The other day I spoke to the staff of St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church and suggested that this is a fabulous time to be in ministry because we are entering a post-Christian age in this post-modern period.
I quoted someone who had spoken at St. Michael's just a few weeks ago, Duke theologian Stanley Hauerwas, to the effect that Constantinian Christianity, meaning what often is called Christendom, has lost -- especially in Europe but increasingly in the U.S., too. This Christianity involved a close, almost incestuous, connection between the church and the governing powers. So now we Christians are liberated from the burden of that and can focus more freely on following Jesus, which means using our prophetic voices to point out what is unjust and unmerciful in our culture and then work to fix it.
So I was intrigued to run across this ABC News report suggesting much the same thing. It says that many Christians -- especially those who would identify themselves as evangelical -- are tired of being identified primarily by what they're against (such as abortion and equal rights for gays). They'd rather be know for what they are for -- namely a willingness to tackle global issues without regard to who happens to hold political power.
A lot of what the ABC report is about seems related to the Emergent Church Movement, which has come out of the evangelical wing of the church. So I think it's important to point out that many of us in the so-called Mainline churches have been busy for decades with exactly the sort of issues-oriented ministry that now seems increasingly important to the Emergent folks.
And we're glad to have the Emergents along now to help.
I find it enormously liberating that we no longer can assume that the culture around us is somehow "Christian." It frees the church to focus on ministry to those in need and to quit worrying about being in defacto charge of the culture. I'm not suggesting that the more secular culture that is replacing Christendom in America is a good and unblemished thing. Not by a long shot. But now we're freer to critique it and to offer better alternatives.
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IN THE BIG INNING. . .
The baseball slugger Manny Ramirez -- you know the Manny-Being-Manny guy -- tells an interviewer he's found God and reads the Bible every day. Apparently before this, RBI for Manny meant Reads Bible Irregularly.
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