The Blooming Bride:

The Changing Face of the Church in America

“To Captain Meriwether Lewis,The object of your mission is to explore the Missouri River, and such principal stream of it, as by its course and communication with the waters of the Pacific Ocean… may offer the most direct and practicable water communication across this continent for the purposes of commerce.”

-Thomas Jefferson

Lemhi Pass looking the west.

WHAT IS AHEAD OF US IS COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THAN WHAT IS BEHIND US.

What is ahead of us?

The Changing Landscape:• Post Christendom– “There once was a time when if a man wasn’t on

church on Sunday, his boss asked him about it on Monday.”

Christendom

• 1,700 year period era with Christianity at the privileged center of Western cultural life.

• “Blue laws” and The Ten Commandments in schools

• “Under God” in the pledge

• LA Times Dec. 1963 featuring the Warren Commission (9,000 member Hollywood Pres.) daily bible readings for the upcoming week.

What is the research telling us?

Pew Research Study

• 2007-2014, US population increased by 18 mil• Other faiths increased from 4.7-5.9%• Unaffiliated (atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in

particular” increased from 16.1% to 22.8%.• R.U. increased 19 million and are second

largest “religious affiliation”

The Chruch as apostolic

• Apostolic isn’t to claim a name or credibility, but rather vocation. Like Mr. Farmer buying land and planting crops like his ancestors once did.

• The mission is clear but we are in uncharted territories.

If things are changing, then how can we respond?

There must be a change in culture

Technical Problems vs. Adaptive Change

Technical problems are those to where the solutions are available to and within the

repertoire of the community.

“Adaptive challenge by contrast, are those that “cannot be solved with one’s existing knowledge and skills, requiring people to

make a shift in their values, expectations, attitudes, and or habits of behavior.”

A matter of values

Explicit vs. Implicit values

Culture eats strategy for breakfast

How do you change a culture?

SEX

Adaptive Work

• to learn and adapt, we need new, creative experiments in relationships and purposes

• when we are experimenting with new solutions within a living system, we are doing so with something that has a history, is alive and precious, and must be handled with care.

• People aren’t afraid of change, they are afraid of loss

• Dissecting squirrels

Adaptive capacity: the resilience of people and the capacity of systems to engage in problem-defining and problem-solving work in

the midst of adaptive pressures and the resulting disequilibrium.

Finding guides for new terrain

Sacagawea

• “... the only member of the Corps of Discovery who was not in uncharted territory when they crossed the Continental Divide and headed over the Rocky Mountains was the teenage mother with her nursing baby. Sacagawea was not venturing into unexplored territory, she was going home.”

• “Those who had neither power nor privilege in the Christendom world are the trustworthy guides and necessary leaders when we go off the map. They are not going into uncharted territory. They are at home.”

• “Christendom can be helped by learning to look to and partner with those who have already been living in post-Christendom marginality.”

Ideas, content, and quotes largely taken from:

Canoeing the Mountains by Todd Bolsinger

The Next Evangelicalism by Soong-Chan Rah