A Changed Mission Reality: Six Major Shifts

3. Religion: From Christendom to Pantheon

While the population is growing, church attendance is declining.

The “nones” are the fastest-growing group (those who report no religious affiliation). The growing population of the “spiritual but not religious,” is not anti-Jesus, just anti-church, mostly.

Perhaps we are seeing the emergence of a new nonconformist movement. People are open and even hungry for spiritual meaning, but the common assumption is that it cannot be found in institutional religion. The emerging spirituality is once again “protest-ant,” protesting and pushing against the established hierarchies.

Within the living memory of some North Americans is the time of the “Blue Laws,” those restrictions designed to ban Sunday activities to promote the observance of a day of Sabbath. The time of Blue Laws is over. The age of the new pantheon has come. The Roman pantheon syncretized worship to include the noteworthy gods from subjugated peoples. In the syncretistic, new pantheonic thinking, all the gods share the same mythical space. They are equally able to meet spiritual hunger and add value to our lives. People are cobbling together a spirituality that often lacks the critical sacred communal elements; for example, the faulty assumptions of a “churchless Christianity.”

4. Technology: From Morse Code to Virtual Reality

Technology is not only changing every industry, but it is also changing society and the meaning of community itself. Look at the history of broadcasting, for instance. Morse Code (the wireless telegraph) burst onto the scene in the late 1890s. Commercial radio broadcasting was emerging in the 1920s. In 1939, theater audiences were dazzled by The Wizard of Oz as Dorothy walked into Technicolor and realized she wasn’t in Kansas anymore. Until the 1950s, most US families rallied around a radio for weekly broadcasts. By the 1960s, color televisions were becoming widely available. Since that time, Americans have gathered around their televisions to get their news from the three national broadcasting networks: CBS, NBC, and ABC. New technologies have transformed all this. Millennials, the first “digital natives,” now use social media to receive and disseminate news.

Through the various livestream features, people can experience momentous events as they unfold. Now, experimental technologies in virtual reality are not simply providing a one-dimensional optical and aural experience, but full sensory immersion. In the 1970s, the clunky personal computer was beginning to become available; today we carry around miniature supercomputers on our wrists or in our pockets.

Tech-driven, knowledge-based systems are helping eliminate extreme poverty, increase mobility, and allow mass access to decentralized education. Mobility allows longer commutes, pursuit of jobs, and decreased loyalty to a central space where we would live and work our entire lives. What are the implications of these technological revolutions for the church?

5. Neighborhood: From Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood to Neo’s Matrix

All these shifts contribute to this sketch. Community itself has been remixed. There has been a significant erosion of social capital and the concept of neighbors.

I was one of the millions of children impacted by the incredible life of Fred Rogers. From 1968, on and off to 2001, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was a steady force for positively shaping the development of children. Live on public television, Fred Rodgers subversively taught generations about the importance of learning, the values of neighborly kindness, and compassion.

Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood is no more—neither the show nor the potentiality it envisioned. We have moved from Fred Rogers’ neighborhood into the fictional computer hacker character Neo’s Matrix.

The Matrix films are prophetic in the sense that the kind of fictional community we see there is becoming reality. Beside the urbanization and clustered-but-isolated living arrangements of Neo’s pre-red-pill world, the films also capture the sense of people living in two worlds, both the physical and the digital.

In this new matrix of networks, the makeup of neighborhoods themselves is undergoing a major remix. New smaller households are growing faster than the population due to the familial shifts described earlier. As the population grows, urbanization and the increasing lack of space are creating smaller self-contained, dormitory-like structures. In the network scenario, neighborhoods become secondary to flows of communication, information, and mobility, enabled by technology. People gather across geographic boundaries around shared practices that predominately take place in neutral third places.

Here we can lean into the pioneering work of sociologist Manuel Castells, who describes this new societal order in depth. Within this post-industrial, knowledge-based era now described as the Information Age, technology has made the world smaller. Humanity is now a truly global community. Microelectronic and communication technologies enable us to connect across geographies and time. The new organization of this global community is a complex series of interconnected networks. Castells posits that at the end of the second millennium, a new form of society arose from the interactions of several major social, technological, economic, and cultural transformations. Network Society consists of a social structure made up of networks enabled by micro-electronics-based information and communications technologies (Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society [Oxford Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000], xvii–xviii.)

The emerging societal structure is constructed around technologically enabled flows of capital, information, organizational interaction, images, sounds, and symbols. The flows refer to the means of social organization, the expression of processes dominating our economic, political, and symbolic life (Castells, 442). Thus, in a network society, culture is now mobile, moving along a complex web of interconnected networks; flows are about the movement of people, objects, and things from one node to another in social space. Cultures consist of bundles of dynamic practices, connected across space and time through structured flows of information and media. Practices are simply the activities carried out or performed by a group of people habitually or regularly in these social spaces. Flows are the means through which these movements and connections occur.

Many churches are seemingly still stuck in the Fred Rogers’ neighborhood model while existing in a Matrix world of networks connected by flows.

6. Church: From Constantine to North American Imperial Cult, Back to Caves

The final shift is within the church itself. The dominant North American version of church goes back to Emperor Constantine in AD 313 when Christianity became the state religion. Until then, Christians were a rogue—and periodically illegal—religious movement that experienced several rounds of imperial persecution. At times, the primitive church met in secret spaces, subversively scratching the fish symbol (Ichthys) on cave walls to identify meeting places. This small renegade movement, with few resources, no buildings, no professional clergy, and no committee meetings, between the time of Jesus’ death on the cross in the 30s and the rise of Constantine in the 300s, grew numerically across vast geographical distances. It became a force to be reckoned with.

The blending of religion and state power had both positive and negative effects. Not being arrested, punished, or having property confiscated was certainly a plus. The days of meeting secretly in caves and catacombs were largely over. Yet, adversely, vast church building projects of unparalleled grandeur were launched. Christians were no longer a minority, and many good citizens became Christian. This created a need for professional full-time priests to care for the growing masses. This is the attractional model: build it and they will come.

The United States has operated in the Christendom assumption that we are a Christian nation and that the church enjoys a central role in Western culture. Protestant denominations adopted the organizational structure of the twentieth-century corporation and benefited greatly—for a season. However, emerging generations are not buying this amalgamation of Christ and empire.

We have built it, and they have not come. More Americans now hold a secular worldview than a Christian one. The Christendom model as we know it, our dominant Western version of the faith, is disintegrating.

Fresh Expressions

God turns deserts into jungles. God turns cemeteries into gardens. God makes dead things come alive again. We describe the power God uses to do this with the word resurrection.
How exactly does God make one a new creation in the present? It’s certainly not that God throws us into a dumpster and starts over. God works with the existing material, reshaping and recreating. God’s way of “making all things new” (Rev. 21:5) is not our consumeristic way of brand-spanking newness and waste. It’s the way of potters remixing at wheels and shattered lives reassembling in new amalgamations.

The formational story of the Christian faith is the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Resurrection is the ultimate narrative of disruption. The empty tomb throws a monkey wrench in the death-dealing cycle of business as usual. It changes everything. Resurrection is the power that dismantles all other forms of power.

Fresh Expressions create little communal pockets of resurrection that heal the epidemic of isolation and loneliness that describes our age.

Click here to learn more and join a movement of others engaged in this work, join us at the first ever Fresh Expressions UM National Gathering, February 7-9, 2024, in Charlotte, North Carolina.

(The content of this article was drawn from Deep Roots, Wild Branches by Michael Adam Beck.)