Gregg Caruso

Postmodern Theology

Someone emailed me the other day and asked me a question about "effective postmodern theology."  I'm not sure I've ever thought about an answer to that question.  But here is my response...

Postmodern theology begins with a perspective that Christendom is a Westernized view of Christianity that was both expanded and narrowed by modernity. Modernity's commitment to science and reason is insufficient to fully unpack the promises, claims, and perspectives of Scripture.  Perhaps we could think of modernity as providing insights into one, or even several, facets of Scripture, but not all.  The Bible was written by poets, storytellers, prophets, scribes, theologians, royalty, and businessmen.  Effective postmodern theology would have the capacity to appreciate the significant strides made in and through the modernity construct, yet would seek out additional ways to view and engage the other facets.

Simple Church Interviews

Church in the West is changing.  How do we provide stability and simplicity? 

Paul Potts Phenomenon

I've been taking a break from blogging but I couldn't pass this up. Have you heard about Paul Potts? He was a cell phone salesman from S Wales who sings opera and auditioned for the Britain's Got Talent show last summer.  Take a look at his first performance (You can follow his progress on YouTube)...

T.E.D. Talks

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

The annual conference now brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes.

The website makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public -- all for free. More than 100 talks from their archive are now available, with more added each week. These videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted.

Their mission is quite simple: Spreading ideas.

You can visit the site here.

Personal Vision Statement for Living the Text in a Postmodern Context

As part of my emerging personal vision statement for living the text (see previous post) I have listed seven emerging values that I am aiming to incorporate into my life and ministry. Each of these values presupposes that I continue to grow in my listening skills. Whether it is listening to the cultural context, listening to the community of faith I am serving, listening to the marginalized, or listening to a new friend at Starbucks…

1.  I will seek to become “whole-bodied” in my calling to creatively shape group efforts to engage and live out the text.
My word muscle is fairly well developed (i.e., traditional Evangelical sermonizing), having had the most consistent workout over time. I am looking forward to experimenting with image, text centered in community, and (particularly) dialogue. I have been awakened to the idea that to reduce our speaking of God to deductive verbal and rational propositions is a limiting distortion of God’s revelation.

2. I will seek to expand the use of a variety of art forms to imaginatively shape group efforts to engage and live out the text.
I want to carefully consider future themes and series foci to have sufficient time to allow various art forms to help communicate and unpack the text. This will affect my preparation, delivery, and brainstorming how imagination may be at work among the hearers.

3.  I will seek to engage cultural contexts through DJing.
While I still feel challenged by concepts of juxtaposing, subverting, and amplification I would like to learn how to creatively listen and re:mix the gospel text with the multiplicity of voices in a particular cultural beat -- keeping in mind that it is a learned skill, that effectiveness is enhanced through incarnating our culture, considering what makes the community dance, respecting the community around the text, and then looking for feedback in the form of the non-verbal (or verbal) amen.

4. I will seek to approach contemporary texting by experimenting with both preaching as conversation as preaching as communication.
I have been quite challenged by the descriptions of conversation as creating shared meaning and communication as sharing created meaning. These two approaches to texting seem to form a dynamic tension that has the potential to develop a more intentional spiritual formation.

5.  I will seek to listen to the unfinished story of the other.
I was intrigued by the statement that deconstruction is the precondition of justice. While I don’t fully comprehend that yet I want to let it percolate. I want to look for that which is outside my categories as well as engage the text with the poor and the marginalized in view.

6.  I will seek to develop my dialogical skills in facilitating living and engaging the text.
I really enjoyed the community dialogue exercise of unpacking Luke 10 and I want to develop the skills to facilitate learning through question and answer, give and take.

7. I will seek to engage in "Godly play" by entering the text and letting the Bible shape me through the use the imagination, senses, and wonder.
This feels like an art form to me; using sacred imagery like parable, silence, and liturgical narrative to become more fully aware of the mystery of God’s presence.

Some of my emerging values are overlapping. I see these concepts as granting me permission to dream and engage (and live) the text in, for me, completely new ways. Professor Taylor said in class that the result of living the text should be to enhance the community performance of the text. It seems that in modernity there may have been pastoral drift. The pastor became the minister/answer-person. To enhance the community performance of the text requires, I’m thinking, an intentional shift to pastor as equipper. We can ask, “What will it take to engage this community of believers in the text and in our cultural context?” By seeking to develop the skills and art forms listed above I will become a more effective at living the text in a postmodern context.

Living the Text in a Postmodern Context

Over the last couple of weeks I have taken two intensive courses at the Pasadena campus of Fuller Seminary.  The first was Living the Text in a Postmodern Context and was an exploration of communicating the Biblical text in a contemporary world, with particular missiological reference to the use of the Bible in the postmodern, emerging church.  (The second course was Organizational Development taught by Dr. Shelley Trebesch.)  Living the Text was taught be Dr. Steve Taylor, author of the book, "The Out-of-Bounds Church."  Steve blogs here.  Over the next couple of days I'll post my reflections on the class including seven emerging values that I am aiming to incorporate into my life and ministry.  Todays thoughts will be an overview of my reflection...

We are living in a transitional tide of history. Both modernity and postmodernity are ebbing and flowing within our culture, which includes a growing number of individuals and churches. This may be true of the next several years – if not decades. One of my primary roles, I believe, is to serve as a guide and interpreter to these two divergent groups.

For me, during our class, the word LISTEN became a hinge, or connecting, concept. I work with a growing number of churches wherein the heritage moderns have driven out the postmoderns, which sometimes includes their own children and/or grandchildren. Moderns and postmoderns must learn to listen deeply to one another. Steve described this as living the text in a mode of listening rather than defending. This, no doubt, will be difficult in many modernistic churches. The video clip, “This is who I am?” would be helpful required viewing in every modernistic church. As pastors and leaders there is an invitation for us to “listen to the world around us, read the issues, and hear the rhythm of heartbeats” – in both the larger surrounding culture and in our own church context. And then we are invited to listen to the story of the other – the poor, the disenfranchised and marginalized, as well as the cynical spiritual seekers (who are really not much different from ourselves!).

I appreciated the inductive approach to “shaping the txting of the text.” The inductive approach begins with engaging the listener’s world. The inductive task is to “lay out the evidence, the examples, the illustrations and postpone the declarations and assertions until the listeners have a chance to weigh the evidence, think through the implications and the come to some form of conclusion.” This is a shift that will not only be helpful for those of us who preach and teach, but also for our approach to mission and evangelism. An inductive approach to relationships invites us to engage someone else’s world and listen deeply to their unique story – and look for and affirm God’s workings in and through their lives. My perspective is that evangelism, during the last fifty years has been mostly about deductive talking (i.e., preaching and witnessing); evangelism during this next season will, I believe, be more about inductive listening.

As part of my emerging personal vision statement for living the text I will list seven emerging values that I aim to incorporate into my life and ministry. Each of these values presupposes that I continue to grow in my listening skills. Whether it is listening to the cultural context, listening to the community of faith I am serving, listening to the marginalized, or listening to a new friend at Starbucks…  (More to follow...)

From the Wall Street Journal - Awakening of Spirituality in Europe

In Europe, the cradle of the Enlightenment and secularization, issues of religion have figured prominently in recent public discourse. Below, some examples...

Sinéad O'Connor, Irish singer, caused a stir in 1992 by ripping up a photograph of Pope John Paul II on "Saturday Night Live" and shouting "Fight the real enemy!" She's now released "Theology," a collection of Bible-based songs:

"I adore religion and love it. Obviously, like anything, it has all sorts of negatives sometimes, as we all do," she told Beliefnet, a Web site. She described the photo-tearing episode as "an act of love for God, actually. But, also an act of rattling the bars of something that I do love, but I don't love [the Catholic Church] as much as I love God."

Jürgen Habermas, influential German intellectual, member of the originally Marxist Frankfurt School of philosophy and self-described "methodical atheist," has revised his view that modernization inevitably leads to secularization. In a 2004 book, "Time of Transitions," he hailed Christianity as the bedrock of Western values:  "Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this day, we have no other options [than Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter."

Gérard Depardieu, French film star known for his chaotic personal life, met Pope John Paul II in 2000 and was urged to play Saint Augustine, a 4th-century North African bishop who, after a dissolute youth, became a pillar of faith and one of the church's pre-eminent philosophers. Depardieu read selections of Saint Augustine's "Confessions" in Paris' Notre Dame Cathedral in 2003:  "I was heavy with spirituality without knowing it. I was touched by the light of Saint Augustine," Depardieu told the French Catholic newspaper La Croix. "Saint Augustine's quest touched me personally because it reflected by own fragility."

Anders Borg, Swedish Finance Minister, former non-believer and Europe's only senior male official with a pony-tail, left the Church of Sweden when he was about 18. For years he considered himself an atheist. In a recent interview with Dagens Industri, he said he'd reconsidered:  "Lately, I have decided to consider myself a Christian. For me, the core of the Christian love message is reconciliation, forgiveness and peace."

Sting, British rock star, was raised a Catholic, turned away from organized religion but has often talked about faith. On "The Oprah Winfrey Show," he said:  "Religion is an interesting word. It comes from Latin; it means to reconnect, reconnect with the world of the spirit. There are many ways to reconnect with the world of the spirit, not just through going to church or praying, you can reconnect through music, through the woman or the man you love. These are my roots to the sacred."

Oriana Fallaci, combative Italian journalist and lifelong critic of religion, grew close to the Catholic Church toward the end of her life. She met Pope Benedict XVI and praised him as a bulwark against Islam. She died in 2006, leaving her book collection to a university run by the Vatican:  "I am an atheist, yes. An atheist-Christian," she said in New York in 2005.

In Europe, God Is (Not) Dead…Christian groups are growing, faith is more public.  Read the WSJ story here.

25 Websites We Can't Live Without

Time Magazine recently published a list of the 50 best websites of 2007.  You can view the complete list here.  I was more intrigued by their list of 25 websites we can't live without.  I have enjoyed surfing these sites and I intend to check-out more of the 50 best as well.  Below is the list of the 25 we (apparently) can't live without.  In addition to the obvious, I have found the BBC, FactCheck, HowStuffWorks, Kayak, and TelevisionWithoutPity to be quite helpful &/or entertaining...

1. Amazon
2. bbc.co.uk
3. Citysearch
4. Craigslist
5. del.icio.us
6. digg.com
7. Ebay
8. ESPN
9. Facebook
10. factcheck.org
11. Flickr
12. Google
13. HowStuffWorks
14. InternetMovieDatabase
15. YouTube
16. Kayak
17. NationalGeographic
18. NetFlix
19. Technorati
20. TMZ
21. usa.gov
22. TelevisionWithoutPity
23. WebMD
24. Wikipedia
25. Yahoo

Intro to Gordon Brown

Gordon Brown just became Britain's new Prime Minister. You have probably been hearing and reading the news about the transition from Tony Blair to Brown. Here are some thoughts from Jim Wallis who met Brown several years ago and has an ongoing friendship with him...

"...The word I would use to best describe [Brown is] 'passion.' That’s in sharp contrast to some of the British press, who refer to the new Prime Minister as 'dour,' as one Guardian columnist did this morning on National Public Radio. But that is simply not the man that I have come to know and whose friendship I deeply value. I have taken American heads of churches and development agencies to visit with Brown, and they have been universally and amazingly impressed with his deep understanding of the issues of globalization and his personal commitment to tackling the moral challenge of inequality. I believe that Gordon Brown has more passion (and knowledge) about the issues of global poverty and social justice than any other Western leader today. And I believe his leadership could make a great difference. He is somebody you should know and follow closely.

Gordon Brown is the son of a Church of Scotland pastor and grew up in a manse where the biblical vision of justice seems to have found its place in his heart. Quotes from Isaiah and Jeremiah pepper his speeches about the kind of global economy we must be working for, and as I said in God’s Politics, Brown’s words often remind me of the prophet Micah, who knew that true security requires that “all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid.”

To read more, or to see Brown's views on various issues, click here.

Sad Stats

The following statistics, gathered from such organizations as Barna (www.barna.org) and Focus on the Family (www.family.org), tell a sad story of the toll of vocational ministry.

Pastors

• Fifteen hundred pastors leave the ministry each month due to moral failure, spiritual burnout, or contention in their churches.
• Fifty percent of pastors' marriages will end in divorce.
• Eighty percent of pastors and eighty-four percent of their spouses feel unqualified and discouraged in their role as pastors.
• Fifty percent of pastors are so discouraged that they would leave the ministry if they could, but have no other way of making a living.
• Eighty percent of seminary and Bible school graduates who enter the ministry will leave the ministry within the first five years.
• Seventy percent of pastors constantly fight depression.
• Almost forty percent polled said they have had an extra-marital affair since beginning their ministry.
• Seventy percent said the only time they spend studying the Word is when they are preparing their sermons.

Pastors' Wives

• Eighty percent of pastors' spouses feel their spouse is overworked.
• Eighty percent of pastors' spouses wish their spouse would choose another profession.
• The majority of pastors’ wives surveyed said that the most destructive event that has occurred in their marriage and family was the day they entered the ministry.