I've been thinking about my cousin and his favorable description of mom's graveside service, and of mom. And, I think it's a description of our family, at least at our best.
...personal, cordial humorous, thoughtful, reflective, spiritual, joyful, connected...
And, it strikes me that many of those adjectives, as well as those adjectives lumped together as a whole, describe the values of what, a decade ago, we were calling the Postmodern worldview.
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We've stopped talking about postmodernism in the CGGC. We haven't talked it since the days of Brian Miller's Emerging CGGC blog.
As far as it concerns me, postmodernism awareness came into our dialogue through Reggie McNeal, when he was the keynote speaker at IMPACT, what?, 15?, 20? years ago.
In those days, a few of us in the CGGC were hyped about the reality that younger people lived with a different understanding of the world, and of right and wrong, and good and bad, than even the Gen Xers,...
...and those few of us were exploring the need to make the timeless gospel relevant and attractive...believable...to people with a postmodern worldview.
That conversation has long since fizzled in the CGGC and the spiritual decay and numerical decline of the CGGC has continued...
...and we are getting older. We are dangerously old.
And, we're no longer, as far as I can see, from my place out here in the wilderness, concerned about preaching the eternal truths of the gospel in a way that will engage millennials and the people who are younger than they.
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How did we come to this place?
Here's what I think. It's what I've been saying about this since I was haranguing on Brian's blog:
APEST APEs are the disciples who would, easily and naturally, engage a different culture, in this case, postmodern people.
We have forced our APEST APEs to continue to be subjugated to the holders of institutional authority in the CGGC who are slavish pawns of the Shepherd Mafia.
Churchly institutions and Shepherd Mafias are all about coddling the old and established and creating and sustaining moldy traditions...to placate geezers.
They say, in this case, to postmoderns, "Take it, or leave it!"
And, the fruit of CGGC ministry say, since the grand debacle of the 35,000 X 2000 fiasco is that postmodern people, people younger than Gen X, have taken the offer...
...they've left...
...and they're gone.
There are many ways we suffer because the CGGC Shepherd Mafia insists on being submitted to. But, this is one of the most consequential.
There is no APE quality to our ministry. There's no openness to the different, to the future.
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My afinity to postmoderns...to millennials and those who are younger...comes from two sources.
1. My spiritual gifting.
2. My family and its natural openness to things that are new. "Raise up a child in the way they should go..."
My cousin who used those postmodern adjectives to praise mom's service, is 66 years old. It would be a slight stretch to call him a postmodernist. But, it shows that there are geezers who can see the good in that way of being.
He's lived in the Harrisburg area, a CGGC hotbed, since his teens, but he's not the sort of person who could ever have enjoyed or thrived in the crotchety, stodgy, increasingly hierarchical, institutional CGGC.
He's a picture of why we, in the CGGC, continue in our spiritual decay and numerical decline. A generation ago, we couldn't connect to him so, now, we can't connect to postmoderns.
He's something apostolic or evangelistic. He's a rather typical geezer, but one who still has a fresh and open mind...and heart.
And, sadly, he could never have been one of us...nor, more tragically, over the years of his lifetime would we have wanted him...
...because we are pathetically moldy and modern, at a time when modernism is dying, as we, too, die.
And, knowing what he sees as being a good thing, helps me understand why I'm, so often, out of step with so many of the rest of you.
I'll take "personal, cordial, humorous, thoughtful, reflective, spiritual, joyful, connected."
You can have yours.
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