearts who are within that culture are changed and conformed to his image.

Within the month, Second Story, a fictional story about that question will be released by Da[w]bar House Press.  It'll be available on Amazon and hopefully through some local bookstores.  I really want to spark conversation about how we can effectively communicate the gospel to people today, right now, in this culture.  More information about the book is available on my website.

The culture of crime

I sat in court this morning and watched a judge berate a father for spanking his 8-year-old kid with a belt.  The judge said, "I would never, ever consider hitting my child with a belt."  The father said back to the judge, "I'm trying to make my child into a good man, so he's not pulling up to a drive-through restaurant with a gun in his hand, asking for all the cash."
 
One of the most difficult things for me to deal with as a criminal defense attorney is the lack of cultural understanding within the system.  There are lots of reasons that our system is unjust, but this is one that is really hard for me.

The law is written by the representatives of the majority.  These are people who have to weigh was is good, what is bad, and how to govern society as a whole.  This is necessary and important work.  But the world that I'm from is a minority world.  The urban culture is a whole different culture, where survival is dependent on presenting an invincible image, where my safety depends on whether you're more afraid of me than I am of you.  The urban culture does not mesh well with the majority culture.  On so many levels, what is required of an urban person for survival is against the law.

Setting aside questions of morality (like whose culture is morally correct), this creates a situation where my clients can never win.  They will not survive their home life or their neighborhood walks without acting in one way.  But acting in that way sets them at odds with the law.  As a result, they face the attendant financial and social penalties that further separate them from the majority culture.

Going back to the father in my story, I wouldn't be surprised if the father is right, that the only way he can prevent his son from going criminal is to physically discipline his child.  In his culture, this is the only way to communicate discipline.  Is it ideal?  No.  Is it causing the child damage?  Maybe--I don't know because I wasn't there.  But the father's reaction may be the lesser of many evils that are possible.  I don't advocate for situational ethics.  But I do wish that there was some way that the father's perspective could be legitimized.  He has very real fears and concerns that society is not helping him to solve in a socially acceptable way.  So he's left with a domestic violence charge on his record, hundreds of dollars of court costs that he's unable to pay, and a criminal record for violence.

Is this really justice?  I understand the need for rules and laws that govern societal behavior.  I understand the desire to protect children from abuse.  In fact, I'm a huge advocate for that in many arenas of my life.  But I do want to cry out against the perception that just because this is what the majority has deemed correct, the people who choose to do otherwise for their own good reasons are somehow different than "us".  He's just the same as everyone else.  Many times criminal behavior does not indicate that someone is a reprehensible or morally stunted person.

The blurry lenses of culture

When I was 13 years old, my family moved overseas, to Singapore, to live.  It was a really interesting time to leave my home country and find myself plopped down into a whole new world.

I was a pretty contemplative, observant kid, and so I just soaked in the culture.  I watched what people did.  I listened to what people said.  I began to separate culture from beliefs, from worldview, and from values.  I remember learning about the parlimentary system there, and how there are multiple parties, but only one ever has been (and probably ever will be) in power.  I remember asking to use the bathroom and having a lady lead me back to her bedroom suite, the only bathroom that had a bathtub.  I remember reading American magazines that were painting dark skin as desirable, and then hanging out with my Singaporean friends who were jealous because of how pale I was (yes, really!).

I think it was about then that I realized how we so often want exactly what we don't have.  And our whole culture values something that is scarce to us, but could be abundant somewhere else.  And I think it made me look at everything differently.  It made me question which of my beliefs were truly true, and which we just held on to because they were comfortable to our culture.  It made me wonder whether what my culture told me about beauty was really true.

Similarly, when I went to church in Singapore, I found that they focused on different "truths" than we did here.  What they were totally concerned about was in the Bible, but we just didn't pay as much attention to it as they did.  That made me wonder how we decide what is the most important.  Everyone says that they are taking what they believe straight out of the Bible.  But my life experience caused me to question which really came first... did my church really look at the Bible and then allow it to form our culture and beliefs?  Or did my culture and cultural beliefs form what my church thought was important and worth emphasizing?

This experience forced me to conclude that we really do read a lot into what we believe is "truth."  Based on our culture, our experiences, our lives, our values... we take those things with us when we read.  If I come from a culture that values community over individualism (like Singapore), I'm going to read about the call to Christian community with totally different expectations than I will as a Westerner. The Westerners that I know can't even conceive of the reality of living 12 people to a 3-bedroom flat, and all the cooperation that entails.

Technology has made the world smaller.  One of the consequences of that is that people are confronted with different ways of living and believing and existing at a really young age.  For me that experience was a shock to the system - I was thrust into another culture where I couldn't help but recognize the differences.  Today's generations are growing up exposed to all different worldviews and tolerating those is fairly natural.  I think this probably contributes to the skepticism about "absolute truth."  As I've said before, I think it's less an issue of people believing there is no absolute truth, and more an issue of thinking there's no way to know what that is.  How can I really separate myself so utterly and completely from my own life experience, values, and culture to be able to say that I know for sure what that passage really means?  And if you try to tell me that  you are completely separating yourself, I'll probably laugh at you.

So what does all this mean?  I think the beginning of every conversation about truth has to be the admission that I see through my own experiences and culture.  If we can agree about that, then maybe we can begin to talk about our different perceptions and how to figure out what the truth is, even though we know that we can't find it perfectly.  Until then, I think that modernists and post-modern, post-Christian people are just going to keep talking past each other.

Truth?

So here's an example of what I mean about missing the point about how people view truth.  I was recently at the National Outreach Convention put on by Outreach Magazine.  While in one of the main sessions, they played this video for us.

I'm just not sure that in real life people actually believe that 2+2 does not equal 4.  I don't think that people question facts and reality.  The major issue I see is that people are struggling with how to identify truth when it comes to you.  There is admittedly a much bigger reliance on personal experience than authority when examining truth.  But if something is true, then shouldn't it work in real life too?  Is it really enough for true things just to make rational sense?

Let me bring this down to what it actually looks like in my own life.  I had a conversation with a Calvinist who I love and respect.  I don't subscribe to Calvinism for several reasons, which are somewhat beside the point here.  Anyway, we were talking about Calvinism, and he said to me, "Calvinists today aren't really following Calvin.  They've gotten away from the fundamentals that Calvin believed."  I think he was trying to make me feel better about Calvin's Calvinism.  So then I said, "um, yeah, but didn't Calvin kill a bunch of people who didn't believe the way he did?"  And he said, "Yeah.  He was a little cold."

Um.  Ok. 

So here's the thing.  I can't espouse a belief that, when carried to its logical conclusion, coldly kills off people who don't believe the same way.  I think that's antithetical to God's very character and being.  I think that right beliefs lead to right actions.  If experience is wrong, then something has to be wrong in the thinking too.

That doesn't mean that I don't believe in truth.  What I would say about truth is that it is a person.  Jesus said that he is the way, the truth, and the life.  I know true by measuring things against Jesus and what is revealed about him in the Bible. 

At the same time, I fully admit that how I perceive truth is limited to my own experience and beliefs.  If I had been abused as a child and had my father beating and belittling me all the time (which didn't happen), I would have a very hard time perceiving God my Father any differently than that.  That doesn't change the truth of God's character or being.  But it does limit my ability to perceive and experience his love.  Every word and every consequence of sin that's in the Bible is going to look like judgment to me.

Similarly, growing up in the Western world, the values and culture that I experienced totally affect how I perceive God.  For the first 15 years of my life, I thought of Jesus as a white man.  It wasn't until I was outside my own culture, living overseas in an Asian country, that I actually realized that Jesus was Middle Eastern and probably closer in culture to that country than my home one.  And what a shock to my system that was.  But how easy it is to read into our understanding of truth and reality what we're bringing in from other places--namely our experiences and our culture.

So what I am trying to say is that in my own conversations with people today, I don't have the sense that they question the existence of absolute truth.  I have the sense that they are cognizant of their own biases, prejudices, and limitations, and are hesitant to say that they know for sure that what they believe is true.  They'll also laugh in your face if you deny those biases and perceptions of your own and how they impact your own perception of truth.

My hope would be that we can move beyond this fight about absolute truth, which I doubt is at issue for the average person on the street, and begin to walk with people as they attempt to figure out how to know what truth is.  I think that we have a lot to offer there, and I think it's sad that we're wasting our energy on something that's not at issue.

Assumptions

I think it's only fair to begin by disclosing my assumptions--at least one pretty big assumption--that not everyone will agree with.  I'm coming into a conversation that's been going on for quite a while, and there are some things I don't want to get bogged down with as I continue to write.

Primarily, I recognize that there is a lot of disagreement out there about the approach to absolute truth.  Maybe a better way to say this is that the majority of people have decided that the main problem with younger generations is their presumed disbelief in absolute truth.  The way the conversation is going, it seems like that is where everyone is spending all of their time.  It's almost as if they believe that the rational assent to absolute truth, as it is currently defined by our rational western culture, is necessary for belie.  So, when speaking to the younger generation or telling others how to do so, the bulk of energy appears to be going to the argument about absolute truth.

But I think that we're missing the point--for several reasons.  First, I'm not sure that we have identified the right issue.  A great hew and cry was raised after Neitche's "God is dead."  And logically, true postmodernism probably does deny that absolute truth is possible.  But I'm not sure that's where the people on the ground really are.  In my experience, people allow for the reality of truth--even absolute truth--they just aren't sure that they have it figured out.  And they view the claim that you do know what absolute truth is as the worst kind of arrogance.  So I wonder whether we all aren't closer together than we think, but we're getting stuck on the different language we use.

Second, and probably more important for our future discussions, culture exists.  It is.  Every one of them has ways that they reflect God's values and character more than others.  Similarly, every one of them has ways that they violate the essential character and values of God.  But I'm not sure that fighting culture is the answer.  I don't actually think you can win.  Culture goes to the very core of our beings and forms the basis for our assumptions.

But culture can be redeemed as the people within it are redeemed and restored to the image of God.

So that's where I'm headed in this conversation.  I have accepted that this culture--the one we're in right now--exists for this time and place.  And we're just going to have to live and walk with God within it.  As we are redeemed and restored i his image, we can pray that he will do the same with our culture through us.

There are lots of forums where we can talk about how the world has changed and why reason is superior to experience and all those other things.  But we live in a world where experience is more important than reason, where life is more about what you do that what you say you believe.  My burning passion is to figure out how to speak about God in this context, how to walk with God in a meaningful way, and how to walk with others on their spiritual journeys here and now.  Today.

I hope you'll consider walking with me for a while.