GYC SE 2011: A New Beginning

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GYC Southeast

GYC SE 2011 Seminar: Reaching Postmoderns

Alan Parker

Paradigm Shifts: Understanding Postmodernism

Father God, we want to thank you for being with us.

We pray that as we examine postmodernism that you'll help us to understand the world we live in.

We're grateful, Lord, that you have given us this opportunity to meet together, to think about how we can more effectively engage with postmodernism.

We pray now for your Holy Spirit to be present.

Well, when I think about what's happened lately, I see that we've had what I call the eye revolution.

Now this is a fake picture, since he won't be here in 2012.

And there's Steve Jobs if he was to do his next big project.

But that's actually just photoshopped, So it's not real.

So you take a look at that and you realize that there has been a lot of difference in the world that we're looking in.

This world is changing drastically and I look at what is going on in our world and I start seeing there has been a shift and that's who I want to take a look at, a shift in the way people view the world.

So this was during the 2005 Stanford graduation, and Steve Jobs gave his graduation speech to the class.

And he said this, your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.

Kind of doctrine, don't be tracked by traditional doctrine.

Which is living the results of other people's thinking.

Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice.

And Most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.

They somehow already know what you truly want to become, and everything else is secondary.

Now at first, when I first watched this, I was like, wow, you go, Jobs.

So I thought, man, this sounds really good.

But the more I looked at it, the more postmodern I realized it had become.

And I started looking at some of the things here, don't be trapped by dogma.

Don't live with the results of other people's thinking.

1 is that Today, as our world is changing, we're moving from truth to meaning.

So he was more worried about what is meaningful for me than what is a truth that has been handed down through the ages.

That's very different from the way the world used to be.

A second point that comes out here is there's a move from facts, supplied by other people, to feeling.

And Steve Jobs has this idea that you just follow your heart.

And it already will teach you what you need to know.

In the past, you got a body of material together and you got the facts, and then you made sure that you were in harmony with the facts.

You just need to be able to have intuition and feeling.

So what we're going to talk about a little bit is your window on the world.

If you were in a house and you had 4 different windows and they each looked over a different part of the yard, when you look out that window, would you see the same as what someone else would see.

No, you'd see a different part of the art.

Maybe 1 person would look over the garden and see the cucumbers and the tomatoes.

Another person would look over the flowers and they would see that part.

Another person over the hedge, another person over the road.

Now what happens in postmodernism is this idea that everybody shapes their own destiny, and that's kind of what Steve Jobs was saying.

Everyone has their own view on the world.

You see this, I see this, someone else sees something else.

It's kind of like the old Indian parable about these blind men who went up and felt an elephant.

And the 1 grabbed hold of the tail and said, you know, An elephant is like a snake.

And then another 1 went and grabbed hold of the leg and said, no, no, no, you're wrong, an elephant is like a tree.

And another 1 said, no, you're absolutely wrong.

An elephant is like a wall, because he was touching the side.

And another 1 said, no, no, that's totally wrong.

An elephant is like a spear because he was holding the tusk.

That's basically the idea of postmodernism.

So when you look at it, you're like, hey, man, this looks like truth.

But it's always gonna be limited to what you can see, your particular view of the world.

They brought up this fancy term to say, this is a set way of looking at the world.

Now there, you may not be able to see it very well, but that is a flat world.

So people used to believe that the Earth was flat.

Now, how many of you believe the Earth is flat?

And from medieval times, they said, well, look, if you look down the road, does it look flat?

Then other people came and said, no, no, not at all.

If you look, when you see a ship coming towards you on the sea, first you see the mast, And then you see the rest of the ship, which means the world is probably curved.

You look up at the sky and what does the moon look like?

So they said, what if the Earth is round?

The church has always said the Earth is flat.

Some of The greatest theologians have said that the Earth is flat.

Parable: Sharing Your Faith with Postmoderns

I'm going to be talking about how to share your faith with post-moderns, and I'm not going to be talking about the philosophical post-modernism.

Derrida, and we could get into philosophical concepts, But I'm dealing with the concepts that are out there in the everyday world, the friends that you know, and how you can go about sharing your faith effectively with people who sometimes think very differently from you.

Now, as a reminder, 2 things about postmoderns.

You can have truth for yourself, but it doesn't apply to everybody else.

So that's the first part, reject truth claims and certainty.

And then secondly, they focus on their personal feelings or intuition.

So let's do a quick quiz if you were in the last section.

And then postmodern people, where do they get their truth?

When you're thinking about this, It's kind of like saying, let me take in the modernistic paradigm, I would give you the whole apple and dissect it and have you eat the whole apple and it represents the whole apple.

In the postmodern paradigm, When I give you truth, it's like I'm giving you little segments of an orange.

And I'm saying, eat this little segment and see what you think.

So you're not getting the whole picture, you're just getting a little slice, a little piece.

And you find out what meaning there is for you in it.

Now let's think about how we do traditional evangelism and compare it with the postmodern person.

So they get a little flyer in the mail and it's got 1 of these scary beasts.

Somebody who wasn't a very good graphic artist was involved in this 1.

And yeah, you know, this beast is coming out of the sea.

What's the likelihood that they're going to come to your meeting?

What are they going to think of the church that sends this out?

We can adjust our evangelistic meetings so that they don't look like this.

Or we can simply say these people are not gonna come out to these kinds of meetings, so we may as well go ahead and attract the people who will come to understand prophecy.

Now I've gone through different phases and I've tried to do a postmodern evangelistic meeting.

I mean, people don't come out, no matter what kind of advertising I use, to an event at a Seventh-day Adventist church to learn about Bible prophecy, if they're a postmodern person in general.

And when they do come, they get frightened away after 1 or 2 nights.

So I realized If I'm going to do this, I may as well do this and attract the people who will come out.

I'm not saying you always need to use ugly beasts like this.

But you bring up prophecy symbols, you are going to get a crowd.

And I said, when I'm doing an evangelistic meeting, I'm going to preach prophecy.

I'm just going to go ahead and preach the prophecy because who am I going to get?

But then what am I going to do about the postmoderns?

No, I've got to have Jesus' love for them.

So I've looked through postmodernism and I've thought through my postmodern friends, including my own experience.

Remember I said I'm a recovering postmodern.

And I've thought through my own experience and I've looked at the literature and I've come up with some things that help us to understand who postmoderns are.

Postmoderns want to, what's the key word?

Now that's not how we do traditional evangelistic meetings.

We advertise, we come and we teach them doctrines.

And then when they get to the end of the doctrines, we say, now, how many of you want to belong?

But is that going to work for postmoderns?

No, they're going to work the opposite way around.

So I was thinking back, friends of mine who are postmodern, who have ended up becoming Seventh-day Adventists.

And you know what, sometimes they would attend church for a year without making any decision.

I went to Seventh-day Adventist church at the age of 14, being somewhat postmodern, not completely.

And I attended for a whole year and a half before I finally decided to get baptized.

Because first I wanted to be part of the community.

And then later on I said, by the way, what do you guys believe?

And they said, well, you don't know what we believe.

So when you have that perspective, then you can see why we need community.

Now I'm quoting here from Russell Burrell, a great book called The Revolutionized Church of the 21st Century, and it's about the need for small groups in the church.

I'm just going to give you a quick overview of my opinion.

Yeah, we come to Sabbath school, you know, we put on a whole program.

We are incredible at programs at that age.

So when we bring up the kids, they don't really know community.

Radical: Ten Ways to Impact Your World

Now I want to pretend to be a postmodernist.

And the reason why is that I really think we can learn from postmodernists.

And that maybe this crisis of postmodernism can help us reinvent the church.

Now I'm not gonna throw out those central tenets of the faith that are so powerful and meaningful to me.

I think that's a mistake of postmodernism.

But I do think we have something to learn.

And so I've entitled this presentation Postmodern Radical, 10 Ways to Make a Difference in Your World.

And these are not exclusive, they're just to get us thinking.

10 ways I want to throw out there to get us thinking.

But before we begin, let's invite God's presence.

Father, it's been so incredible to see you at work, and as we meet this afternoon, you know the challenges that people are going through.

I just ask for their focus now as we rethink the church, as we rethink what it is you're calling us to do.

And Lord, I pray that we will leave from here not just with theoretical knowledge, but with a determination to make an impact on our world.

Had a young person come to me and they had a really interesting statement.

They said, I don't feel like going to church.

And for a while I thought of turning back to them and saying, well, I don't either.

But I had something even more radical to say to them.

That's like rule 101 in pastoral vocabulary.

You don't tell people not to go to church.

They said, how can you tell me not to go to church?

I said, I have something more radical to tell you.

See the church in the New Testament was not a building.

In fact, buildings only came in the third and fourth centuries.

So you didn't want to build a building here.

Here we are, come get us, throw us to the lions.

And so when they talked about church in the New Testament, they talked about people gathering together to worship God and to be on a mission for God.

So I said, the problem is, you're going to church to be a spectator.

He called us to go to church so that we could be the church.

So if you're just going to church to visit, yeah, that's boring.

It's like the pastor who was up in front of the church 1 day and he said, we're going to have a board meeting after church with all the board members.

So 1 guy comes up And he says, you're not a board member.

And the man says, pastor, if there's any member who's more bored than I am, I'd like to know about it.

Well, if you go to church, yeah, you're going to find that church is boring.

But when you are the church, something changes.

And I am going to suggest to you a reinvention of how we think about church.

I want to give you 10 strategies for how you can make a difference in your church and make a difference in your world.

And So I'm just going to throw them out there and see what you think.

Number 1, strategy number 1, pray for rain.

Now we've talked a lot about the Holy Spirit in the last years, ever since General Conference a year ago.

We're going to pray for things, but it's not really happening.

And 1 of the most powerful experiences I've had is when I've gone to prayer sessions.

We would do these like little popcorn prayers and we start praying for God to work in our lives and we start giving thanks to God and we start bringing our requests to God.

And there's people, they call it United Prayer, they'll send us prayer the whole night.

And it's so powerful when God's people gather for prayer.

My wife and I have started praying every night, God, send us the Holy Spirit, fill our lives with the Holy Spirit.

That's in contrast to what is really going on.

This is what David Watson says, If God were to take the Holy Spirit out of our midst today, about 95% of what we're doing in our churches would go on, and we wouldn't even know the difference.

And it's true, 1 of my fellow doctoral students, he had this awful dissertation, I don't know why he did it.

He wrote a dissertation on church boards.

He went to, I forget what it was, like 50 church boards in a year.

And so he gets up and he says, apart from a little devotional thought at the beginning and a prayer at the end, that's the only time the name of Jesus or God was ever used.

We treated church just like it was a business.

How many of you want something different than that?

How many of you want to be in a church which is filled with the Holy Spirit?

You know, the only way it's going to happen is when your life is filled with the Holy Spirit.

Now let me just get pumped up a little bit here.

You're gonna stand back because this is a passionate area for me.

Wherever the need of the Holy Spirit is a matter little thought of, there's seen spiritual what?

Spiritual darkness, spiritual declension, that's deterioration, and even death.

Acts of the Apostles, page 50, 5 powerful pages.

You really need to read these 5 pages from Acts of the Apostles, just incredible.

And so it goes on to say, since this is the means by which we are to receive what?

Why do we not hunger and thirst for the gift of the Spirit?

Why don't we talk of it, pray for it, and preach concerning it?

For the daily baptism of the Spirit, how often?

Every day, every worker should offer his petition to God.

So how many of you prayed for the Holy Spirit today?

I mean, it's something that we have forgotten, we've neglected, so we try and manufacture it.

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GYC SE 2011 Seminar: Reaching Postmoderns

Radical: Ten Ways to Impact Your World

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