What is Catalyst?
Four issues of Catalyst are mailed each academic year to some 5,000 UM theological students in more than 100 seminaries in the U.S.A.

AFTE
Catalyst is a project of A Foundation for Theological Education (AFTE).

What is the John Wesley Fellowship Program?
Each year AFTE awards up to five John Wesley Fellowships to assist gifted United Methodists in their doctoral studies at the finest universities.

Back Issues
Several back issues of Catalyst are now available on-line.

Subscriptions
Subscription is free for UM seminarians, and is available to all others for $5 per year.

24 TRANSITIONS FOR A POSTMODERN MINISTRY

Groucho Marx once queried of Chico:  “Where are we?” To which Chico replied, “You can’t fool me—we’re right here!”

So, church, where are we? Where is “here”?

A television ad for MCI gives us a clue about where “here” is. A child star chants in what I suspect may be some of the most profound words you are going to hear on tv: “There will be a road. It will not connect two points. It will connect all points. It will not go from here to there.  There will be no there. We will all only be here.”

It is important to know where we are, and how we got there.

We are living in a marching-off-the-map world; we are living in a Genesis-like world; we are living in a world of such blazing speed that there are more changes in a decade than used to occur in an entire century. We are now living in a world that is almost unrecognizable to our grandparents, and our children will live lives that will not be recognizable to us who are their parents. Two of the biggest companies in the world today, Intel and Microsoft, are built on products that our grandparents could not even imagine. One expert predicts that by 2000, half the current job descriptions will no longer exist (interview with Technotrends author D. Burrus, Performance [September 1995] 16).

No wonder people are having trouble making sense of the world. Augustine said there was a time when “it was not absolute nothingness. It was a kind of formlessness with out any definitions.” The modern era’s operator’s manual of how to live in the world no longer works. Poet M. Arnold expressed the sensation for his era when he said we are “wandering between two worlds, one dead and the other powerless to be born.” In the more contemporary words of award-winning poet P. Gross, “How can the centre hold/while maps of half of Europe/ hit the shredders?” (I.D. [Faber, 1995]). Novelist G. Garcia Marquez, at the beginning of his One Hundred Years of Solitude, writes that “The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.”

Not so much “point and click” as point and grunt. I saw an epigraph to a British book recently in which a rider, asked his destination, replied, “Don’t ask me...Ask the bloody horse” (D. Abse, Intermittent Journals).

Sometimes, from Balaam’s ass to Noah’s dove, our animals know more about where we are headed than we do. But this much we can say: “here” is less boundary than border. Indeed, in the course of each one of our lifetimes we have moved from a boundaries-world to a borders-world. All over the globe boundaries are coming down, whether boundaries to keep people out (Wall of China) or boundaries to keep people in (Berlin Wall).

As the MCI child-star chants, the boundary between “here” and “there” is now virtually gone. We are living in a world where any place can be every place. One of the first things I did before coming to Drew was to ask them to take the desk out of the Dean’s office and replace it with a conference table. I do not “do desk.” I do not even “do office” very well either. I have a virtual office that I take with me wherever I go, and find that the boundaries between being actually present and virtually present are becoming smaller and smaller.

For ministry, the implications of this shift are enormous. Boundary-ministry/living is different from border-ministry/living in transforming ways. In boundaries, life is predictable, controllable, familiar, and well-delineated. There are firm conceptual bearings, and one becomes skilled at using categories and concepts that iron out all elements of contradiction, discontinuity, and irrationality from discussions as well as from life

In borders, life is ill-defined, unformulaic, diffuse, and displaced. There is a sense that the limits are endless while the certainties are nonexistent. In a world where everyone is a stranger and yet no one is a stranger (in Hebrew the word for “stranger” [zar] is the root of the word “border”—you cannot have strangers if you do not have borders), everyday living is anxiety-ridden and riddled with uncertainty—and often violent. Biblical scholar D. Jodock, writing of the scholars’ need for battle fatigues while working in these borderlands, writes that “identities now need to be formed amid a prevailing disorientation, a deep existential confusion, and a lack of overarching direction” (The Church’s Bible: Its Contemporary Authority [Fortress, 1989] 87).

Playwright and politician V. Havel, now president of the Czech Republic, observed all this in his acceptance on 4 July 1994 of the Philadelphia Liberty Medal. The “modern age has ended,” he announced. “Today, many things indicate that we are going through a transitional period, when it seems that something is on the way out and something else is painfully being born. It is as if something were crumbling, decaying, and exhausting itself, while something else, still indistinct, were arising from the rubble.”

He, like so many of us, calls this new thing “postmodernism,” and he finds the symbol for what he means by postmodernism in that television ad where a “Bedouin [is] mounted on a camel and clad in traditional robes under which he is wearing jeans, with a transistor radio in his hands and an ad for Coca-Cola on the camel’s back” (“A Time for Transcendence,” Utne Reader [Jan-Feb. 1995] 53, 112).

To make the transition from the modern to the postmodern era, I have developed these 24 Meta-Principles of Ministry. These are part of an interactive CD-ROM group game I am producing called “Ministry Cards”© that will help churches design micro-ministries for their churches and communities. The “from’s” are not meant to be repudiated (God did not put us through the last 500 years for no reason), but to be built upon by the “to’s.” It is assumed that ministers have mastered the “from’s,” and therefore can move to the “to’s.”

24 Transitions for the 21st Century Church
(1) From Critique and Pick-apart to Choose and Pick-up: From Critical Thinking to Creative Thinking
(2) From Monocephalus Leadership to Polycephalus Leadership: From Pyramid to Pancake
(3) From Representation to Participation
(4) From Institutional “Here-I-Stand” Churchianity (Maintenance) to “There-We-Go” Christianity (Mission)
(5) Inwardly Mobile, Inward-Looking Ministry to Outwardly Mobile, Outward-Looking Ministry: Turn the Headlights on (Not the Dome Lights)
(6) From Printed Page to Screen/From Consecutive, Linear to Concurrent, Field/From Word to Image
(7) From Control (Program Design) to Out-of-Control (Process Design or People Design)
(8) From Authority Structures to Relational Structures
(9) From Information Processing which Accesses through Critical Thinking to Modulating/From “Does It Make Sense” to “Was It a Good Experience?”
(10) From Integrity to Authenticity
(11) From Theology of Giving to Theology of Receiving
(12) From Hi-Fi to Stereo (and soon Surround Sound) Spirituality
(13) From Planning Modes to Preparedness Modes and Prophesying Your Way Forward (Think Future and Plan Backward)
(14) From Politics to Economics and Bioeconomics
(15) From Church Growth to Church Health
(16) From Standing Committees to Moving Teams/From Independence to Interdependence (Synergy and Serendipity)
(17) From Nation State to Mega-State
(EC, NAFTA) and Micro-Tribe/From
Nation State to Uni-GIobaI and Multi-
Tribal
(18) From Mass to Demassed Structures (e.g., From Congregational to Cellular Thinking)
(19) From Denomination to Tribe and Postdenominational Movements
(20) From Think Big and Simple to Think Small and Complex
(21) From Boundary-Living to Border-Living
(22) From Churched Culture (“Home Court Advantage”) to Mission Field (“Away Games”)
(23) From Pastoral Care to Ministry Development
(24) (WILD CARD) From “Re” Words to “De” Words

Most of us in ministry today have been theologically educated for a world that is no more. World knowledge doubles every four years. Half-lives of information are becoming smaller and smaller in every field. The half-life of most scientific knowledge (six years) and engineering knowledge (three years) is shrinking fast. Science-fiction writer J. Pournelle says that the computer industry is like a Third World country: there is a revolution every three months.

Cutting edges can quickly become dull edges. Unless leaders keep on their information toes, unless leaders work hard and diligently to stay hot and current, leaders automatically obsolete themselves by an information base for decision-making which gets more and more flawed, shaky, and eventually fatal. If ministers are not constantly learning and unlearning, they are becoming less and less qualified to serve as effective disciples of Jesus Christ. Postmodern leaders are constantly rebuilding themselves, embracing the young and open to the strange.

By Leonard I. Sweet, Dean, Drew University Theological School.