Soultsunami: Sink or Swim in New Millennium Culture

This book just made my top ten list for congregations. It sets a new standard by which all church leaders will be measured.

Bill Easum

President, 21st Century Strategies, Inc.

Leonard Sweet gives hope in a world being shaken at its roots. Rather than running and hiding from it or yelling and raging against it, he shows us how to ride the wave of change to make the gospel relevant and powerful to a lost world. He challenges the church and its people to learn to breathe in a postmodern atmosphere—to stop grumbling about it and start living the life of Christ in it. SoulTsunami is refreshing and practical—not a must read, but a must do to help us thrive in times of massive cultural and societal shifts. This book will make you uncomfortable, but it will also give you hope.

Dr. Jerry White

President, The Navigators

A mind awake! Sweet moves beyond prediction to creative intervention. Rather than cursing the darkness, he lights a candle in our pre-Christian culture. The Hot church is timeless and progressive. How? By worshiping Jesus. And by loving actual people in a virtual world. The Gospel is the most real reality, the truest truth, in the universe. Don’t skip a page!

Kelly Monroe

Founder, Harvard Veritas Forum, and

chaplain for the Harvard-Radcliffe United Ministry

SoulTsunami is more than just another trend book that spoon-feeds Christian leaders so they can appear to be relevant and state-of-the-art. It has the same potential to transform the church as Joel Barker’s Paradigm Shift changed the business world in the early ’90s. SoulTsunami is the Y2K and 21-C compliant manual for Christian leaders.

Frank Breeden, President

The Gospel Music Association

Like dust motes in sunlight, Leonard Sweet illumines the invisible obvious and asks us bluntly, Do you see it? and What are you doing to do about it? This is not a book to help the church feel good, but to be good—not a book to help folk learn about God, but to experience God.

Dan E. Solomon

Bishop, The United Methodist Church

This book will challenge every church to examine its past, take an honest look at its present, and change all its plans for the future—if it has any plans in the first place.

Louis Dorn, Editor, Helps for Translators

United Bible Societies

We live in a pluralistic age of sophistry. With a fine poetic pen, Leonard Sweet portrays the myriad confusions of our age and gives us some pointed insights into how the timeless gospel of Jesus Christ can speak to us anew.

Dr. Ted Baehr

Chairman, The Christian Film and Television Commission

It’s been said that no church leader understands how to navigate the seas of the 21st century like Dr. Leonard Sweet. He’s been called a modern-day prophet who sees things the rest of us do not see, and dreams possibilities that are beyond most of our imagining. Vital Ministry magazine calls on Dr. Sweet twice each year to serve as a lookout from the crow’s nest on the ship we call the church. His words are meant to warn us of potential disasters and to steer us toward bountiful ports of call. Listen here as he shouts down words of warning for the church, as well as for times when he calls, All is well.

Vital Ministry magazine

BOOKS BY LEONARD SWEET

11 Genetic Gateways to Spiritual Awakening

AquaChurch

Communication and Change in American Religious History

A Cup of Coffee at the SoulCafe

FaithQuakes

Health and Medicine in the Evangelical Tradition

The Jesus Prescription for a Healthy Life

Quantum Spirituality: A Postmodern Apologetic

SoulTsunami

Strong in the Broken Places: A Theological Reverie on

the Ministry of George Everett Ross

Learn about these books at http://www.leonardsweet.com

ZONDERVAN

soulTsunami : SINK OR SWIM IN NEW MILLENNIUM CULTURE

Copyright © 1999 by Leonard I. Sweet

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of Zondervan.

ePub Edition August 2009 ISBN: 978-0-310-86553-7

See the Web site www.soultsunami.com

Requests for information should be addressed to:

Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sweet, Leonard I.

      SoulTsunami : sink or swim in new millennium culture / Leonard Sweet.

            p. cm.

      Includes bibliographical references.

      ISBN-13: 978-0-310-24312-0

      1. Christianity and culture — United States. 2. Twenty-first century — Forecasts.

   3. Christianity — Forecasting. 4. Church renewal. I. Title. II. Title: Soul tsunami.

   BR526.S943 1999

   261 — dc21

98-32034

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Bible Copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means — electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other — except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 • 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9

To Elizabeth

My confederate in calling out an educated third.

My life partner and companion in creating

mountain, sea, and desert third places.

contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Get With It

Life Ring #10

Get Into It—A Pre-Christian Society

Life Ring #9

Get Chaordic—Chaordic Churches and Chaordic Leaders

Life Ring #8

Get Glocal—The Global Renaissance

Life Ring #7

Get Dechurched—De-Everything

Life Ring #6

Get EPIC—HOT (Hands-On Truth) Churches for a HOT

(High-Online Technology) Culture

Life Ring #5

Get Bionomic—The Loss of Genetic Innocence

Life Ring #4

Get Deidolized—The Godlet Phenomenon

Life Ring #3

Get Green—Seven Heads: One Body

Life Ring #2

Get Morphed—The Multiverse

Life Ring #1

Get Souled Out—The God Rush

Appendix 1: Edge-Churches

Appendix 2: Selected Bibliography on Church-based

Urban Ministry

About the Publisher

Share Your Thoughts

acknowledgments

One of the greatest poets of the last century, Philip Larkin (1922–1985), wrote a poem on Church Going¹ in which he speaks of stepping inside a church and feeling

a tense, musty, unignorable silence,

brewed God knows how long.

He continues to go to church, but sees fewer and fewer like him who will endure the brewed mustiness, which leads him

wondering, too,

When churches fall completely out of use

What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep

A few cathedrals chronically on show.

Larkin also confesses to speculating who

Will be the last, the very last, to seek

This place for what it was; one of the crew

That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?

SoulTsunami was written to expunge the modern mustiness that has been brewed God knows how long in the church. More importantly, SoulTsunami was written to advocate the exciting new advantages for the body of Christ in postmodern culture.

Members of an online class at Drew and my first batch of Dean’s Fellows (Steve Ayers, Bradley Bergfalk, John Calhoun, Rob Duncan, Scott McKay, John Newell, Bob Shettler, John Whitehurst, Patrick Wrisley, Ernie VanderKruik, with their team leader Dr. Younglae Kim) tutored me in seeing no such thing as a postmodern culture, only multiple postmodern cultures.

Author/biologist/environmental scientist Leonard Sweet Jr. (who used to be known as Sweet’s son, whereas now I’m increasingly known as Sweet’s father) continually instructs me in the art of being totally committed and completely unattached. His warnings about postmodernism as a conceptual bucket with a hole into which any number of definitions can be poured have been duly ignored by his father.

For two years I carted around a letter from John H. Brand of Austin, Texas. My stamina in seeing this project to its conclusion was partly his gift and that of Sally Morgenthaler, who believed in this book even when I lost confidence in it. My notes say "Thank Landrum Leavell III big time. I just did, big, big-time friend. You ensured this book’s panoptic sweep more than you know. Steve Hudson, executive director of Mission USA for the Evangelical Free Church of America, first suggested a killer app section called Now What?" that inspired a skeletal structure whereby this book is best read, not in one 448-page gout, but in snatches and snippets where you can give the ironies time to play and work themselves out. Carol Childress of Leadership Network rescued me from writing for those wearing a jersey that belongs to any camp. My colleague Professor Otto Maduro of Drew saved some stumbles in chapter 2.

Poet Ben Okri penned this tribute to Poet Laureate Ted Hughes after his death on 30 October 1998.²

You meet them once and it’s electrifying,

Those Titans: they stand there outside

Their own time, strangers to us,

Like monoliths discovered in ancestral caves,

Charged with the scraggy godlike rawness

Of their great fame and hidden suffering.

As soon as I read these words, my words bowed in thanksgiving for two friends—both Presbyterians, both pastors of two of USAmerica’s largest churches, both traditional, but both so immersed in God’s mission in their cities that people wonder why they don’t burn out. Frank Harrington (Atlanta) and John Buchanan (Chicago) don’t burn out because they’re fired up and so on fire for God that they keep lesser feet like mine to the fire.

Two critics almost derailed this book by their sharp queries. Joe Frye of Gatesville Texas, seared my soul after one of my lectures on The Postmodern Reformation when he casually mentioned his belief that reformations are human-induced and temporary, while transformations are God-made and eternal. Why shouldn’t my theme have been The Postmodern Transformation?

Timothy George, Dean of Beeson Divinity School at Samford University, provoked me in his office with the question Who is willing to die for a postmodern paradigm? Chicago Lutheran pastor Bruce Cole roused in me a response to that challenge sufficient enough to complete this study.

It is said that behind every successful author stands an amazed research assistant. Whatever this book’s success, I want to thank an amazing cadre of RA’s over the past four years (Kim Gray, Richard Lamborn, Sarita Marie Melkon, Elena Vishnevskaya, Tasha Whitton) who tracked my scent and trailed my tail on this safari through some rather strange sources. If Callimachus was right—big book, big crime—then Betty O’Brien belongs in the cell with me. Her bibliographic métier and moxie opened this book to lucky-dip pleasures and oxbow surprises without unloading lots of lumber. Because of my skilled and longsuffering editor at Zondervan, Jim Ruark, the reader can smile approvingly at the epigraph to Ovid’s Amores:

I am the author’s book. Much fatter

I was at first. He made me slighter.

Scant joy you may get from my chatter,

But think how your labours are lighter.

Donald Hoff, pastor of Riverside Church in Elmira, New York, had the original idea of sending out Noah’s Doves to growing churches in the community with some standard questions to ask of the worship services they encountered. To get the full complement of material Dr. Hoff prepared for the doves, contact him at donaldhoff@aol.com.

For 38 years Charles H. Parkhurst held forth at Madison Square Presbyterian Church in Manhattan (1880 to 1918). He devoted his life to bridging the gap, as he put it, between the life of the church and the life of the times.³ He devoted his every breath to making the church the public language of the Industrial Age. In my attempts to give the church a public language for postmodern culture, I have been blessed with a bar-none team at Drew. For their ideas in birthing the divine form in our new world and culture, I thank Heather Murray Elkins, Virginia Samuel Cetuk, Robert Duncan, Michael Christiansen, Kathi Brown, and John Kirk. Their leadership serves as a constant reminder that I am not saying things for the first time, nor am I saying them louder or with more passion than others.

For the past three years I am afraid I have harried more than hailed my chief administrative assistant Lyn Stuntebeck, who joins me among the heavily caffeinated postmodern believers. If greatness is not something you get as an award but something you earn as a reward, then great is her reward. The best spiritual fencer I have ever faced is Martha Talton of Naples, Florida. She can parry and thrust at my most vulnerable places. Her earned and learned wisdom keeps my spirit right: The more I know God, the more I know a great deal and virtually nothing about who God is.

This book is not the product of a single mind. To every pastor who challenged me in a lecture, to every dinner companion who tested and taunted my ideas, to every cyberspace correspondent (phone, e-mail, chats) and MUD-flapper who reminded me that I had written more than I can chew, to every student who forced me to look a challenging fact in the eye, I thank you. I also leave you the task of doing the close reading and in-depth, close-focus analysis that this eagle-eyed book really requires.

SoulTsunami is no get-out-of-jail-free card from some future tidal wave or tornado. It is more of a welcome-to-your-new-home greeting card to the educated third invoked by my favorite postmodern writer, Michel Serres. A mariner/mathematician/poet/essayist/historian of sciences/Christian, French philosopher Michel Serres travels across disciplines like a sailor in search of new worlds (what he calls third places) where an educated third can converge in a mélange (mestizaje) of historical, scientific, literary, cultural, genetic, and ecclesial endowments. As I write this acknowledgment on the tenth anniversary of my marriage to Elizabeth, I thank God for this utterly out-of-the-ordinary woman on whom I am more dependent than I have any right to be or anyone has a right to know. Her stake in my life and ministry is only partially conveyed by these words from Serres, which I invoke to dedicate this book to her:⁴

I call [her] the Educated third; expert of cognizance, formal or experimental, versed in natural sciences of the living and nonliving. . . . She who prefers action to capitulation, direct human experience to interviews and dossiers, traveler of nature and society, lover of rivers, sand, wind, seas and mountains, walker of the entire earth, passionate for diverse gestures as for diverse landscapes, solitary sailor across the North-West Strait, latitudes where the positive mixed knowledge communicates in delicate and rare manner with humanities, she who is inversely versed in ancient languages, mythical traditions, and religions . . . hence, archaic and contemporary, traditional and futurist, humanist and wise . . . more distant from power than every possible legislator . . . capable of recognizing and understanding failures . . . and finally, and above all, burning with love for the earth and humanity.

Leonard Sweet

Madison, New Jersey

NOTES

1. Philip Larkin, The Less Deceived and the Whitsun Weddings (London: Marvell Press, 1977), 28–29.

2. Quoted in TLS, Times Literary Supplement (6 Nov 98): 20.

3. Charles H. Parkhurst, My Forty Years in New York (New York: Macmillan, 1923), 113.

4. Michel Serres, The Natural Contract, trans. Ciro A. Sandoval (Paris: Flammarion, 1992), 147–48.

Wake up, O sleeper, rise from the dead,

and Christ will shine on you.

Ephesians 5:13–14 NIV

IS THIS A GREAT TIME, OR WHAT?

Introduction

GET WITH IT

or what? A traveler encountered a guru on the road and asked him, Are you a deity?

The guru said no.

Are you a saint?

The guru said no.

Are you a prophet?

The guru said no.

Exasperated, the traveler asked, Then what are you?

The guru answered, I’m awake.

This book is an early warning signal intended to wake us up and keep us awake.

Wake up and smell the future.

Wake up on the right side of history.

Wake up and breathe in the cold, arctic air of a moribund modernity.

Wake up and breathe out the fire of a postmodern future—with all its omens, amens, and amends.

Can the church tell a sleeping world what the best part of waking up is?

The best part of waking

up is Folger’s in your

cup.

Radio and TV commercial

Can the church stop its puny, hack dreams of trying to make a difference in the world and start dreaming God-sized dreams of making the world different? Can the church help invent and prevent, redeem and redream, this postmodern future? If the future ain’t what it used to be, as the great philosopher Yogi Berra once said, can the church make the future what God wants it to be? Or will the church be more a surf rider of events than surf creator? Can the church reach postmodern culture in its quest for understanding the universe’s unknowable beginnings and unforeseeable ends?