THE INVENTIVE AGE

In 2003 I wrote about the holistic, missional Christian community called Solomon's Porch where I am a pastor. At the time, the church was three years old. Now, in 2011, the church is eleven years old. We've changed quite a bit since 2003, and like a house that's starting to show its age, this book needed a bit of a remodel.

A few years ago, Shelley, my wife, and I remodeled the kitchen of our 110-year-old house. The purpose of the remodel was not just to make the kitchen look different; it was to give us a new way of living in our house.

Our house was built in Minnesota toward the end of the Agrarian Age. While the official paperwork on the house dates it at 1930, I discovered it was actually built in the late 1890s. As I opened the walls in preparation for the remodel of the kitchen, I found newspapers used for insulation that were dated 1897. So either the builders of the house were quite the pack rats and hoarded newspapers for 30 years, or the house was redated when our part of town was officially incorporated in 1930. I chose to believe the latter.

In the one hundred-plus years since our house was built, the way people use a kitchen has changed. Back then, there was likely only one person doing the cooking, so the folks building the house didn't worry about making space for multiple people to work in the kitchen at the same time. Back then, they didn't have appliances that sat on the counter. They didn't have recycling bins. They didn't have snack drawers or dishwashers or giant upright refrigerators and therefore didn't need the space those things require. We wanted to be able to eat in our kitchen, something unheard of in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—that's what the dining room was for. So we remodeled the house to fit the way we live in it.

After several months of upheaval, we had a "new" kitchen. But it wasn't entirely new. The walls are the same walls and one of the windows is from the original kitchen. It's in the same location relative to the family room and dining room. So it's a mix of what was there before and what needed to change to reflect the way we live in our house.

This book is a bit like our kitchen—a refreshed version of what was there alongside new ideas that make it a bit more inhabitable.

In part, the remodeling of this book is due to the way our community has changed since the book was first published. But it's also due to the way the culture in which our church exists has changed. When we started Solomon's Porch, we had just entered a new millennium. What we didn't know is that we had also entered a new era, one I have come to call the Inventive Age.

If you've come to this book having read my most recent book, Church in the Inventive Age, then you already know what that term means. If you're new to the phrase, let me give you a quick overview.

For most of human history, changes in broad social structures came occasionally and were limited in geographic scope. But in the last two centuries, cultural change has become far-reaching, constant, and increasingly rapid.

In the last two hundred years, American culture has moved through three distinct ages—the Agrarian Age, the Industrial Age, and the Information Age—and is heavily engaged in a fourth—an era I have dubbed the Inventive Age. With each of these ages has come a shift in what we think, what we value, what we do, and how we do it.

I was once in a small group meeting with famed organizational expert Peter Drucker. Out of everything he said at that meeting, one thought has stuck with me more than the others. He said, "The world my parents were born into was essentially the same as the world of Abraham and Sarah from the Bible."

He was, of course, right. Drucker, born in Vienna in 1909, was pointing out that the world into which his parents were born—specifically Austria in the nineteenth century—operated under a social structure that had been in place in rural areas for a millennium. He contrasted that with the world into which he was born—Austria at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Just one generation earlier, the majority of human beings lived like their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents had. They worked the land, rarely lived more than one hundred miles from where they were born, and knew they'd be lucky to see their fiftieth birthdays. Mid-nineteenth-century culture was, as Drucker said, nearly identical to the culture of the ancient Israelites. Both were part of the Agrarian Age.

The Industrial Revolution of the late 1800s brought about dramatic cultural upheaval in Europe and the United States. Certainly earlier inventions like the printing press had a broad impact on society. But the printing press didn't directly change the way people fed themselves or moved from place to place or earned a living. The Industrial Revolution did.

People moved from farms to cities. Men and women who had once worked alongside each other in the fields left their families at home to work in factories. Manufactured goods became the currency of the culture.

The next cultural shift began while the Industrial Age was still booming. During the 1920s and '30s, the Information Age began to take hold, thanks in no small part to the growth of the manufacturing and shipping industries that had taken place during the Industrial Age. As people had access to books, newspapers, radios, and eventually televisions, knowledge and information became the most valuable assets of the culture.

In the same way, the Inventive Age is being born out of the Information Age. Knowledge is no longer the goal, but the means by which we accomplish new—even unimagined—goals.

Few cultural institutions have been able to move through all of these shifts with their central identity intact. The church has been a steady—though not unchanged—presence in each age. It has remained when so many other cultural institutions have either fallen away completely or morphed so cleanly that they no longer resemble their former selves. I believe that's because the church has been both shaped by and a shaper of culture.

There are people who hate the idea that the culture impacts the church. They like to think of the church as a bastion of stability in a sea of turmoil. They want to believe that the church has somehow maintained a pristine, untouched essence even as the muck of society has swirled around it.

That's simply not the case.

This isn't an insult to the church. The church ought to place itself squarely in the midst of a culture. Everything from the kinds of buildings we call churches to the way we expect our pastors to preach, our theology to be laid out, and our furniture to be arranged is meant to communicate something to the culture in which a church functions. I think that's good news.

As American society has moved from the Agrarian Age through the Industrial Age into the Information Age and now...