Just had a CAOS steering group meeting and we have a conversation about Paradigm shifts. Anyone know anything about these?
David Bosch, a South African Missiologist, who very sadly died in a car crash a few years back, identified that the chruch was miving through a change in world views (a paradigm) from the Modern Era to the Post Modern Era. We were moving from a culture who did everything en masse to doing things individually, from all going to the one screen cinema together to going to much smaller multiplex cinemas, from all going to church en masse to choosing our spirituality.
However, not everyone is convinced that we are yet in a new paradigm but may be in the buffer zone between the old paradigm (moder era, Victorian era) and a new one which cannot yet be identified. Everything is in flux.
I go with that latter view. Nothing is settled or familiar. We don't know what we are moving into. The church is uncomfortable at the moment because it doesn't know the worldview that we are all moving into. There are wars and rumours of wars, there is much more unsettled thought about environment, trade, aid, justice etc because the cards are all up in the air and no one knows how they are going to settle.
Which, for me, makes it a very exciting place to be as much as a petrifying place. We have the singularly unique opportunity to shape things but we don't know how. We have a unique chance to be player in the recreating of the world as people of faith, but don't haave the language or the knowhow, or, dare I say it, the faith factor.
Maybe we are paying our part in a small way in Abbotsford with the styles of worship we have. Maybe we need a bigger role with our Community Arts Project or something like that. I'm not sure. But does anyone else recognise that description of things at the moment, or have other examples of being between paradigms?
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