When I was teaching I was struck by a claim that schools are always teaching young people about the world the teachers inhabited, preparing them for a world that won’t exist when the young people enter it as adults. Unless they consciously try to do otherwise, teachers tend to teach from their own life perspective. They forget their students inhabit a different time zone.
The background to this observation was the rapid pace of change: the only thing you could be sure of tomorrow was that it would be different from today. Facing ‘the permanent white water conditions’ of modern life, we had to find a way to counter the ‘cultural lag’ issue and prepare students for the society they would inhabit.
I remember thinking this was a massive issue for the church. The rate of change is now so fast we won’t be able to keep pace unless we’re aware of the need to continually adapt and we’re intentional about doing it.
It’s not just the church as an organisation that needs to connect its institutional cog wheel with the cog wheel of social change, it’s that we’re called to ‘proclaim the gospel afresh in every generation’. That means re-thinking our strategies for telling our story and serving our community every 20-25 years. And to do that we have to be looking ahead, like experienced choristers looking ahead a few bars when the music is fast and furious. If they don’t, they’re so busy concentrating on singing the current note the music moves on and leaves them a beat or two behind. So music and song get painfully out of sync.
I don’t want church and society, gospel and society, to be forever out of sync. Is anyone else excited at the thought of a church that’s continually looking ahead to anticipate the society of the future and discerning how to serve, critique, and meet it there with the love of Christ?
If we, the church, are a prophetic people why is it we are always behind the times? Is it because there is no place for the prophets in the church to speak and their voices to be heard and taken seriously?
Do you remember the crowd control days of our teaching practices? I kind of think the church does the same thing in a way, dogmatically sticking to its point of view and customs without considering what is best for its “pupils” and not changing things to fit the kids. We need to be flexible and teach from the heart and really believe and live the truth that we are trying to teach. Don’t know if that makes sense?
I think the issue of the church being out of synch with society is a relatively modern issue. Since the renaissance and the rise of modernity the Church went into reaction mode, instead of driving society by keeping abreast of change it reacted to science by saying ‘this is how things are’ when it clearly wasn’t. The issue is still with us today in the form of ancient theology in a modern world. The church still lives with ‘models of nonsense’ eg God is up there! the ascension – when Jesus went back into heaven! – Patently nonsense. The problem is the Bible is not understood as theology but is taken as history. Did Jesus turn water into wine? Probably not -can Jesus turn an ordinary life into something rich – hell yes!