07.06.07

organic vs produced

Posted in community, ekklesia at 6:18 am by len

In The Great Giveaway David Fitch argued that the post-Enlightenment generations will not trust the highly produced worship seeker-sensitive Sunday morning services of the mega church. They trust community, places to connect, authentic lived truth, the organic beauty of a simple worship liturgy.

“Postmoderns suspect the machinations of consumer-oriented messages to have power over them to make “buy” decisions. Instead postmoderns recognize truth most where it is lived day to day one with another. The postmodern is convinced of truth through participation, not consumer appeals, through wholly lived display, not reasoned arguments. Seeker services will still work for the boomers and those raised in modernity either by age or in the Evangelical subculture. These people of modernity were taught to trust only their individual minds or experiences.”

David cites Drew Marshall’s experiment to hire non-Christians to visit churches and report back on their experiences (reminiscent of this and this). David notes that these accounts seem to substantiate what he was writing about. He writes, “It is stunning at how the need for this development, of going from produced church to organic community, is eerily recited back to us in the reports of these two non Christians.”

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