CHAPTER 1

Changing Church,Changing World

IT'S SUNDAY MORNING, 1952

Mom, Dad, and the kids arrive at church. Nancy is left with the teenagedbabysitter in the nursery. Thomas joins the rest of the teenagers in the youthroom downstairs, where their teacher will try to keep them interested in theBible study lesson. The rest of the family settles into their usual pew. Thepriest, vested in a cassock, surplice, and stole, is assisted by a teenager whois both crucifer and server. The service is Morning Prayer and the prayers andlessons are in Elizabethan English. Bobby and Susan sit impatiently with theirparents until the sermon, when it is time for them to leave for Sunday school.Susan goes to the third-grade class, where she hears a story about Noah and theark and then colors a picture that she'll bring home with her. Bobby is off tothe sixth-grade class, where he learns about the early Christians being thrownto the lions in Rome. He and his friends spend part of the hour pretending to belions, silently roaring while the teacher's back is turned. Meanwhile, theirparents kneel while the priest reads prayers and then they listen to his sermonbefore spending a few minutes at coffee hour chatting with friends. At the endof Sunday school, Mom and Dad gather the children and head home for lunch.

IT'S SUNDAY MORNING, 2010

Dad and the kids arrive at church in time for everyone to head to Sunday school.Dad brings Nancy to the Godly Play worship and she is greeted at the door by anadult, who invites her to find a rug square and join the circle of children withtoday's storyteller on the carpeted floor. Susan and Bobby are immersed in thestory of Noah and the ark for the third week. Susan's group is in the musicroom, where they are learning a song about the animals in the ark. Bobby's groupis in the theater, reenacting the story from the perspective of the animals.Afterward they engage in a lively discussion about what the animals might haveexperienced, their relationship with God, and how global warming might be amodern Noah story. The youth group, just back from a pilgrimage in Ireland, hasbeen engaged in a ministry discernment process and Thomas has decided he feelscalled to serve as a eucharistic visitor. Today he plans to ask David, a man inhis sixties, if he will serve as his ministry mentor. Meanwhile, Dad is in theparlor, where he leads a small group through a process of theological reflectionon the gospel lesson of the day. A second group is discussing a chapter in abook they are studying, while a third group is watching a DVD down the hall.Comfortable sofas, the New York Times, and a smattering of resourcesabout the environment are engaging another loosely assembled group ofindividuals in the library, who gather to read, drink coffee, and chat duringthis hour.

At the end of the hour, Bobby joins the procession as a torchbearer. The priestis wearing the chasuble that the youth group designed out of their pilgrimageexperience; one of the deacons, vested in a matching dalmatic and carrying thegospel book, accompanies her. Susan sits with her dad in a circle of chairsaround a central altar. Nearby there is a rug on the floor with soft toys forNancy and the other little ones. Sometimes Susan helps entertain her sister andthe other children, but usually she is engrossed in the service. Today Susan andher friends are leading the Prayers of the People, so she eagerly awaits herturn at the microphone and proudly reads her intercession while Nancy standswith some of her "rug friends," whom she has gathered to pray with Susan. Theservice uses contemporary language and is printed in a bulletin that alsocontains the hymns. Members of the congregation read the lessons and lead theprayers. At communion time, Dad, Susan, and Nancy all receive the Eucharisttogether; Thomas, as usual, is sitting with his youth group and receives theEucharist with them.

After the service, Dad and the girls head to the lobby to wait for Mom, who iscoming by to pick them up. Next weekend the children will be with her, so Dadchecks the schedule to make sure that none of them are listed to do anything atchurch next Sunday. Mom arrives and the girls head off to Susan's soccerpractice, catching lunch at a fast food place along the way. Thomas leaves witha promise to drop Bobby off at his trumpet lesson while Dad joins a group in theparlor to talk about what their church needs to do to help newcomers understandthe Episcopal Church and its theology in the midst of the current crisis aroundthe full inclusion of homosexual persons.

a changing world

The church has always sought to follow Jesus' commandment to "make disciples ofall nations" (Matt. 28:19) and to help Christians of all ages to grow in faithand the love of God. How the church makes and nurtures those disciples haschanged over the centuries, in order to meet the needs of the people living inany given time. Yet those of us living at the beginning of the twenty-firstcentury know the world has changed quite dramatically in the last fifty years:many people talk about a "paradigm shift" that is both fundamental and global.At the heart of this shift is the move from modernism to postmodernism andbeyond, from the machine age to the technological age.

The machine became the primary icon of the Industrial Revolution. Machines notonly dominated how people did work, they also came to dominate how peoplethought and organized their lives—and eventually even how the churchformed its members in the faith. Machines led to the atomization of life. Toinvent a machine, you break down the work required to accomplish a task into aseries of individual, discrete steps (atomization) and then create a machinethat replicates each step. This process of atomization and the ordering ofthings into a linear, logical order, embodied in the scientific method, wasapplied to almost all aspects of human life.

In the realm of medicine, for example, instead of treating patientsholistically, medical specialties were developed in which a doctor treated justone part of the body. Instead of a single person creating a product from startto finish, factories were designed in which a person added just one part to theproduct while it moved down a conveyor belt. Even decision-making becameatomized and organized into bureaucratic organizations comprised of executivesand committees whose primary reason for existing was to make a decision and thenpass it along the conveyor belt to the next level.

The secular education system followed the same pattern. Instead of learning theprinciples and application of mathematics while mastering carpentry, forexample, mathematics was divided into first-grade arithmetic, second-gradearithmetic, third-grade arithmetic, and so on. Children moved along theeducation conveyor belt, with each child receiving the same "dollop" ofinformation at the same age, based on the assumption that we could breaklearning down into its smallest parts and administer it at the...