Much has been written recently about why people are leaving churches and/or switching to a different style of church. While I do not have any definitive answers to that question, perhaps what I am about to say has some applicability.

Part of the change is due to a switch from modern to post-modern thinking. Modern thinking grew out of the Age of Enlightenment and was based on the idea that everything is absolute and predictable.  Everything can be analysed and explained.  Everything is rational and is based on the laws of science. In science everything will follow the rules.  In religion everything is based on clearly defined laws emanating from God and found in the Bible. Absolutes. Post-modern thinking says there are no absolutes. In our search for truth, you have your truth and I have mine. This came about when we realized that many things cannot be measured in a lab and that as we get down to smaller and smaller entities in the world of the atom, the “laws” do not apply and physics changes completely.  Suddenly our concept of irrevocable truth was not so irrevocable.  Concepts.

Christians liked the methods of modern thinking in that everything could be rowed up and we could decide exactly what was true and what was not.  But, it could also get messy.  When we had to make leaps of logic in our exegesis and interpretation of scripture, people landed at different places.  As a result, people at each landing place established a church made up of people who had come to the same logical conclusion. Those churches then extended or refused fellowship based on their landing place.  Interestingly, church divisions rarely come over the things that are clearly taught in the scripture. Rather, divisions are based on fallible interpretations over which we differ.

Modern thinkers want absolutes.  Post-modern thinkers seek out concepts. Which is the right way? Actually there is value and validity in both approaches.  Jesus and the New Testament writers used both.  Jesus looked at the Old Testament law with all its rigidity and proclaimed that if a person loves God with all his being and loves his neighbor the same way he loves himself, those two facets of love will produce a person who does everything God wants him to do.  Living by the concepts ultimately produces the absolutes. Obviously there are structural aspects of the church that will not flow out of this love. But, understanding the importance of concepts helps us to more properly interpret the cultural practices and implications of biblical examples and precepts. (For example Paul circumcised Timothy but refused to allow Titus to be circumcised.)

Modernism and post-modernism are opposite peaks on the arc of the pendulum.  We must recognize that some things are always right and some things are always wrong.  At the same time we must be aware that people who base their Christian lives on concepts may very well produce the absolutes and reflect the principles on which the absolutes are based. Also, each culture and each generation will have different ways of expressing and developing their relationship to God and to their fellow-man.

Hopefully we can find a way to capture the best aspects of both the absolutes and the concepts.  Only then will we have stable churches that continue to grow.