Date posted: February 21, 2012
The Road was an amazing experience to be involved in. Personally I came away stunned and humbled by what God did through this event.
Thanks also to all of you who came. Especially those of you who flew in from around Oz and NZ. A special thanks to those who went on ‘road trips’ driving down to Melbourne.
Since we got back into the office we have had lots of people asking whether The Road is going to go ‘on the road’. At this stage we won’t be taking the whole event on the Road. The good news is that we will be doing some smaller events around the place linked to the release of the book later in the year. Stay tuned.
Also a lot of people have been asking about whether the talks will be available on the net. The answer is yes. You can subscribe here where the talks will soon be appearing.
Date posted: February 10, 2012
In early 2010 there was a lot of buzz and internet chatter about Brian McLaren’s new book A New Kind of Christianity. I read that his book was based around ten questions that he believed Christianity in the 21st century had to address. When I finally saw the questions I was utterly deflated.
Not because I did not think the questions that he was asking were not important, it was just so far from where my own thinking was. It was the usual suspects, yet I was sensing as I read the culture, as I listened to those of faith and those outside of faith, a whole set of different questions. I was looking for the questions that were behind the questions. The questions that no one was asking, but that needed to be asked.
So at the beginning of I scribbled in my notebook my own list of ten questions. Yes some of them were quirky, but I believed they were vital. I just I did not realise just how vital they would become.
Here are my questions.
____________________________________
1: The almost overwhelming consensus in the West is that Church needs to change. But what if Church is not the problem what if we are? In the past people were part of the church because of their sense of devotion, their expectations of Church were much lower. What if we are looking for Church to give us the transcendence that we are meant to find in God?
2: The contemporary christian scene has now fragmented into movements. I know people who were in the new reformed camp but who are now in the emergent camp, and people who have made the move in the opposite direction. I know people who grew up Eastern Orthodox and are now at Pentecostal churches, and Pentecostals who have become Eastern Orthodox. What is the way that we move and change affiliations and tribes telling us? Maybe beneath the theology, and practice something else is going on? Why are we always on the move?
3: Why did the Church flatline across the Western World around 1963-1968? Why such a specific time frame? What happened?
4: What if we as the Church has been so focussed on the way that the enlightenment has captured our minds that we missed the way that romanticism has captured our hearts. How do you communicate the gospel in such a new emotional landscape?
5: What if the sexual climate of the West tells us more about our view of the universe than it does about our sex drives?
6: What if the American author Jack Kerouac in 1947 created a new form of being a half-Christian half-unbeliever that would come to dominate the way contemporary Christians fifty years later would live out their faiths? What if his book On the Road was the genesis of the life script of young adults today?
7: Maybe young adults across the western world are leaving church because we embraced the idea of the seeker? The problem being that in the Western imagination seekers never stop seeking?
8: Everyone in the West sees their life as a journey. What if life is not a journey? What if by seeing life as an individual journey we are preventing ourselves participating in God’s grand narrative of salvation?
9: Why did the 9/11 hijackers spend their last months on this earth smoking dope, binging on donuts, drinking in night clubs, sleeping with prostitutes and buying porn? What does it tell us that men who were so committed to a radical and violent vision of Islam and who despised the culture of the West found themselves so conflicted when it came to behaviour?
10: Why do so many young Christians who profess to follow Christ seem by their actions to be more disciples of Nietzsche, anxiously spending their waking hours attempting to carve out lives of meaning?
__________________________________
2010 was a year of lots of travel. So I took my ten questions with me on the road. Just me and my small notebook, trying to work it out as I sat in airports in New Zealand, caught trains across Denmark, or drove on the seemingly endless highways of the USA. A pattern began to emerge, what was fuzzy began to become clear. My wrist would hurt as I began to fill my notebook with what I was seeing. All around me planes to catch, people on the go, the perpetual motion of the luggage carousel, the limitless destinations on the screens of the airport, the hovering horizon staring back at me through the windshield. Everywhere around me constant motion, physical movement but also psychic movement, a fundamental restlessness which shaped contemporary life and faith. Answers were starting to attach themselves to my questions.
Then 2011 arrived alongside my twin boys. The travel was over, home was now the centre of my universe. Life became simple, the hours of sleeplessness, the constant changing, the never-ending washing was achieved with a book in hand. I devoured a virtual library in search of answers to my question, evidence for what I was sensing. I began to test what I was learning with my Church, it began to resonate. In the season of my life when I had the least time and energy to invest in my community of faith we began to grow, something was up.
The threads began to fall into place, the patterns became clear and strong. One day standing by my car, it all became clear, the key was underneath my feet, it was the road.
So at the beginning of 2012 it is time to go public with the answers. 17-18 Feb we will be running here an event based around not only the answers to my questions, but what I think are the implications for us as individuals. At the Road Event speaking will also be friends who have been sounding boards, who understand just how important this all is.
You can register here.
My questions and their answers formed themselves into a book called The Road Trip Which Changed The World, I will be blogging more about it later, but this to say I think it is the most important thing I have written so far.
Date posted: February 8, 2012
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us.”
In Australia we are in the midst of a pivotal moment that is discouraging and yet thrilling.
Ministries are shrinking, less leaders are coming through, conferences are struggling. The number of churches closing far outweighs the number of those being planted. There is less money around to fund mission and ministry. Apart from the over seventies age group people are leaving the Church and active faith in every age group. Attitudes towards Christians in Australia are at best indifferent and at worst antagonistic. If it was not for immigration and the faithfulness of Australian Christians from non-European backgrounds the statistics would look even more terrible.
In such a moment it is easy to become discouraged.
Yet this moment is strangely also thrilling because it presents with a challenge.
Our Australian context is home to a particularly virulent form of secularism. A cultural situation which presents a unique set of blockages to faith. We face;
The Secularism of the Moment: The Christian faith is a historical faith. It remembers the past, and points us towards God’s coming victory in the future. In contrast our nation’s ahistoricalism borders on the pagan. We choose to ignore the pain of our Aboriginal history. We forget the pain of our white history. We turn a blind eye to the pain of our Chinese history. Instead we bow down in worship of the ephemeral. We are a nation enslaved to the moment.
The Secularism of Rootlessness: The Bible is a record of covenants, commitments and connections. Yet these words strike fear into the contemporary Australian heart. We are a rootless people. In contrast to the original inhabitants of this nation we have little or no connection to our land, instead we remain constantly on the move relationally, geographically and psychically. Nomads in a portable bubbles of individualism.
The Secularism of Success: In a time when other countries are struggling economically, Australians are now the richest people in the World. My home of Melbourne, is listed at the world’s most livable city, and Australia is listed by Newsweek as the world’s best medium sized country. Many Australians are experiencing one of the global history’s highest standards of living, yet such wealth presents a clear and present danger. We are materially rich, yet spiritually poor. In our time of plenty, we can forget the poor in our midst, we can forget those seeking refuge at our shores, we can forget God. We have become a content-lite nation, not really standing for anything beyond some platitudes about freedom, fairness and casualness which could easily be as applied to New Zealand or Canada. We are living up to historian Manning Clark moniker – the kingdom of nothingness. We lie reassuring comfort of our warm, scented and candle lit bath, allowing ourselves to be soothed by the relaxing music, unaware that under the water we are spiritually bleeding to death.
The Secularism of Post-Christianity: Go to a conference on mission in Europe or America and you will hear the term post-christendom thrown around. Observers were labeling Australia post-Christian in the 18th century. Our first minister the Reverend Richard Johnson found the colonial government totally unsupportive of his efforts. He asked for money to build a church and received nothing, eventually in frustration he raised the money himself and built a chapel for five hundred people. At the Christmas service only about forty people showed up, not too long after his chapel, our nation’s first church was burnt down, Johnson returned home to England sick and discouraged. We have no history of a powerful and strong state Church to look back to, our nation has never been shaken by a great awakening. Our founding fathers were more disciples of Jeremy Bentham than of Christ. In the Australian imagination the Church and the Christian faith remains a peripheral oddity.
Communicating the gospel and living the way of Jesus in this environment is the great task before us.
This is a daunting challenge, but nevertheless it is a challenge that God has allowed us to face. Yes, there will be less money, but that will mean we will have to work smarter. Yes, there will be less comrades beside us but that means we will have to turn more to God. Yes, we will seem like cultural oddities but this will keep us humble. Yes, as believers in the nation we face indifference and antagonism, but what would you rather, be thrown in a prison cell for your faith, or have the hipster barrista look at you strangely for reading your bible whilst you sip your single sourced, shade grown, organic, relationally traded, perfectly crafted latte?
The future of the Church in this nation is dependent on how we respond to God’s challenge to us to make disciples and live out his kingdom. It’s our watch. Your faithfulness, your obedience, your response to God counts. You are not just some nobody inconsequentially toiling away in the sunny yet lost kingdom of Oz. God has placed you here for a purpose.
I believe that Australia despite being hidden away down under is actually in a strategic position. The form of secularism which is normal to us is springing up all over the West and the developed world. Already Australian leaders such as Alan Hirsch, John Dickson and Mike Frost are applying lessons that they have learnt here in other Western contexts. Our learnings, victories and failures will be instructive far beyond our shores. We are the post-Christendom laboratory for the rest of the West. When you walk out the front door of your house you are entering the cutting edge of secular culture in the West.
Standing before such a gospel resistant culture we may feel like a tiny mountain climber standing before a soaring and seeming unassailable peak. In such a moment our eyes can be drawn to gentle grassy hills in the distance. Yet we have to ask ourselves ‘Who wants to give their lives to climbing gentle hills when we can take on such a staggering peak.’
Besides, look outside, the sun is out.
Date posted: February 2, 2012
Excerpt from my new book The Road Trip That Changed the World.
In 1947 Jack Kerouac set off on a road trip that would reshape the mental landscape of almost everyone born in the West since that date. His cross-country jaunt would change how we viewed the world, processed our lives and interacted with our faiths. It would alter the cultural code of the West, re-orientating our collective psyches around the idea of the road.
Kerouac recorded his road trips in his classic book On the Road. Even if you have never read the book, you have been influenced by it. It. almost more than any other work, laid the foundation for the culture of the road. It would ensure that Kerouac for decades would operate as a kind of template for the cool, brooding, hipster—would be a sort of grandfather for punk, indie, and everything cool that has come since.
It would be read by millions, but its approach to life would be imitated in one form or another, by millions who had never read the book. True, the release of the book did not change the culture single-handedly but tapped into the desire for change that was already bubbling under the surface. Kerouac’s friend, the author William S. Burroughs, remarked, “The restlessness, the dissatisfaction were already there waiting when Kerouac pointed out the road.” Yet it was Kerouac’s motif of the road that provided the spark that would ignite the fire of cultural change.
Before Kerouac changed the life script of the West, life was processed through the idea of home. Home was not just a building in which you lived. It was a place to which you were deeply connected. Home was a family and a community of people to whom you belonged. Home was a unified worldview. This worldview infused every part of your life: it informed your recreational life, your work life, your religious life, even your sex life. This sense of home was held together by traditions and a way of life to which the individual submitted.
Despite these traditions restricting options and personal freedoms, the ideal of home gave the individual a sense of purpose, belonging and place. You did not need to discover who you were. Your sense of rootedness and your communal connections gave you a sense of self, an identity that was set and solid. Sure, not everyone experienced home in this way, but for the culture it was the ideal; a secure home and a loving community was what we hoped for. Journalist Thomas Friedman uses the symbol of the olive tree to describe this worldview of home:
“Olive trees are important. They represent everything that roots us, anchors us, identifies us and locates us in this world – whether it be belonging to a family, a community, a tribe, a nation, a religion or, most of all a placed called home. Olive trees are what give us the warmth of family, the joy of individuality, the intimacy of personal rituals, the depth of private relationships, as well as the confidence and security to reach out and encounter others.”
Today we could not be in a more different space. No longer do we view our lives through the ideal of home. Thanks to Jack Kerouac, our ideal is the road. We view life through the prism of the journey.
An award winning commercial for Louis Vuitton exemplifies this ideal. It features lush, cinematic shots of attractive individuals in deserts, cities, and exotic locales. There is a deeply sensual tone to the commercial. A suited man takes off his shoes and walks barefoot on the Saharan sand. Another man stands before the vista of an exquisite river, exhaling a cloud of visible breath in the cool morning air. A young female traveler sleeping in the alcove of a Tibetan village is awakened by the wind moving through her hair. Pages rustle in a journal; a young man drinks in both his tea and the sight of Shanghai at dawn. Across the screen come a series of statements and questions:
What is a journey?
A journey is not a trip. It’s not a vacation. It’s a process. A discovery.
It’s a process of self-discovery. A journey brings us face to face with ourselves. Does the person create the journey, or does the journey create
the person?
The journey is life itself. Where will life take you?
It is easy to see why this commercial is award winning. It is beautifully shot, drenched with evocative images. Its romanticism resonates with us because it reveals one of the great values that our contemporary culture holds dear—that life is a journey. That true meaning and happiness are found on the road
The contemporary self does not have to literally be on the move to be on the road. Being on the road is primarily a state of mind, one which constantly is dissatisfied, looking for the next best thing, living in incompleteness, always engaged in a quest for a sense of significance. This search for meaning becomes even more problematic in a culture which flees from objective truth, which fears authority and the holding of belief too strongly. The contemporary person finds themselves engaged in a quest for a truth they are told that they cannot find. In which the act of questing itself is given more importance than the completion of the quest. In such an environment the worldview of the road is triumphant.
The road has made us fickle. It has made our faiths weak. It has made us spoiled. To state it in its most brutal and blatant form, the road is ruining our lives and it is ruining our culture. It has left us lost and directionless, consumers not followers of God. When we open the pages of Scripture we find a different kind of person from the person of the road. A person of the way. The way of Christ. A pilgrim of a road that does not lead to the tantalizing potential of a future destination but instead to a wooden cross. A way that promises life eternal but that also demands total obedience, complete surrender and death to self.
____________________________________________________________
If you would like to explore what it is to live out a Christian faith in a culture of The Road make sure that you get along to our event The Road. Just click on the image below to find out more.
Date posted: January 24, 2012
Wow. Lots of responses to my last article on masculinity and evangelicalism. A number of people have asked for some further clarifications. I noticed also that a number of people slightly misunderstood what I was attempting to say.
I was saying that evangelicalism of the 18th century saw one of its missions as challenging the aggressive, arrogant and violent code of machismo that dominated the public imagination of what it was to be a male.
By the beginning of the 20th century the public consciousness of what it was to be a male had radically altered, the code of machismo was on the whole consigned to the past. This is evidenced in the way that fascism in the early 2oth century saw contemporary modes of ‘the soft male’ as an obstacle to its goals of recreating society. Hitler lambasted the state of pre-war German masculinity, accusing it of passivity, weakness and effeminacy. Thus Hitler took a page out of Mussolini’s book and reached back into history for an alternate model of masculinity that predated Christianity’s softening.*
So what I am saying is that evangelicalism softened masculinity and that was a good thing. I think this re-envisioning of masculinity can be counted as one of its great achievements. This move created much of the social spaces of freedom in our culture today that we take for granted.
Yet in our day this softening has intensified, moving beyond the place of balance into passivity and indifference. The social dislocation of contemporary society and the aimlessness of secularism alongside numerous other factors have contributed as well.
I believe that Genesis teaches us that masculinity moves to two extremes in sin. Adam’s silence while the serpent tempts Eve points us to the sin of passivity. Cain’s murderous rage towards his brother illuminates the sin of violence. Masculinity in different cultures will move from one extreme to the other. Sometimes both extremes will be on view. All around us in the comfortable West is the sin of male passivity. The danger is that when we ignore history we attempt to solve today’s sins by ignoring the sins of the past. To return to a mode of machismo to rectify today’s passivity will only again open pandora’s box of violence, anger and arrogance.
What we need more than anything today, is not a new or old model of masculinity, but a biblical model of masculinity. One that is balanced, that does not fall into the extremes of passivity and weakness or it’s polar opposites of arrogance and violence.
Where do we find that balance? Well I think that the last word should be left to one of my readers, Jono Smith a pastor from Melbourne who wrote the following comment after reading the original article.
“Jesus was tougher and more tender than me. I need the Spirit to grow me in both directions.”
Amen Jono.
*(Of course the death of the code of machismo would see the reduction of individualist and small scale outbreaks of violence in the West, but sadly as history progressed the state would become main arbiter of violence. This transition from the medieval code of machismo to the modern mode of state sponsored violence is powerfully communicated in Tolstoy’s War and Peace which begins with aristocratic duelling and ends with total Napoleonic war.)
Read more blog posts
