The Congregation in a Secular Age (Ministry in a Secular Age Book #3): Keeping Sacred Time against the Speed of Modern Life

Resonance, while open to mystery, is never abstract but rather always concrete. Reading that poem, watching that movie, looking over that mountain vista, laughing and playing with that four-year-old. Such experiences are full. You feel a resonance between yourself and the world, a felt relationship that reverberates at the frequency of the good.

American Protestantism, whether in megachurch or mainline form, has done the same. This is not an insignificant choice. Choosing speed and growth over personhood10 allows our relationships to be instrumentalized. Relationships are used as instruments to attain something other than relationship.

Sacred time was the time that mattered, the time you set your being to.11 You did so because sacred time was a full and gathered time, not an accelerating time.

The pastor or priest would perform these powerful practices to bring heaven to earth whether people showed up or not. The practices were done against the horizon of sacred time. They were necessary and direct links to the divine.

The second element of efficacy is elusiveness.

this third dimension—the continued increase in the pace of our day-to-day lives—shows most clearly that alienation is a direct effect of acceleration.

For the kingdom of heaven is one of life, of belonging and meaning, not of alienation. Therefore, Jesus calls the child to stand among these resource-obsessed disciples, and he says, “Unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 18:3).

Eros love moves in (it is the motion of) passion for the other. To make these claims is to affirm the centrality of change. There is a movement from something to something else. This is change.

The problem is that, recognizing the need for time and that time is motion, modernity became infatuated with making time its own horizon. It cut time loose from persons in relation (stripping being from relationality).