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| Noted author and speaker, Sally Morgenthaler says, “My passion is engaging postmodern people with God in ways that transform, not just inform; ways that honor diverse learning styles and aesthetic languages; and lastly, not only relevance, but the essence of historic, Christian worship: engagement with the God Incarnate in Jesus Christ”. As we have rounded the bend of this millennium, people are grasping for the sacred. The question is, how can we as the Church help with this transformation, this engagement with God? We must always remember that it is God who does the transforming. We cannot do it ourselves but I believe we can “prepare the way” for transformation to take place. There are some cautions of the postmodernity culture as a part of worship. We mustn’t just accept the culture and let it blindly lead us but we should not be afraid of it either. Youth pastor Esther Jing Hua Wu makes a strong statement about this. She says, “The danger of postmodern Christianity is that we become so focused on making God culturally relevant, hip, cool, and fun, that we run the risk of making the gospel about us—our experiences, our relationships, our needs, our worship preferences, our lives. When this happens we lose our awe of God’s holiness. If we spend so much time relating to God as personal friend, we lose sight of the holiness of the God who inspires fear, wonder, worship, and beauty all at once. When that happens, our proclamation of the gospel tips dangerously towards self-centeredness and our experience of God; and the way we want to connect with the holy becomes more important than God himself”. The postmodern emphasis on experience, presentation, and narrative has enhanced our faith richly in many ways. However, experience and narrative are by no means the beginning or ending points of our faith in Christ. God’s holiness is. While postmoderns want to experience God, Wu cautions, “We’re in danger of making the experience, multimedia presentations, or liturgy the centerpiece of our faith. And the result is an experience-based faith instead of one that is holiness-based. Ultimately, this kind of faith will crumble. Our calling as followers of Jesus is to ground our faith in his God-ness, which rests outside our experience”. Continued... |
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