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| I read this book as a part of a study that eventually led me to
leave the fundamentalist Baptist church I had attended for sixteen years, and the
"religious tradition" under which I was saved. If you're a member of the church
I used to attend, you should ask your pastor before you read books like this. :-) Anderson deals with changes in society that have led to changes in the structure of effective churches. He proposes that these changes aren't bad, they're just different. For example, those in my tradition are very insistant upon meeting twice on Sunday and once on Wednesday. Sunday morning includes Sunday School. This is viewed as "biblical" and therefore unchangeable. Anderson suggests schedules that accomodate today's working couple. He suggests there's nothing wrong with a person whose church experience consists only of a singles Bible study on Tuesday nights or a working moms fellowship meeting on Saturday morning. He describes the "shopping mall" church in which the church offers a plethora of services and opportunities and in which no one person participates in every ministry. This may sound very normal to you but from where I come from everyone participates in everything or else they're backslidden. This book helped me to understand that each generation shapes its church experience around its culture. What seems "traditional" and "right" to us would seem meaningless and/or revolutionary 200 years ago. In that light, those changes in the church that are rejected by those of us over thirty but which have meaning to younger Christians will one day seem like tried and true tradition and will eventually seem archaic. It would be in our best interest, then, given that there is no single rule for most of our Christian church life experience to welcome changes that make the church more meaningful for all its members. Well, it's that kind of thinking that made me persona non grata at my last church. It seems pretty tame now. "The old paradigm taught that if you have the right teaching, you will experience God. The new paradigm says that if you experience God, you will have the right teaching. This may be disturbing for many who assume that propositional truth must always precede and dictate religious experience. That mind-set is the product of systematic theology and has much to contribute (it is my own background and mind-set). However, biblical theology looks to the Bible for a pattern of experience followed by proposition. The experience of the Exodus from Egypt preceded the recording of the Exodus in the Bible. The experience of the crucifixion, the resurrection and Pentecost all predated the propositional declaration of those events in the New Testament. It is not so much that one is right and the other is wrong; it is more a matter of the perspective one takes on God's touch and God's truth." (Page 21) |
A Church for the 21st Century: Bringing Change to Your Church to Meet the
Challenges of a Changing Society