“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. ...”
A key political commentator looks back:
“ 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 meteoric change. The old world and its ways are being swept away. A breathtaking and new global economy is being birthed. New injustices and also fresh 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 eighteen-hundreds.
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 their own 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. The second industrial revolution of the early 20th century was fuelled by oil and electricity and mass production.
We ourselves have been living through the third great industrial revolution in which
technology fuelled by the silicon chip has birthed a digital world our parents would not have comprehended.
And now we stand at the brink of an even greater, (fourth?) revolution with the emergence of artificial intelligence set to turn all our societal assumptions upside down.
Walter Brueggemann described our era 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:
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. The second industrial revolution of the early 20th century was fuelled by oil and electricity and mass production.
We ourselves have been living through the third great industrial revolution in which
technology fuelled by the silicon chip has birthed a digital world our parents would not have comprehended.
And now we stand at the brink of an even greater, (fourth?) revolution with the emergence of artificial intelligence set to turn all our societal assumptions upside down.
Walter Brueggemann described our era 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:
"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, 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. (...) 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 Roxburgh, Crossing The Bridge: Church Leadership In A Time Of Change, p 17)
These are our times. We have much to learn from the courageous leaders that emerged 160+ years ago asking how the liberation and justice of the gospel was to be lived and proclaimed in an unimaginable world.
They wrestled with what human dignity and compassion and human meaning looked like in a world where traditional, local cottage industries, ancient and safe village life was being swept away in a tide of change leaving people, bewildered and anxious like sheep without a shepherd.
I wonder how we will respond?
