Picture a time of incredible change and rapid progress!
The certainties of yesterday are lost in the progress of today.
As one writer enthuses: “Let the great world spin forever down the ringing groves of change!”
Another significant national leader says in a speech:
“Nobody, however, who has paid any attention to ... our present era, will doubt for a moment that we are living at a period of most wonderful transition, which tends rapidly to accomplish that great end, to which, indeed, all history points ... the unity of mankind [sic]. ....
The distances which separated the different nations and parts of the globe are rapidly vanishing before the achievements of modern invention, and we can traverse them with incredible ease; the languages of all nations are known, and their acquirement placed within the reach of everybody; thought is communicated with the rapidity, and even by the power, of lightning. ...”
“ It is nowadays not easy to recollect how wide was the intellectual gulf which separated the young generation ... from their parents. ... The young men [sic] of the time grew up with the new ideas and accepted them as a matter of course... Our parents lived in an intellectual world which bore no relation to our own; and cut adrift as we were from the intellectual moorings of our upbringings, recognising as we did, that the older men were useless as guides in religion, in science, in philosophy ... we also felt instinctively that we could accept nothing on trust from those who still believed that the early chapters of Genesis accurately described the origin of the universe, and that we had to discover somewhere for ourselves what were the true principles of the ... science of sociology...”
The time I write of is one of great upheaval, discovery, technology and change. The old world and its ways are being swept away.
A breathtaking and new global economy is being birthed.
New injustices and also opportunities are evolving.
Fresh expressions of church are urgently needed and being launched – movements of brave, young and radical followers of Christ who raise the hackles of the traditional religious bureaucracies they are leaving!
I write, of course of the mid 1850’s.
The writers quoted, namely, Alfred Tennyson (Memoir by his son, Vol 1 p 195), Prince Albert (Speech given at a banquet at the Mansion House on 21 March, 1849) and Edward Pease (The History of the Fabian Society, 1916) respectively were each reflecting on a different time - nearly 160 years ago!
The first industrial revolution and the colonial expansion of the European powers had brought about massive social changes that had left the established churches scrambling to catch up.
We now live in the midst of what many are calling the ‘Third Great Industrial Revolution’. Walter Brueggemann describes our time as one in which an old imagined world is lost, although still powerfully cherished. It is a time of bewilderment and fear because there’s no clear understanding of how to order our common imagination differently or better. He states:
I believe we are in a season of transition, when we are watching the collapse of the world as we have known it . . . the value systems and the shapes of knowledge through which we have controlled life are now in great jeopardy. One can paint the picture in very large scope, but the issues do not present themselves to pastors as global issues. They appear as local, even personal, issues, but they are nonetheless pieces of a very large picture. When the fear and anger are immediate and acute, we do not stop to notice how much of our own crisis is a part of the larger one, but it is. (Walter Brueggemann, Hopeful Imagination, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1998, 45-46).
Brueggemann describes this transition as a troubling place to dwell, but it is exactly where we must dwell. There is no other time or place to which God has called us to live but this one.
Alan Roxburgh who has spent several years alongside denominations and congregations reflecting on this says:
“This is where we find ourselves. What we have known, what we have grown up with, is the known world. Yet, many of us are beginning to understand that that world is passing and that we need to imagine our churches from the perspective of their missional future. It is not simply matter of moving from one to the other. We are so deeply embedded in the known world that we must first engage ourselves with the in-between, transitional world, before we begin to imagine the shape of our missional future. (...) God is calling us to become a missionary people to our own culture. We have been cast into this place of transition, like it or not. The reality is that leaders of congregations and denominations, without choice or preparation, have been pushed into this new, in-between place....” (Alan Roxbugh, Crossing The Bridge: Church Leadership In A Time Of Change, 2000 p 17)
This is our time. We have much to learn from the courageous leaders that emerged 160+ years ago asking how the liberation and justice of the gospel was gospel was to be lived and proclaimed in times in an unimaginable world.
