I see many churches wanting to reach out to the ‘Emergent Generation’ or postmodern crowd. You can read all kinds of books and attend workshops on this topic. Church planters read books, blog, chat, and research their target to the hilt.
Then, they set out to reach these people with edgy websites, and other promotional resources filled with angst-ridden copy that is designed to appeal to the emergent person. ‘Are you sick of fake religion? Do you want to get real?’
Meanwhile, go to the local mall (or other public place) next time it is crowded with people and see if they will let you make an announcement, ‘Attention shoppers, will all the emergent and postmodern people please report to the information booth?’
Within minutes all you would have show up at the information booth would be a couple of hold-out Hippies and several over-cappuccino’ed, goatee-laden ordained guys carrying their Macintoshes.
Postmodern/Emergent people don’t exist really. The terms are shorthand tools for ministry people to talk about how we have cloistered ourselves into Christian ghettos of our own making for the last 30 years and only recently realized the worldview changed on us while we were at our Christian bookstores, conferences and concerts.
(Via Unchurched People Don’t Exist.)
I don’t even know where to start, except to express that the approach towards persons who have been labeled unchurched, and them more specifically postmodern, shows a complete lack of understanding for the worldview shift that has been occurring over the past several decades. He later mentions how you can’t “buy a mailing list to reach young and emergent people looking for real meaning in their life.”
Self-identity is not required to be part of a grouping. For a negative example of this, do you think most wife-beaters would gladly self-identify with physical abusers? Or are they just losing their temper once in awhile? What defines a group is common traits and characteristics not self-identity or even awareness of the terms.
Of course, the approach of marketing the church is not one I’m keen on, so I’m not sure how much I would want to help out this misunderstanding. A part of me thinks, “Yes, please keep thinking this way and don’t do further damage to the people who are already extremely difficult to reach with the good news about the Kingdom of God.”
Besides faulty analysis at what makes a group, the approach is one which is doomed to failure for the very types of person the writer speaks of. Just look again at how he sees the church’s efforts to “reach” postmodern people: “edgy websites, and other promotional resources filled with angst-ridden copy that is designed to appeal to the emergent person. ‘Are you sick of fake religion? Do you want to get real?’”
Any one truly falling into the postmodern category would indeed fail with these efforts, as the writer clearly suggests. However, his solutions are to analyze, define, and implement a ministry. Here’s a bit of honest advice: if programmed, institutional religion is something your target group loathes, do not create an institutional program to reach them. Just a thought.
In fact, the mindset of gearing ministries towards reaching a segment of the population is flawed on many levels. For one, it furthers the consumer-driven mentality of today’s established church. We’re looking at marketing subjects and try to give them a product they’ll buy. Also, why would we expect what postmoderns want to be anything like the Church? We should remove obstacles from our carried over philosophies, but the Church will not inherently be attractive to someone who is not following Jesus. Unless we make the Church act like something She’s not. For one, the Church is a diverse body, and breaking even the local church into highly specialized segments of people who are all alike is not allowing the Church to be who She is.
The better approach would be to take seriously the criticisms of postmoderns (both the philosophical and cultural versions of postmodernity) and change the ministry based on the valid critique while striving to maintain both a proper biblical, cultural, and historical approach to the life of the local church. Of course, it’s much easier to put on a show and do a mailer.
One last thing. The author ends with a decent paragraph, but based on the rest of the approach, I see a huge problem. Seeing from another person’s perspective is a good thing, but when it’s mired in a marketing campaign you are reducing each person to a commodity. If you truly see from a “postmodern” persons perspective, you should know that this approach is the kind that will doom your outreach to failure.
You can reach unchurched people, but you need to take yourself out of the picture and really learn to think from the perspective of the people you want to reach. Spend less time thinking about what you want them to think, do and be until you understand what they do, what they think and what they are. Then with your understanding of them you can develop meaningful segments and develop great ministry outreach.
Technorati Tags:
ecclesiology, emergingchurch
Seeing from another person’s perspective is a good thing, but when it’s mired in a marketing campaign you are reducing each person to a commodity. If you truly see from a “postmodern†persons perspective, you should know that this approach is the kind that will doom your outreach to failure.
I won’t speak to the postmodern critique, but it does seem wholly inappropriate to reduce the Gospel to a marketing scheme.
John
January 13th, 2007