The Out of Bounds Church?: Learning to Create a Community of Faith in a Culture of Change (Paperback)

Chapter One

I sit on the fault lines of a cultural shift. In my right hand, I hold a video remote. In my left hand, I hold the gospel of Jesus. I am born for such a time as this. So are you. Ours is the task of communicating this gospel in an age of change. Ours is the task of following Jesus into the future of this cultural shift.

Last century, Karl Barth wrote that the task of Christian communication was to sit with the newspaper in one hand and the Bible in the other. Last century. That was when "gay" meant happy and the Berlin Wall marked East from West. Last century. That was before multi-media, the Internet, and virtual reality. Jesus and the Bible have not changed-both have captured my heart. But the world I sit in looks totally different than it did even ten years ago. The future of faith looks increasingly fragile.

Press PLAY

In 1968, the year I was born, Franco Zeffarelli produced a film version of Romeo and Juliet. Zeffarelli realized that while Shakespeare's ancient text had not changed, the people reading the text were totally different. It was time to focus on historical literature through the lens of a contemporary context.

The 60-second cinematic introduction to Zeffarelli's Romeo and Juliet is one long, slow, camera pan. From a distance, the lens casts its gaze languorously over a city. The viewer is allowed a detached distance from the affairs and passions of that city. A lone male voice speaks over a soft, orchestral lilt. Slowly a horse and cart emerge from an ancient city gate and clip their way across the screen.

Rush ahead to 1996, less than 30 years later, to Baz Luhrmann's cinematic version of Romeo and Juliet. Luhrmann, too, realized that while the ancient text had not changed, the audience had. Once again it was time to mix the old with the new.

Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet is set in Verona Beach, a modern city of guns, money, and greed. The 125-second cinematic introduction starts with static and channel surfing-welcome to the world of multi-media. A TV appears center screen and the news announcer, a black female, speaks-welcome to the celebration of the ethnic and the edge. The camera zooms the detached viewer into the TV and plunges down two lines of apartment blocks-welcome to a shift from objectivity to immersion. Text and image are mixed with an explosive soundtrack. Images flash by: a statue of Jesus, city scenes, helicopters, advertising, police around a body, newspaper headlines. Flames engulf a newspaper-both image and text-telling of the Capulets and Montagues-welcome to ancient text amid a cultural shift.

Two directors, two movies, two cultures, one text. Both movies tell a story that has been told (and contextualized) for centuries. Yet in these two versions of the same story, there exist cues about the times in which-for which-they were made. Not just the trappings of the culture, mind you, but its very essence.

Culture is like the air we breathe. Without it we would die. It lies all around us, unrecognized and unmentioned. And then, every now and again, air becomes a talking point-when my city has a pollution warning, when I am forced to study air at the university level, when my breath clouds in deep white billows in front of my face on an icy morning. Then I think about air. In the same way, the culture shifts between Zeffarelli's era and Lurhmann's have come so subtly that we may not necessarily notice them until some director pops them up on a movie screen in such an extraordinary way that we can no longer ignore them.

When I think about the cultural "air" in which Luhrmann contemporizes Romeo and Juliet, I find four clear marks of the postmodern culture: fragmentation of fast/cutting, individual pick-and-mix lifestyles, tribalism, and the ethnic edge.

Fast/cutting and fragmentation

Fast/cutting is a filmmaking term for the rapid cutting between one image and the next. Fast/cutting is the mainstay of much contemporary video communication. It is a feature of Luhrmann's introduction of Romeo and Juliet-a montage of city scenes, people rioting, and images of Jesus. Graphics and text flash by, juxtaposed and fleeting.

Fast/cutting also shows up in the use of sound bites in the news. Studies show that the average length of a sound bite has decreased from 40 seconds in 1968, to 8 seconds in 1996. The way in which we are given information has changed, and therefore the process of thinking about that information has changed. In every way, we have moved from Zeffarelli's slow single-shot pan to Luhrmann's rapidly moving juxtaposition of text, sound, and image.

I often show the introductions to these two versions of Romeo and Juliet to groups wanting to explore cultural change. After we watch the introductions, I have the groups list the changes, not just in the filming techniques but in the aspects of the culture that these techniques represent.

After doing this with a range of mainstream churches, I did it with an emerging church group. Halfway through the exercise, a voice spoke up. "It's real. Luhrmann's one. It's got more content." This comment reminded me that technology influences, even changes, the way we think. When you spend your life immersed in the fast/cutting of text and image, fast/cutting becomes the way you process and learn. Suddenly, the slow camera pan and the monologue become artificial, false, hard to follow. When you're used to surfing from image to image, three point sermons start to sound like archaic King James English.

Fast/cutting is a surface technology. It demonstrates a change in the way culture communicates. But fast/cutting is also like the leaves of a tree-just as leaves are nourished by underground roots, so fast/cutting is nourished by underground ideas. It isn't just our understanding of our culture that has become fragmented, but the culture itself.

In his book, The Postmodern Condition, French thinker Jean François Lyotard investigates the ways in which computer technologies influence people's thinking. His findings lead him to argue for "incredulity toward metanarratives." In other words, over time and with the help of our tech-centered world, we have grown to distrust the idea of one overarching story that can be used to make sense of everything. Our thinking has fragmented into many privatized stories.

And that brings with it a whole new set of questions. As Morpheus uses the remote to change landscapes around Neo in The Matrix, the question is, "Which reality is the real one?" As war is constructed in Wag the Dog, the question is, "Who controls reality?" As Forrest Gump is digitally inserted into the black-and-white archives of U.S. history, the question is, "What is true history?" As Bono from U2 sings, "Even better than the real thing," the question is, "Where are you standing to view reality?"

These movies, these cultural leaves, emerge from underground thinking. Back in 1972, French thinker Michel Foucault argued, "Truth is a thing of this world; it is produced only by multiple forms of constraint."

Consider the work of Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstructionism. I used to think of his work as part of the remote world of academia-until he packed out one of the largest auditoriums in my city. I might have considered him elitist, but my city obviously considered him inspirational. In an article titled, "Des Tours de Babel," Derrida explodes previously universal and objective ways of viewing faith and language.

He argues that at the tower of Babel we see the emergence of the "city where understanding is no longer possible." Rather than unify, language confuses, separates, and fragments. Subversively, Derrida pushes us further. He uses ancient languages to argue that God's name is Babel. Rather than unify, God divides, fragments, or, to use Derrida's favorite term, God deconstructs. It is not the task of this book to respond to Derrida. Rather, I want to point out that a packed town hall listened to Derrida deconstruct Western ways of looking at reality. The universality of language, philosophy, rationality, even religion, has become unstable and subjective. This fragmenting approach has been cleverly called, not deduction or induction, but unduction, the reversal of all attempts to achieve knowledge and truth. Such fragmentation, whether at the surface or on underground levels, can result in contemporary cultures being both pessimistic and playfully pluralistic.

Modernity's dream of a better, brighter future is replaced by kind of hopelessness. "It's dark in there-in the Future I mean. It's not a good place ... I feel like sleeping for a thousand years-that way I'll never have to be around for this weird new future," writes a disillusioned young adult in a Douglas Coupland novel. In Coupland's Polaroids from the Dead, a hippie mother puts her children to bed while telling them the story of the skeleton that enters the gleaming modern city. The city is in a drought. Its creative visionaries die. The skeleton speaks, urging the dying city to pray for a vision of the afterlife. It's a poignant moment of pessimism that serves to contrast the idealism of hippie dreams with a dying, prayerless city.

The notion of postmodern pluralism, the fast/ cutting approach to life, needs to be applied with care. Pluralism is not new; modern liberalism prized plurality. However, that brand of pluralism remained private. Plural beliefs were welcomed, as long as they lay within the overarching, universal metanarrative of the Western dream.

In contrast, a postmodern pluralism celebrates the breaking apart of the metanarrative. Instead of one public, tolerant answer to the big questions, we now have competing answers-a mosaic of perspectives and ideas and beliefs. We stand at the postmodern coffee counter, individually choosing our own mix of worldviews-one shot or two, small or grande, milk or soy. The public worldview selection list goes on. We have little choice but to move from image to image, idea to idea, with the speed and vigor of Luhrmann's opening montage.

Pick-and-mix lifestyles

Fragmentation represents both crisis and opportunity. In Luhrmann's world, the camera zooms into a city where multiple communities are visible. Such communities are evident in the gender and ethnicity of the black, female newsreader and the black, male chief of police breaking up scenes of rioting between various groups, as well as in the juxtaposition of the Montague and Capulet families. As our culture liquifies into a montage of choices, the range of lifestyle options becomes evident. Identity is constructed from the pick-and-mix options available within the multifaceted culture.

The term liquid modernity has been used to describe the cultural shift from the solid, production-oriented, structured confines of modernity to an insecure, individual-driven, flexible way of living in contemporary society. The shift in the culture and the ways in which those shifts change the people living in the culture becomes an ongoing dance where each partner leads for a time.

As those of us living in a postmodern world negotiate our way through a piecemeal society, our assumptions about our place in that society are subtly altered. Angela McRobbie notes, "The reason why postmodernism appeals to a wide number of young people is that they themselves are experiencing the enforced fragmentation of impermanent work and low career opportunities." There is little that is permanent here-not your job, not your home, not your family or your friends. It is the age of the cell phone, the laptop, and the PDA, where the hot desk has replaced the office desk and the satellite has replaced the landline. While the factory prized production, routine, and teamwork, postmodern industry values speed, innovation, and independence.

The Internet may be the ultimate in pick-and-mix living. Individuals are freed from external institutions, whether they are religious, familial, or business. The individual Web surfer clicks and browses. A virtual screen offers a global world of possibilities to each individual mouse. The surfer can construct his or her identity in a world of chat and e-groups. The Internet never sleeps as all these equal websites, bound together by the egalitarian hyperlink, offer their graphics and text. This is a world of individualized meaning, in which the consumer clicks supreme.

At the heart of this individual pick-and-mix is a search for identity. Sociologists Madan Sarup and Tasneem Raja note, "Millions of people in the world today are searching for 'roots': they go back to the town, the country, or the continent they came from long ago ... identity is a construction." Nowhere is this more evident than at the mall.

Identity and lifestyle walk hand-in-hand through the malls that define contemporary culture. At the mall you can survey the wide range of identity garments-the hip, the classic, the bold, the subdued, the sweet, the sexy. It is at the mall that we see the extent to which "product image and style and design take over from modern metanarratives the task of conferring meaning." It is at the mall that you pick and mix your lifestyle. At the same time, the selection isn't as individualized as it sounds. The choices are still pre-selected by powers outside of our control.

Even in the seemingly endless sea of choices, the pessimism of postmodernity bobs to the surface: "I am a 16-year-old girl and I attend a public high school in downtown Colorado Springs. Since childhood my body has been a billboard. Before I could read there were labels on my shoes, on my jeans, and across my bosom."

Identity is not just about clothes. It's also about the consumption of experiences in an experience-driven economy. The humble coffee bean can be grown as a commodity. It can be converted into a product. It can be sold as a service. Or it can be the center of an experience in a place that defines your identity. Experiences become another accessory the individual consumer can use to compliment a lifestyle.

Identity is also about making our life stories public; I define myself as I tell you who I am. That telling is not always a verbal exchange. Notice how widespread tattoos and body piercing are among the emerging culture. These are visual symbols of experiences, public mementos of a life lived. Ask my friends why they got a tattoo and you will hear part of their story. Ask me why I have three earrings and you'll discover that each piercing was carefully chosen to assert my identity first as a Christian and then as a minister. In many ways, body modification is the natural offspring of a culture in which identity is found in how we look and the experiences we live out.

Continues...