When the Okanagan Mountain Park fires were first raging near Kelowna, one of the earliest impressions I had was of the natural cycle of regeneration. I remembered a special I had seen on the American National Parks system in 1989 where the ecologists and forestry specialists recalled that before the days of managed forests, fires were part of a natural cycle. When European settlers arrived, our interests focused on control and management; we were concerned with safety, and with economics.

But like other kinds of interference in natural processes, we were messing with mystery. We were out of our depth, but convinced that we knew best. The natural seven to ten year cycle of small fires ended. The result was a build up of fuel, and old and disease ridden forests. We were profoundly conservative, and ignored the risks of that conservatism.

When fires are allowed to occur naturally and more frequently, the result is renewal and regeneration. Small fires have less fuel to use, and are not as hot. As a result, they tend to stay near the ground and don't make their way to the crown of the tree. Bark has a certain resistance to fire, in particular the thick bark of pine trees. There are usually few branches down low, and so a cooler fire is less likely to make it to the crowns of trees, where it can be fanned by the wind and do the most destruction.

Furthermore, a cooler fire doesn't destroy the ability of the tree to reproduce. And it doesn't harm the soil, killing important bacteria and destroying nutrients.

I wonder.. if the church was less concerned with self-preservation.. if we were less concerned with management and control... if we were concerned with love and transformation and not conservation... would we experience a natural cycle of death and rebirth? Would we remain more in touch with our culture, changing and adapting to changing times? Would we have experienced less destruction when change finally came? Would we have healthier family (community) systems?

Thankfully, God remains sovereign (see also Job 7:14 and following) and the cultural shaking that is occurring is resulting in the death of an old system and the birth of a new and healthier one. We are returning to our roots. We are less concerned with management and control and security, and more concerned with life. But the cost to get here has been immense, and could have been so much less if we had been less afraid of change.

I have had an image in mind as I wrote these words. The image is a painting of a pine tree by a local brother named John Revill. It's hard to convey the impact this picture made on me the first time I saw it. John had stopped by to visit and brought the newly finished picture with him. It was as if I was looking beyond the tree itself to God's idea of the pine tree. I saw the truth of it; it's deep beauty and purpose. The tree seemed to have an inner light. John's ability to work with a variety of media and textures was powerfully evident... the image itself seemed alive.

It calls to mind Psalm 1..

How blessed is the one
who does not walk in the way of the wicked,
Nor stand in the way of the sinner,
Nor sit in the seat of the scoffer..
For he will be like a tree
Planted by streams of water,
Which yields its fruit in its season,
And its leaf does not wither..

The following is a research paper I wrote for my pastor on postmodernism. It's long, poorly written, and I don't expect you to finish it. But maybe you can help me if I misrepresented aonyone's views.

Introduction

When being asked to define postmodernism, I just sort of blink with apprehension, because it’s like being asked what color is a rainbow? Many people don’t realize that the way people think has changed from intellectually categorizing certain essential distinctives, to experiencing a variety of… well… experiences. Reminiscent of The Matrix, my glib reply is "I know what postmodernism is, but I can’t explain it to you. You will have to see it for yourself.” Obviously, postmodernism is very frustrating to many people, and is usually received with suspicion and skepticism. In this essay I will attempt to demonstrate that postmodernism is not indefinable, nor is it something to fear. I will explain by historical and philosophical methods how postmodernism came about, what it is, and how Evangelical Christians can respond. My hope is that after reading this essay postmodernism will be viewed as a very interesting and challenging way of thinking about and relating to God.

Let’s go back to the rainbow analogy. A rainbow is comprised of many different colors. No one color can be used to describe it. It is, in itself, a symbol of diversity that displays a colorful image of different colors, not mixed, but alongside one another. This is a key idea to understanding postmodernism. Modernism, if you will, has become just another color in the rainbow. Now, ironically, many modern Evangelicals, or modern thinkers for that matter, don’t even know what the word "modernism" means.

What the Heck is Modernism Anyway?

In the Christian context, the word "modernism" was used by Pope Pius X to describe the endeavor to reconcile the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church with the conclusions of modern science. It was a methodology of thought in which certain Biblical questions, apologetics, and the theory of dogma would be validated by rational, scientific explanation. The Enlightenment, represented by Descartes and Hume, along with Galileo and Sir Isaac Newton, brought forth a type of thinking that was purely rational and scientific. The scientific method and pure rational thinking became the authorative way in which we came to know truth (Epistemology). If you had no empirical proof of what you thought was true, you were treated with skepticism. This, of course, has been around even before the Enlightenment. St. Thomas Aquinas’ works are written with very little style or creativity, because his aim was to be as scholarly as possible in his approach to whatever questions came his way, and of course, we know Aquinas was heavily influenced by the logical realism of Aristotle.

What these philosophers were trying to accomplish in there thinking was the goal of laying down objective foundations. Stanley J. Grenz says, "The Enlightenment epistemological foundation consists of a set of incontestable or unassailable first principles on the basis of which knowledge can proceed. These basic beliefs must be universal, objective, and discernible to any rational person". One of the foundational beliefs of the modern age was in science, and it was crowned as the method in which all things can become known. The most widely accepted position of the modern era was scientific naturalism, in which spirituality became nominal and superstitious (see David Hume).

A Little History

How this relates to the Church is hugely important. After Aquinas we had Luther’s reformation and after the reformation the church fragmented into what we now call "denominations" that either became liberal, or conservative. The conservative denominations were able to agree on five fundamental truths that were articulated in a series of booklets called The Fundamentals published around 1909. The articles were written to identify the foundational doctrines of Christianity that were, at the time, under heavy scientific scrutiny. The five foundations were The inspiration and infallibility of the Bible, The deity of Christ, the substitutionary atonement of Christ, the resurrection of Christ, and the second coming of Christ. Liberal and conservative theologians disputed these foundations heavily for the next decade, until the great earthquake of Darwinism rocked the religious community.

During the 1920’s fundamentalist Christians were publicly humiliated by the Scope’s Monkey trial. Scopes was a public school teacher in Tennessee where you couldn’t teach anything that was against Biblical creationism. He taught evolution and therefore broke the law and was brought to trial in 1925. The case drew huge attention, and even though Scopes lost the case, the fundamentalist Christians came across embarrassingly ignorant and public opinion drove Christians from the public square and they stayed quiet until the 1980’s (Blinded by Might). It was not until Jerry Falwells’ Moral Majority delivered a crushing blow to its political opponents that forced the public once again to deal with Christians. It seemed as though utopia would return, morality would be legislated, and God would eventually win back the heart of society. The problem was, the people’s thinking had changed, and the church had not.

In the 1960’s and 70’s growth in Para church organizations like Campus Crusade for Christ, the Navigators, and the Jesus People exploded, and they took traditional churches by surprise. The movement was unlike any they had ever seen. People, like my parents and my pastor, were meeting in small dorm-rooms or apartments, breaking the bread and singing worship songs with nothing more than a guitar. They would reach out to people in a variety of ways, helping people move, inviting their friends to diner, and yes, by cold-turkey evangelism. There is actually a documented movement in the late 60’s and early 70’s called the "Jesus Movement" where hundreds of thousand of people were saved.

There were all kinds of movements in the 60’s and 70’s that marked the very beginning of the postmodern movement we see in full fledge today. What was this revolution all about? What were they revolting against? There is a myriad amount of answers to these questions, but in short, it was against the sterile and traditional modern approach to life. People didn’t want to wait until marriage to have sex, people didn’t want to live in the block communities of suburban America, women didn’t want to live in the home baking brownies, men didn’t want to go to work eight hours a day in a suite and tie, and people didn’t want to grow up having the same unspiritual life, going to a church affiliated with some irrelevant denomination.

A Little Philosophy

The type of revolution society was going through was the great earthquake the modernism, and it was no surprise. In fact it was foreseen by a philosopher named Frederick Nietzsche. Nietzsche is best known for the atheistic aphorism, "God is dead," but not known for why he said such an offensive thing. His philosophy, in my opinion, sheds light on what exactly happened during the great philosophical earthquake of the 60’ and 70’s, and he has also had large influence on the postmodern thought of today. Let me state now, I go out on a limb with this thesis. I am not a philosophy major, nor do I have any ordained merit, but I find too much in common with Nietzsche’s ideas and our current state postmodernism.

Nietzsche was very influenced by the philosophy of nihilism. Alan Pratt defines it pretty well, "Nihilism is the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated. It is often associated with extreme pessimism and a radical skepticism that condemns existence." In my opinion Nietzsche wasn’t a nihilist, but a victim of it, though he desperately tried to fight it. The encyclopedia also stated, "Nietzsche argued that its [nihilism’s] corrosive effects would eventually destroy all moral, religious, and metaphysical convictions and precipitate the greatest crisis in human history." Nietzsche agreed with Ludwig Feuerbach’s teaching that God was merely a being postulated by projected human reflections (Robert Solomon). In other words; monotheism was created in the image of man. Eugene Rose comments, "The type of god fashioned by men was not the omnipotent Creator of all revealed in the person of Jesus Christ, the God who could raise the dead. On the contrary the fashioned god is a mere human idea, not revealed to faith and humility but constructed by the proud mind that still feels the need for 'explanation' when it has lost the desire for salvation. This is the dead god of the philosophers who only require a 'first cause' to complete their systems…"

This type of reasoning made Nietzsche insists that there is no absolute foundation that can be known apart from our perspectives. He writes, "there are no facts, only interpretations." Also, in The Will to Power, he writes, "That there is no truth; that there is no absolute state of affairs—no ‘thing-in-itself.’ Eugene Rose added, "This alone is Nihilism of the most extreme kind." Nietzsche despised anything that was dogmatic or claimed to have unassailable authority. He threw out the philosophy of metaphysics (the idea of true, transcendent being, i.e. God, absolutes), and instead brought forth an epistemology called "perspectivism." Perspectivism teaches that the more perspectives one has, the closer to the truth one becomes. There are many perspectives. There is a religious perspective, a moral perspective, a scientific perspective, and an aesthetic perspective. A good example of perspectivism is in our poetic descriptions. It is better to say:

Her beauty is so captivating
That the very light she gently reflects
Is blessed beyond words
Before it can express her wonder
To my eye

instead of saying, "She weighs 107 pounds, has blond hair, blue eyes, and has such and such measurements." The measurements may be a more descriptive and accurate way of describing the girl, but expresses little in how the beholder relates to her.

Nietzsche’s approach isn’t entirely deconstructive. He goes forth his notorious, "Will to Power" philosophy which can best summarized by saying people act in accordance with there desire for value, esteem, worth, and strength. He encourages people to "create themselves" like an artist would create artwork. His philosophy is very experimental, individualistic, and revolutionary. It rejects all that is held true and valued, and seems to promise liberty through what is forbidden and contemptible; that is our own self-actualization.

Two postmodern philosophers, in particular, carried on the Nietzschean tradition. Rorty drops the notion of an absolute truth for his own ideas of pragmatism. A pragmatist has no absolute theory of truth but holds that our knowledge and beliefs help us cope and negotiate with reality. He advocates that the point behind any theory of truth is to help us decide what is good to believe. Rorty thinks his ideas of pragmatism covers him from the irrational position of relativism, but his views are marginalized by his own philosophy of liberal ironism. A liberal ironist is one who does not think his own ideas of his view of the world are right in that they correspond with some reality that is foundational. The ironist is committed to promoting a society in which there is a harmonious dialogue of our views with a growing circle of people. The irony, so to speak, is that Rorty can only believe and state that his view is better than others, but it is not necessarily true (also see D.A. Carson).

To the other postmodern philosopher, Michel Foucault, truth is not something that is uncovered, but some thing that is fashioned by men. No one simply knows truth, but truth is known for something. This type of thinking can become very deconstructionist and aims to find the ulterior motive for power behind every theory of truth. Take today’s politics for example. A political leader my state something true about the state of the nation, but it is written off by his opponents because the truth he is advocating is not for the truth itself, but for his agenda. Foucault follows Nietzsche in the Will to Power doctrine that one must become free from the indoctrination of what we are, and in turn, "become oneself" to have value. He worked this method out in the arena of sexuality. He believed that there is no one way to understand or practice sex (he was gay), and all that is taught about sex is induced from a societal power struggle to contain mans inner freedom of sexual expression.17 Foucault died of AIDS in 1984 (also see D.A. Carson).

So What is Postmodernism?

Again, Grenz sheds light on this muddled goop by clarifying, "Postmodern thinkers maintain that humans do not view the world from an objective vantage point but structure their world through the concepts they bring it." In light of the ideas put forth by Nietzsche Rorty, and Foucault, we can construe three main tenets (or pillars) of postmodernism, and they work dialectically. First, we have nihilism; an indifference towards truth, a disintegration of value, and a vague sense purposelessness are at its root. Second, we have perspectivism; nothing can really be known in the absolute sense, yet truths still can be discerned for reasons relative to the given point of view. Third, we have the perfect product of the former two, pluralism. Pluralism is everyone’s friend in that it states that there are choices, choices are good, and no choice is superior to another. A classic example of such thinking came from the mouth of Bishop Melvin Talbert of the United Methodist Church when he responded to Larry King about his religious beliefs, "I believe my God is large enough to be inclusive of all human beings who were created in God's image and that includes those religions that are not Christian." He later added in response to a rebuttal, "For me, salvation in Jesus Christ is the way, and what I try to do as a Christian is to live that example. My responsibility is not to convert all other religions, but to live the Christian faith in the face of those religions. Are you going to say that my -- our friend on the show tonight who is Jewish is on the wrong path? That's God's choice. That's God's judgment, not mine." (Italics added for emphasis) That statement is the culmination of all three of these philosophies. Talbert is indifferent towards the traditional Christian belief that Jesus is the exclusive way to God, he speaks from his own perspective (i.e. the words "For me"), and carefully includes all other "ways" to God as being equally valid.

Tolerance is the single most important, if not absolute, virtue of postmodernism. Go back to my description of postmodernism being like a rainbow. No one color makes up the rainbow, but the diversity of colors. Diversity (not necessarily unity) is the highest value in the postmodern ethos. The more points of view we have, the better grasp we will have on truth. The more ideas that are included the more appealing the philosophy will be. The more ethnicity we have in society, the better the society will be. The more inclusive the religion, the more spiritual it is. This is where people make the mistake of rushing to condemn postmodernism, when really what they are condemning is a consequence of it.

What postmodernism has at its heart is a critical agenda. It goes after whatever claims to have an infallible knowledge, even science. Science no longer has, or never had, adequate answers to questions as to Why are we here? Who are we? How shall we live? People want a deeper sense of truth than the facts, appearances, or even their own experiences. Things that were formally rejected, like religion, spirituality, mysticism, and "other (eastern) religions," are more accepted than ever, and whatever the ethnocentric mainstream was is rapidly waning. Greg Boyd sees the advantages of this:

At the same time, however, this postmodern perspective has served to expose the narrowness and arbitrariness of the Enlightenment assumption that reality can be exhaustively defined and understood by empirical categories. Postmodernism has been helpful in revealing the arrogance involved in the modern, Western, chronocentric, elitist, intellectual tendency to dismiss every other worldview that has ever existed as "primitive" and "superstitious."

The playing field has been leveled.

Obviously, this is can be very confusing. Rationally speaking, people would not want a "choice" when it comes to the absolute certainty of things. People don’t want to be presented with a choice of different kinds of medicine that will ale their sicknesses, they want be presented with the right medicine that will cure them. But at the same time, however, people are in a state of nihilism. Nothing we choose really matters. What are we to do? In my view, people believe what they think matters. People want to be told the truth, they want meaning and significance, and they want to make a difference. They want something real, true, and authentic, but they find themselves unable to know if anything is real. Ironically, people find themselves in a constant crisis of faith; will they believe in what they think is real or will they doubt. If we only read our Bibles and paid attention to Paul when he says we live by faith, not by sight.

Response and Adaptation

Lets go back to the time of the 60’and 70’s and examine the Christian culture when my pastor came to Christ. At a leader’s meeting, He retold the story of his upbringing in Christianity, the rejection of it, his conversion, and the fellowship he had with believers. His upbringing in a rural Baptist setting, where everyone knows each other, is typical of central Iowa. His rebellion against the church/religion was most likely inspired by the tremendous hypocrisy he saw in the lives of his family members and neighbors. After God got his attention through a number of unusual near-death experiences, he got involved with a group of Christians that called themselves the "Jesus People". He recalled the genuine love they had for each other, the relevant worship music, and their piously authentic ceremonies of baptism and breaking the bread. It was a group of people who were genuine in their beliefs and truly loved the Lord. This was a great example of a postmodern Christian experience.

Many people at the Rock experience the same things. You hear so many testimonies about an upbringing in a semi-Christian environment, disillusionment with religious people and the church, rebellion, repentance, and a new refreshing experience with people of the same age living in true communion with God. However, this is not something new or necessarily "postmodern." Augustine tells of a similar story of his conversion in the Confessions. Also Soren Kierkegaard, the father of the philosophy know as Existentialism, went through the same experience very dramatically.

Just before Nietzsche was born (1844), Soren Kierkegaard also saw the horrible effect modernism had on Christianity. Growing up in Denmark under the extremely strict religious education imposed on him by his father, Kierkegaard developed an absolute contempt for what he condescendingly called "Christendom." He didn’t hate God, or the teachings of Christ, but what the church had become. In one of his more outrageous journal entries, he writes, "Christianity does not exist." Also, in The Attack upon Christendom, he also writes, "New Testament Not True." At first glance, he sounds heretical, but he develops a very funny sense of irony, poking fun at the complacency of his social era’s lack of real faith. He would sarcastically comment about how in Denmark, "everyone was a Christian", and on the wide path to heaven instead of the straight and narrow. No one was on the wide path to destruction, for how could they be? The Danish church was a state church that you were born into; you were born Christian. You would go to church and the priest would lecture about faith and the sacraments and that would make you a better Christian. Kierkegaard hated this. He developed a deep contempt for this superficiality and went through his own time of empty rebellion while he was in college. However, he became extremely depressed and found little solace in the wild social life he partook in. He turned incredibly inward, and in his profound inwardness he became intensely individualistic and reflected much on why he existed and for what existence he had to live for himself. Hence, he became the founding figure of existentialism. In this mode of thought, he became conscious of certain absolute truths that he had to make choices about, and how he related to them. (see Phillip Cary)

The first truth he had to face is that we must make a choice. Second, each person, as an individual, must choose between God and the world. An atheist does this, as well as a Christian. He writes, "This is the eternal, unchangeable condition of choice that can never be evaded—no, never in all eternity." To Kierkegaard, even if a postmodern pluralist were to say, "God and the World aren’t absolutely different," this would be refraining from choosing, and thus be a choice. Kierkegaard teaches that either every man must present himself before God, or live mundanely in the pettiness of bourgeois society. The third truth that Kierkegaard expounds is that, "God has been merciful to us, demonstrating his grace to the point of being willing to involve himself with every person." What Kierkegaard is so passionate about is having a living, breathing, and personal relationship with God. (Quoted from this)

Kierkegaard brought the "personal relationship with God" theology to a much higher and more personal (or existential) level. Kierkegaard never set out to prove the existence of God; in fact the thought the idea of proving God’s existence was foolish. It would be like a court of law trying to prove a criminal existed, instead of proving that the accused, who does exist, is a criminal. Why would you try to reason in conclusion to existence, instead of reasoning from existence to conclusion (Quoted from this)? Kierkegaard’s entire philosophical project is to make faith difficult, like the faith demonstrated by Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac. Kierkegaard called this the "Leap of Faith" and for him, faith is how we come to know things for certain.

Kierkegaard disliked "objective truth." He felt it was meaningless to existence, and would have no bearing on how people lived if it was known. He boldly proclaims the absolute truth of Christ and how little it mattered to the people standing right in front of him, Pilate asked, "What is truth?" And with such a question, it was crucified. Kierkegaard was more interested in what he calls "subjective truth." Now this is where it gets confusing. This sort of truth is characterized by how it relates to the absolute truth. The straight and narrow road is not a literal road, but how the journey is lived (Quoted from this). This is the most important kind of truth for Kierkegaard. The following quote sounds very postmodern, and is the most direct statement about what he means:

Truth is not a sum of statements, not a definition, not a system of concepts, but a life. Truth is not a property of thought that guarantees validity to thinking. No, truth in its most essential character is the reduplication of truth within yourself, within me, within him. Your life, my life, his life express the truth in the striving. Just as the truth was a life in Christ, so too, for us truth must be lived. (Edifying Discourses)

Reduplication means to live out in life the challenges of what one thinks, to be what one says. Kierkegaard had a problem though. How could he to communicate this truth to people without it becoming marginalized by the chronocentric modern method of intellectual categorization? He desperately did not want to be another footnote of consciousness, for that’s what happened when people wrote books about truth. He felt that subjective truth was too deep and to insightful to be communicated directly. So he turned to what he calls "indirect communication." He wrote long-winded novels and discourses under pseudonyms (false names) to offer multiple perspectives filled with philosophical irony about the relation they all had to truth. This all seems nauseatingly complex, but a man who communicated his "subjective truth" very well, inspires Kierkegaard (Palmer).

Jesus never proved he was the Son of God to those who demanded proof. Jesus simply put forth his teachings, his character, his miracles, and implored his followers to have faith in him. Comically, when Jesus was asked about what the kingdom of God was like, he would say it was about, "a man who sowed good seed in his field," "a mustard seed", "like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount of flour", "a treasure in a field," "a merchant looking for fine pearls," and "like the owner of a house." He rarely ever said what he meant, but by doing so, caused people to come out of the complacent lull they had drowsily fallen into by listening to the teachers of the law. Jesus caused the people to think and relate to the parables that he often gave without explanation.

Communication is the challenge of postmodern evangelism. It is all based on the method of language in which we present the truth. I remember my pastor sharing about his experiences of living and evangelizing in Boulder, Colorado. Armed with his Bible and the fire of Christ’s message burning in his heart, he boldly proclaimed the Gospel. However, he quickly found out that sharing the Four Spiritual Laws with people was ineffective in bringing people to Christ. He was not alone in his experience, and a new method had to be developed to communicate the time-old truths of the Gospel. Hanging out at the arcade playing pinball sharing with onlookers, he told of the awesome changes Christ made in his life. My pastor’s mantra "Experience God, not Religion" was born, and it is a concise synopsis of what Kierkegaard emphatically tried to say through his bizarre, cryptic style.

The church has had large fear of postmodernism, because it seems as though all truth must be discarded and everything must be approached nonrationally. Leonard Sweet in Postmodern Pilgrims teaches that Churches must become "E.P.I.C." (experimental, participating, image based, connected communities) in order to communicate the truths of Christ. This is a helpful acronym to keep in mind; however, in my view, this is a narrow treatment of postmodernism because postmodernism still includes rational approaches to knowing truth. Many postmodern evangelists think postmoderns have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. They have not. Rational approaches of knowledge are just another one of the perspectives used to find out if something is true. The best rational evangelistic tool that challenges informal pluralism is the teachings found in Josh McDowell’s More Than a Carpenter. Either Jesus is the way, or he is not.

However, postmodern people do not want another argument proving Christianity. They would rather see a Christian living by what he says, rather than listening to what he says. A bold Christian life is no longer about standing up with a microphone blathering on about the virtues of purity, but actually living pure in the midst the peer pressure of immorality. Postmoderns would rather see a life changed and lived with conviction, than hear about why it is good to be changed. People want to experience God spiritually, not mentally. One of biggest movements that the church has ever witnessed is the wild fire spread of Pentecostalism. In the last 30 years no other movement has even come close to the record growth it has seen32. In the past, it was labeled "cultic" and "flaky" for its unorthodox practices, but many Christians, desiring to experience true spiritual power, have experimented with it. People, like my own parents and many Rockers, have moved on to a Pentecostal denomination in search of a more intimate spiritual experience.

Postmoderns want to be active in their beliefs. It is important for the Church to allow people to participate in ministry, leadership, theological dialogue, and even the messages, so their beliefs can be relevant to their lives. People want to be participants in the body of Christ, to have a role, and a purpose, instead of being a simple observer. All of this calls Christians to take their faith more seriously.

Postmoderns are moved by images as well as words. Movie clips illustrate feelings, and other nonrational concepts in ways never before imagined. The movie The Matrix inspired deep reflection on faith, reality, and religion. It gave a great working picture of the modern philosophy of Descartes, and the struggle between knowing what is real and what is not. Mark did a superb job using The Shawshank Redemption to illustrate hope. The pictures can say things that statistics never could, but that doesn’t mean that you replace black and white text for pictures, otherwise you run the risk of dumbing down everything you say. A popular conjunction of these two methods is in John Eldridge’s book Wild at Heart. He uses both pictures from movies and his own words to clearly communicate his ideas.

Postmoderns long to have community. It is ironic that in an intensely individualistic culture, where we all are trying to become ourselves, we long to be connected to each other. In a support letter I received from a campus missionary commenting on the variety of reality love shows (Joe Millionaire, the Bachelor), he wrote, "We just can’t seem to get enough love stories! It seems that our society is relationally deprived." If there is one thing that determines people’s acceptance or rejection of Christianity, it is by how they are received within the Christian community. Will they be welcomed and accepted, or ignored and snubbed?

As far as I am concerned, the Rock is doing an excellent job allowing its members to experience and participate in the authentic spiritual life communicated by its leaders. The use of stories, images, participation, and a sincere community has fostered the growth of hundreds of lives. Some things to grow in, however, would be a greater emphasis on worship and bible teaching. Remember, modern Christianity became superficial; postmoderns will not tolerate superficiality in any way. A perfect example of this genuine hunger was articulated by a small group leader’s comments at the last leaders meeting, "In this year of leading small group, I have never had to teach from the Word as much as I have this year.” People are hungry for truth the Bible teaches, but they aren’t sure how to understand it.

It has been a pleasure for me to write this. I could go on longer about what we can do to reach out to postmoderns, but that was not the focus of this essay. The purpose I had in writing this essay was to help people love God with all their mind, as well as our heart, soul, and strength. Also it must be said that postmodernism is in its infant stages and is always changing, and that is why philosophers are cautious to define it. Nevertheless, we have an enormous opportunity to relate with our culture, and I am excited to be a part of a movement dedicated to making Jesus Christ attractive to the outside world.