Time To Learn New Skills

I have a stack of books in my office on Christian Formation and children. Some of them are classics, and some of them are recent. The one I just finished is Postmodern Children's Ministry: Ministry to Children in the 21st Century by Ivy Beckwith. The publisher's web site says it

Presents a new paradigm for children’s ministry in the emerging church of the 21st century and explores current ways churches are putting that vision into practice.

Yet Beckwith quotes John Westerhoff's 1976 Will Our Children Have Faith? and Gretchen Wolff Pritchard's 1992 Offering the Gospel to Children. Essentially, what she has to offer forward thinking Christian Educators and Formation Leaders have been saying for 30 years or more.

Basically this tells me is that the Emergent Church is even less aware of how children learn than I thought. It also tells me that not much has changed in the last 30 years in the area of Christian Education/Formation.

However, Beckwith does give one of the best explanations of the transition from modern to postmodern that I have encountered so far.

But these kinds of cultural shifts are never easy--or quick. When the world was moving from the Middle Ages to the Age of Reason, not everyone got there at the same time. People didn't wake up on January 1, 1700, look at their calendars, and say, "Goodness! Look at that! We've moved into the age of modernity." These cultural changes, while tumultuous and significant, are gradual.

And that's where we are now. We find ourselves in a world slowly leaning toward postmodern but still populated by a lot of people who hold a modern worldview. This leads to conflict and to at least one popular misconception about postmodernism. Lots of speakers and writers like to use the word postmodern and generational monikers like Generation X or millenial interchangeably. They treat the postmodern worldview as a life stage that one will likely outgrow as maturity settles in. (p. 21)

Not only has she pinpointed our culture's challenge, she has highlighted the problem the church finds itself confronting today. Some 400 years after the fact, the church has finally adapted to modern age only to find itself in a world very much like the one in which it was born. And it doesn't have the skills to cope.

Obviously, our culture has a very different understanding of the physical world, genetics, and a host of other things about which the ancient world had little or no knowledge. Governments, churches, and other social institutions cannot ignore those changes, as much as the Taliban or the Southern Baptists might wish otherwise. You can't put the genie back in the bottle.

However, we now live in a world where Christianity is a minority religion, or soon will be. In some places in the world Christians are persecuted. Yet the church--especially in the "West," but even in the so-called "Global South"--is still operating from a place that assumes Christianity is the social norm.

Our Christian Formation programs must begin to help us see the world around us realistically and equip us to live in it graciously and productively.

I'm not holding my breath, but as I Christian, I live in hope.

Peace,
Jeff