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I find it hard enough to achieve something
that I set out to do, let alone accomplish something I never
intended. Yet Leonard Sweet has managed just that, in his latest pair of
books Soultsunami and Aquachurch.
Dr. Sweet, the dean of Drew Theological School, set out to provide
church leaders with a primer on
postmodern ministry. He did just that, and in the process of doing so
exposed a rift in Canadian
evangelicalism that I had heard about but never before seen so vividly
portrayed -- the cavern between the
Church’s apparently MP3 podiums and her seemingly 8 track pulpits.
Soultsunami sets out the 10 theoretical
liferings that every church will have to surf in order
to thrive in our postmodern world. Aquachurch builds on those
theoretical liferings with 11 1/3 leadership arts that individual church
leaders need to practice in order to be effective in our postmodern
world.
The cavernous note for this Canadian pastor was that Sweet quotes no
less than 7 different Canadian
academics on the implications of postmodernism for ministry but could
not find one single Canadian church
putting these implications into practice. I was so struck by this
discrepancy that I personally contacted Dr. Sweet. His response was that
he didn’t know much about what was going on in Canada but would love
to investigate and study any ministries I would pass along to him.
So I took up his offer and contacted
several of the academics quoted in his books as well some prominent
evangelical leaders across the country and asked them to identify
ministries that were actively attempting a postmodern approach to
ministry in Canada. Of the dozen leaders I contacted all responded that
the rift was real and that there were very few churches consciously
attempting to wrestle with postmodernism in the way Dr. Sweet
prescribes. As a result I had to dejectedly respond back to Dr. Sweet
telling him to continue ignoring the paucity of our pulpits while mining
the riches of our podiums.
How has this rift come about? As a
twentysomethings youth pastor and board member of a prominent
theological seminary, I am uniquely interested in this disconnect. With
a foot in each world and a desire to see greater integration between the
two, I wonder why Canadian churches that pour millions of dollars and
thousands of students into seminaries, bible colleges and Christian
colleges every year, ignore the warnings, missives, teachings and
opinions of the very faculties they so zealously support?
What is the experience of our pastors in these schools, if they patently
ignore their former teachers upon
graduation? Is this simply another example of "the scandal"
that is the evangelical mind?
Len Sweet certainly did not set out to
raise any of these questions, much less answer them in
Soultsunami and Aquachurch, yet his books leave the
Canadian church with hard questions to
consider as it seeks to "make disciples" of this nation in
this postmodern era.
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