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

Ultimately, few church leaders, consultants, or denominational officials have seen that calling the church to catch up to technological acceleration will have a deeper impact than just making the church more culturally relevant. Accelerating in the technological dimension will result in shifting the moral norms (social change) and the speed of our

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 pastor somehow needs to take a fifty-person church with few resources, in a denomination of depleted assets, and speed things up to create a five-thousand-member church. Her first step is to make it relevant to fast people living in a compressed present, seeking the good of multiple lifetimes. Retention with these fast-paced people is won by gi

The child is greatest in the kingdom because she is the kind of creature who needs others, who directly lives out of the resonance of a relationship with another. She is resonating with a depth of life itself in and through relationship. The phenomenological level of resonance, affection, and emotion is inescapable when we experience an ontological

when my experience can no longer be expected to deliver me into socially affirmed norms, I’m struck with a sense that I’m old. I’m of the past because my experience no longer helps me anticipate how to be in the world.

And speeding up time creates, and keeps us in, the secular age. It does not just keep people too busy to go to church.66 It keeps their lives moving at such a frantic pace that all the transcendent quality of mystery, divine discourse, and openness to spiritual encounter is drowned out in acceleration.67 Our attention is focused too fully on immane

The decay rate of the practices and perspectives of production and reproduction clicked forward, moving from a rate of intergenerational to generational to intragenerational—that is, from multiple generations, to one lifetime, to the ability to live multiple lives in one lifetime.

Depression breeds within the freedom to change and then change again and again, but this freedom never delivers on the promise that this change will produce the good life we seek and the meaning we need. Depression is us facing this horizon and realizing that we don’t have the energy or time to reach it.

But when this fullness is in the form of busyness, the congregation finds it hard to offer a moral horizon that encompasses fullness in the kingdom of God, participation in the life of the Trinity, and ministry to the world.