How A Reformation Builds

If it is true that God is working an interdependence reformation in our day, how should we expect that to develop? Doubtless there is much that we cannot predict, but is there anything we can expect? To the extent that there is a "recipe for reformation", what is it?

As we've explored in the last few posts, the Reformation of 500 years ago (perhaps in our terminology we could call it the independence reformation) proceeded along these lines:

1. An enabling technology (the printing press) that began to seed patterns of behavior moving towards independence. This technology disrupted the status quo of society and created a swirl of change.
2. The reformers then reframe the gospel in the language of independence and redesign the shape of the church to match the independent shape the world is growing into.
3. The church then acts as a moral, theological, and social anchor point that helps work this independent shape into every nook and cranny of society (government, economics, etc) over the next few hundred years.

A technology provided the context, the reformers reframed the gospel and reinvented the church, and the church worked to disciple the nations. There were doubtless dozens, maybe hundreds of other factors in play, but I would argue that at least this much happened in this order.

In general, I don't know how an interdependence reformation could proceed in a different pattern. Without the enabling technology, no reformation could be actualized. In may be truth spoken, but there is no good soil for the truth to land in. (This is, sadly what happened to John Hus, a pre-reformer who taught virtually the same message as Martin Luther did, but before the printing press.) The enabling technology allows the church & world to begin to step into a new shape, so it is a necessary prerequisite.

As this disruptive technology begins to break up existing patterns in society and establish new ones, it is only natural that the form of the church based upon those older patterns feels increasingly at odds with the new world that is forming. It is off the previous pattern: it is an old wineskin and cannot hold new wine. As a result, the church feels a growing strain with the culture. It looks more and more out-of-date, antiquated.

In this environment, the reformers did a deep reinvention of Church. It is important to realize how deep they went: this wasn't an update on the model of church: they recast the message. They edited what we call the gospel. They had immense courage: casting off centuries of tradition and understanding and they reread the Bible for themselves, seeing it in a new light because their context enabled them to do so. It wasn't that they Scriptures had changed of course; but their mental frames had changed because they were people their current world, and those mental frames allowed them to process the words of the Bible in a new way. As a result, they saw something different and they preached something that felt "new".

In my opinion, this is the challenge of our present moment. Most of the "innovation" I see in the church at this point isn't new or innovative at all: it is preaching the same message with the same mentality, and updating some of the tools. We need the courage to press deeper than that. We need the courage to go back to the message itself and see the gospel in a new, interdependent light, and then build an interdependent church from scratch. If it's not different enough that it makes people feel uncomfortable, we're probably not anywhere near the right territory. Wars were fought for years over the reformation; there was more than a little disruption of the established way of the Church.

This is what I believe my assignment to be:

Work to establish an interdependent understanding of the gospel, and work to build a corresponding interdependent church.

This is what I have to give my life towards and what brings us to this whole conversation. Having seen all of this, I cannot do anything other than this: to invest in anything else feels somewhat like a waste of time comparatively. From here on out, the rest of these articles explore these two things: what ideas do I have about an interdependent story of the gospel, and why I believe Phoenix may be the right place to go and begin to build an interdependent church.