The World is New
With nearly every straight, liberal male I know semi-obsessed with a musical sitcom about a high school show choir on Fox, it is difficult to imagine that the world is not different than we imagined it to be. Every indicator points to a landscape dramatically altered. From Phyllis Tickle's 500 year cultural rummage sale to Bill McKibben's new Eaarth, there exist abundant images of a world transformed. The Church, like all other institutions, will fair only as well as it is capable of responding to the changing cultural environment in which it exists.
Young Adults stand at an interesting intersection at this moment of cultural upheaval. Coming into adulthood in this environment, their frame of reference is limited by the a-historicism of American culture and the lack of personal experience in any other time but this. Armed with technology they threaten the generations they follow with the capacity to leapfrog to corporate predominance. Cautioned by an economic downturn in which entire industries are being eclipsed while new ones pop up with each refreshing of the page, they approach "career" with tentativeness and education with the utilitarian concerns of keeping as many options open as they can manage to juggle.
The Church as an institution faces the cautionary scrutiny given marriage by a generation for whom divorce was felt as common as not. Like pre-marital co-habitation, spiritual path shopping is a consumer tactic meant to head off institutional incompatibility and failure. This is not a failure on our part, but it is a reality. We cannot assume the given of the post-marriage, post-childbirth return to Church. The moral elementary school model of religion is failing in a nation where Liberal Christianity has won the culture wars. The question left us is what Christ speaks to this world that is new? What image of the Reign of God do we offer to a generation for whom that reign is no longer singular?
We give many answers. The Body of Christ is continually being born anew in this world through churches that compete in a free-marketplace of loyalties, moralities, and ways of being. What is the Spirit birthing anew in the Episcopal Church? What might that look like for Young Adults and how might we work together to affirm and strengthen this new Body of which we are a part?
I'll be using this blog as a platform and as my own site for digestion. I'm new to this world. I'm a young Episcopalian adult, raised in the Church and employed to support others in this journey we take together. I invite your comments here, but more so I invite your friendship and companionship. I'll be telling my story of this journey, and I hope as it progresses it will become Our Story. I don't know how that happens but I trust that as it does, we will do it with honesty, humility, and grace.
Young Adults stand at an interesting intersection at this moment of cultural upheaval. Coming into adulthood in this environment, their frame of reference is limited by the a-historicism of American culture and the lack of personal experience in any other time but this. Armed with technology they threaten the generations they follow with the capacity to leapfrog to corporate predominance. Cautioned by an economic downturn in which entire industries are being eclipsed while new ones pop up with each refreshing of the page, they approach "career" with tentativeness and education with the utilitarian concerns of keeping as many options open as they can manage to juggle.
The Church as an institution faces the cautionary scrutiny given marriage by a generation for whom divorce was felt as common as not. Like pre-marital co-habitation, spiritual path shopping is a consumer tactic meant to head off institutional incompatibility and failure. This is not a failure on our part, but it is a reality. We cannot assume the given of the post-marriage, post-childbirth return to Church. The moral elementary school model of religion is failing in a nation where Liberal Christianity has won the culture wars. The question left us is what Christ speaks to this world that is new? What image of the Reign of God do we offer to a generation for whom that reign is no longer singular?
We give many answers. The Body of Christ is continually being born anew in this world through churches that compete in a free-marketplace of loyalties, moralities, and ways of being. What is the Spirit birthing anew in the Episcopal Church? What might that look like for Young Adults and how might we work together to affirm and strengthen this new Body of which we are a part?
I'll be using this blog as a platform and as my own site for digestion. I'm new to this world. I'm a young Episcopalian adult, raised in the Church and employed to support others in this journey we take together. I invite your comments here, but more so I invite your friendship and companionship. I'll be telling my story of this journey, and I hope as it progresses it will become Our Story. I don't know how that happens but I trust that as it does, we will do it with honesty, humility, and grace.
posted by Jason Sierra at 1:53 PM
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