Postmodern Spirituality is potpourri. However, I’m convinced that most people gravitate to one aspect at a time—more yogi, more Pentecostal, more Reformed—they’re just not going to stay that way for 10 years. Everybody goes through phases, but we go through them a lot more intensely than those who came before. Most of us will go through a really charismatic phase, a really contemplative phase, a really eastern phase, but at some point, we need to de-compartmentalize. As we move out of one phase, we shouldn’t badmouth it. I think we need God’s help to bring the charismatic and the contemplative together—both corporately and personally!
Spirituality isn’t supposed to be scintillating; it’s supposed to be about cultivating wholeness with Jesus Christ. We need to connect the dots between what God has done in our past and what God is doing now. We need to understand our “phases” as developmental stages, not fetishes, worthy of sacred memory not scornful regret.
We also see an increased proclivity toward provocation and activism, which means our upcoming preachers are going to be much more like Banksy than Billy Graham. However, despite our cultural proclivity for provocation, we don’t like to be provoked. We’re the pokers, not the dead legs. We are hyper-sensitive, and yet, when we’re provoked hard and fast, we rise to the occasion.
The task is to shift from anger at what everyone else should be doing to shame at the realization that “being angry” is just another means of doing nothing.
But when we lash out, let’s make sure we lash out at ourselves—specifically at that part of our sin telling us “lashing out” is the way to fix things.
Let’s destroy the destructive tendencies in our nature, and invoke God to heal our fragmented view of grace connecting past to present, impulse to intellect, and rationalism to revival.