What we call something has no real meaning except for the unified understanding of what the word represents. We could have easily called a fish bowl a spork or tuna receptacle or Martin Luther or dangling chad, if all of us together agreed to call those muddled water and goldfish-containing bowls the same thing. All that to say this: words mean nothing in and of themselves---we ascribe meaning or thing-ness to them. Mass opinion dictates truth in this respect (and some might say in most things these days.)

So in my humble but correct opinion I submit for your consideration a change in terminology. Many of us in an active ministry role these days are tossing around the term “postmodernism” all the time. We fancy ourselves as some of the first children of the postmodern age, even the ones that live in suburbia and drive a Taurus. We study all things postmodern, which usually consists of using a book by Leonard Sweet as a coaster at the local coffee shop where interesting Goth characters and likely lesbian college students hang out. We attend conferences where even the Seeker Church gurus are beginning with the “Pomo-Speak.”

But there are a few problems with the term and the usage. First, is the general distaste of those in the world to be labeled as “dealing with the reality of a postmodern age.” This smacks of dis-ingenuity and reserved speculation to the masses. It’s like having a psychiatrist label you with random terms like “Paranoid Schizophrenic” and “Oedipus Complex” after one session. Not that this has happened to me in therapy or anything---but you get the picture. Postmodern is about as popular a title for ourselves as the conveniently-Boomer-invented title “Busters”.

And therein lies the other issue: Postmodernism as a word implies that the most important facet of this age is what came before it. It is after something that was so significant that what comes later should have its same name, but with a lesser qualifier attached to it. It’s like being one of George Foreman’s younger children. The football PREseason. The organ POSTlude. The AFTERmath of a nuclear holocaust. We in the postmodern world are the wimpy opening band to the Rolling Stones that were the Modern Agers.

So let’s come up with a new name.

Because of the immense readership of Next-Wave.org e-zine, I expect this to only take 2 or 3 weeks---or at least before Clinton moves out of his D.C. pad. It is also much easier to change people’s terminology than to get them saved these days (as many of our successful super-church pastors are proving) so this is a great opportunity to make a difference.

Our first options revolve around the self-aggrandizement that we’ve developed from our pervasive computerization. We will want to make a high-tech statement with our new title for this age. The Information Age, The Age of Technopolization, & and The Age of Bill Gates As Demi-God are all possibilities. But they have been used before and never really caught on. Perhaps the Age of the Internet will persist in its pervasiveness---unless the lackluster Internet Christmas sales and dot com business busts continue. Then we might as well call it The Wal-Mart Makes a Comeback Age and that would really depress me. The Age of Aquarius is too musty to be redeemed, but The Age of Aqua-Man could be focus-grouped to test its viability. In any sense, I’m hesitant to dictate to the billions around the globe a title based on technology---since the computers we’re staring at now all become outdated the moment they leave Circuit City or arrive in the cow box. Technology is moving too fast to pin down. We might effectively end up calling it something akin to “The Age of the Eight-Track” and make a colossal blunder.

So let’s turn to more spiritual titles, in hopes that Jesus makes a comeback with the spiritually flat-lined millennial and even-now-being-conceived-by-Xers-generation. The Age of Rebirth, The Spiritual Age or The Age of Douglas Coupland Disciples are all less than viable, since they either reek of religiosity, are to broad, or are too narrow. Specifically, what spiritual essence describes the age we are entering in these decades? This is the age that was ushered in by the children that don’t remember Woodstock or Neil Armstrong but do remember the Berlin Wall and the Challenger. Maybe the spiritual climate could be described in the world “Blah.” Even the ones that seem to be seeking things spiritual can’t really describe what they’re looking for or what they’ve got once they’ve got what we’re trying to get them to get. When we in this age talk of our spiritual condition it starts to sound like Charlie Brown’s teacher, and the “blah, blah, blah” balloon above our collective heads is an adequate although depressing vision for our collective souls. But The Age of Blah would be so hard to market, and might even hamper our worldwide renaming domination plan. So let’s move on.

Maybe it’s attitude that will shape the identity of this age. Maybe it’s not concrete things like wars, leaders, organizations and Chia Pet infomercials that will become the fabric of our consciousness. Maybe it’s the way we see things! We must admit that we’re at fault for the whole “postmodernism” thing in the sense that we are still so hung up on the past. We just can’t get away from the hippies picketing the Vietnam War or the seminal technologies of Atari and vinyl records. We’re kind of like old school hip in an Airwalk shoes with bellbottoms kind of way. We’d like to take the best of times from the Modern Era and re-language it and adopt its purpose, since we don’t really protest the Kosovo Wars and are constantly beaten into a pulp by our nieces and nephews on the new fangled Playstations. We like to collect the remnants of the Modern Age’s demise. And I don’t mean the “end times” kind of remnants---I’m thinking more of the “left in the throne” kind of remnants. The Beatles are number one on the charts with a compilation album this month, for goodness sakes!

So maybe we could retain part of the Modern Age’s classic nomenclature as a hat-tipping gesture to the age that delivered us from the Dark Ages (which were re-named The Middle Ages by opportunistic people such as myself). Perhaps the abbreviated “Mod” could be our choice, qualified by something that really pops. A real grabber would be nice, again along the lines of our narcissistic outlook.

The attitude that seems prevalent today is violence. Not really an actual violence, although certainly our fictitious and tabloid heroes are violent. But they are more like examples of what we’d be like if we had enough guts, enough money, or enough reason. One phrase that we hear much today involves “Going Postal.” This is so way cool that kids will say it not knowing why they’re saying it-which is always the pinnacle of cool. If you’ve never had the joy of saying “If you don’t stop it, I’m going to go postal on your butt,” then, my friend, you have not yet entered this age we are renaming. Going Postal is our ever-unachieved-but-always-hoped-for goal in life. Our attitude is that “things are so bad, man, that at any moment I’m going to snap out of my Microserfed profession and bust out an Uzi”-even if that just means reading Dilbert comic books on lunch hour.

(Drum roll, please). So our new name for The Postmodern Age is now The ModPostal Age. We can now go and start ModPostal churches. We’ll institude ModPostal Consulting firms (my smam e-mail about this will be forthcoming). First we must insert the term ModPostalism into our mission statements. And most importantly we must start dropping the word as though everyone in a meeting should know what we’re referring to. We are a ModPostal people, living in a ModPostalistic environment, attempting to become more ModPos in our perspective as Christian leaders.

Start spreading the news.