Before this course, I think I found the world of Baz Luhrmann, limitless online opportunities, and global connectedness a bit frightening and most definitely not of God. Don’t get me wrong, I am not outside of this postmodern culture in any way, but in some ways, I considered culture as outside of and disconnected from a Sunday morning worship experience. I prided myself on being able to move back and forth between the two worlds of culture and religion. It didn’t make sense to me that someone could go on a hike or to a concert and say that they had a “worship experience” there. This disconnect in my mind became crystal clear to me when we watched the video of the Gen Xer woman who represented her generation to a church congregation of older people. That woman spoke my life into words and made me realize how much I had disconnected my pain and my heart from my faith. I was living in a church and faith of exegetical sermons and deep Bible knowledge but no understanding of how to appropriately and meaningfully apply it to the lives of the people I go clubbing with on Friday night.
When I realized this disconnect, I felt fairly helpless. I had no idea how to make the Bible relevant to my culture. I had found some relevance in it, but that was mainly because I had been raised in a church that preached sermons with such good and solid exegesis that I could occasionally find meaning in it. But I’m not in that church or that place of life anymore. And neither are my friends. My friends are bored; they crave something that touches them somewhere other than the intellect. They want to feel something all the time. So my question for the course became, first of all, is it realistic to expect this constant stimulus from church? Secondly, how can we as a church connect in any way to this need for authenticity and emotional experience in a way that retains the integrity of the text?
Probably the two concepts that were the most helpful in forming my thinking about how to connect the Bible to my generation were the concepts of DJ and storytelling. I’ve heard good DJs, where the mix is so smooth and so innovative that the whole crowd gets energy and excitement just hearing the transition. I’ve also heard DJs that made the transition choppy or predictable. The crowd would keep dancing, but would not experience much excitement. You could feel the mood die. When I think about translating this concept to transitioning the Bible into culture or transitioning the culture into the Bible, it seems exactly the same. Everyone will notice if the transition is choppy or boring and unoriginal. Just like a good DJ produces a “high” in its audience, seeing how the Bible speaks to my life in a new and original way should touch me. The danger, as we talked about in class, is making sure we as ministers DJ with integrity, rather than just throwing the Bible together with culture in a way that seems cool or new. As I think about how this combines with psychology and therapy, I can’t help but think about how much psychology has become a part of everyday culture. What I don’t think I or my clients realize is how much of good therapy is connected to the Bible. How does libertarian theology and the exodus story connect to my client who is in an abusive relationship, for example? In my profession, there is incredible opportunity to DJ the Bible with culture that changes as my clients change.
The other concept from this class that changed how I view living the text was the idea of storytelling. I know how much this culture loves a good story that is well told. What has frustrated me in the past is how poorly some people have told the gospel story. For some reason most of the “dramatized” gospel accounts I have seen, with the exception of Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ, have watered down the gospel story to make it less offensive or graphic. However, I believe that this generation craves raw and vital stories. As part of the desire for authenticity that marks my generation, we are not interested in stories that are glossed over and polite. Furthermore, this generation more than any other craves excitement and stimulus. I honestly don’t understand how to make the Bible exciting, or if doing so would maintain the integrity of the text. Was the Bible intended to be exciting? Can the stories within the text be told in a way that thrills my generation? These are questions I still have to wrestle with. At the very least, even if it is not necessarily as exciting or intriguing as the latest Quentin Tarantino film, the church can begin to tell the story of the Bible in a way that is real and that connects with its hearers. I know, from working with clients, what relief people experience from telling their stories and feeling heard by their therapist. There is a power in sharing and confessing a story that is difficult or painful. My task as a therapist and as a member of the church is to connect these stories with God’s narratives within the text.
In summary, I’m not sure that my view on how to integrate the text into everyday life is fully developed yet. However, I’m beginning to see that God is more flexible than I believed in the past. He is not repulsed by our culture. Postmodern culture offers several pathways to ministry that are exciting to me. I am, however, still unsure how to appropriately address these opportunities within the therapy experience. At this point, I think that until I become more holistic in my view of the text and how it relates to life and the postmodern culture, I will not be able to effectively communicate it in a professional context. I want to be a good DJ, without awkward transitions, and this will take time.
7 comments:
Your question of whether we can maintain the Bible’s integrity and make it exciting reminds me of Debbie Blue’s sermons. Blue says Christians often domesticate the Bible’s graphic, multi-layered stories (1). Similar to Peter Jackson reading the Tolkien trilogy 57 times (2), Blue enlivens the text by immersing herself in it (3). She opens her sermon, “A Potentially Gruesome Metaphor,” by poking fun at the children’s song, “Fishers of men.” Imagining “hooking” and “reeling in” people as we do fish brings some violent images to mind (4). Perhaps we have made Scripture dull not because we know it too well but because we do not know it well enough.
(1) Debbie Blue, Sensual Orthodoxy(St. Paul: Catherdral Hill Press, 2004), 9.
(2) Steve Taylor, “Chapter 0: The text today,” Living the Text manuscript.
(3) Blue, 10-11.
(4) Blue, 41.
As you portrraited I also have experienced the disconnection between faith and reality. It is hard to find the way to reconcile these two. But as Steve says "Yet in this crisis there is opportunity. We can offer the culture the richness of our Christian heritage-the beauty of new expression of faith and community that have the power to sustain us in a time of fragmentation"(1). So let's work it out! Your great questions and experiences will help your clients well, and God will also work through you to those who need to be touched not by diverse cultures but by the living Spirit of God.
(1)Taylor, Steve. The Out of Bounds Church. p.27
I'm bored to death with sunday mornings, maybe much like your friends. honestly, I don't think i have much that i care to contribute by way of intellect to these discussions. I don't quote the books i've read. i don't listen to sermons in my spare time, and i certainly don't intend to have hymns plastered over my paintings on a powerpoint. maybe i'm like one of Debbie Blue's "outsiders" in the manger scene. (p. 20) I'm the last person who should've found my way to Christ, but i did. and now i can't seem to stop following him. I can't get enough of the lepers and tax collectors, pot smokers and the homeless, believers and non. I can't stop swapping stories with them. I rarely grow tired of their presence in my life. more than that, i can't seem to stop loving them with hope that the Incarnation is real and that it'll rock their lives like it did mine. I'm stuck in the mystery of it all and i'm okay with that.
peter michael stevens
Debbie Blue, Sensual Orthodoxy,
Cathedral Hill Press, 2004
As a fellow SOP-er, I heartily agree re: therapy applications of DJ and storytelling concepts. Reflecting on “the idea of storytelling”, you seem to draw a nice distinction between a livingthetext which entertains (a faux Gospel) and one which brings alive the Gospel – a gospel authentically exciting. You state, “the church can begin to tell…the Bible in a way that is real…” noting just before, “even if it is not…as exciting or intriguing as the latest Quentin Tarantino film.” I would like to add, “THANK GOD!”
You have helped me reflect on a therapist’s calling to assist a client’s process of discovering a most authentic mix/remix via the client’s own DJ storytelling. Therapists (and pastors alike) may help clients to sort through existing mixes, and to consider/include and/or remix bites of livingtext into the telling and experience of their fast/cutting mixes. Thank God that we are not Tarantino either (or how could the mix be near to authentic for a particular client).
Steve Taylor, The Out of Bounds Church? Learning to Create a Community of Faith in a Culture of Change, 9-60, and throughout.
I was particularly impacted by your statement, “My friends are bored; they crave something that touches them somewhere other than the intellect.” Tex Sample’s book, Ministry in an Oral Culture: Living with Will Rogers, Uncle Remus & Minnie Pearl (1994) discusses the way in which oral cultures make sense of life and faith through proverbs, stories, and relationships rather than “discourse, systematic coherence, the consistent use of clear definitions, and the writing of discursive prose that could withstand the whipsaws of academic critique” (1994, p. 3). In surprising ways, postmodern culture also understands the world through stories and narrative by virtue of its desire to be emotionally impacted. Thus, traditional orality has a postmodern equivalent in that textual manuals and references are seldom utilized in everyday spirituality. The way in which we think has been dramatically impacted by the way we now process information: typically in terms of sound-bites, quick take-away messages, images, and affective states. Consequently, the delivery method of a message must be considered when one attempts to communicate with one’s congregation (1994).
I empathize with your questions regarding the best way to make scripture as affectively impacting as our culture seems to desire. I believe you have touched on one answer in your emphasis upon personal and cultural narrative. I myself now question whether Sample’s conclusions regarding the necessity of active and embodied spirituality being promoted within ministry among oral individuals may be relevant to a postmodern culture as well. –Lee Perry
Sample, T. (1994). Ministry in an Oral Culture: Living with Will Rogers, Uncle Remus & Minnie Pearl. Louisville, KY: Westminister Press.
Anna, I think some of the answers to your questions start with rethinking our idea of church. Do we attend church with the hope of getting something out of it or do we bring what we have as an offering. Are we free to share what we bring with others in our spaces of worship? I want to see Worship at my church become an opportunity for each of us to bring what we have experienced during the week, the good the bad the silly the confusing, and share our experiences in ways that will glorify God and further his Kingdom. I think we can add story telling, art, video, questions and times for pondering in ways that do not turn our time of worship into a time of worshiptainment and would perhaps reach out to those who find church boring or irrelevant.
Steve points out in Postcard 4 that it is our missionary task as the church to provide a space for people to make connections between God, themselves, others and God’s world. Perhaps there is a way to create this type of space in your therapy. I don’t know much about how it works but it seems like it would be helpful to incorporate ways for your clients to make these kinds of connections too.
(1)Taylor, Steve. The Out of Bounds Church. p.72.
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