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By
Leonard Sweet | posted 1999
I
am an eBay addict. I may need help. My most recent purchase
is one of the first books published by my Ph.D. adviser. It
has been missing from my library for 20 years. I got this
copy for 50 cents. The postage cost more than the book. But
for $2.50 I reclaimed my pedigree. At eBay, I feel like a
kid in a candy store.
The online
auction house is one of the wonders of the last decade. From
1995 to 1998, eBay did no outside advertising; yet it boasted
3.8 million registered users and grew from 289,000 items in
1996 to 2.2 million today. With a $23-billion market, eBay
is now worth more than Kmart, Toys R Us, Nordstrom, and Saks
combined.
eBay is
so effective because its owners understand postmodern culture.
It also alerts us to what the church must do to get the attention
and attendance of postmodern people.
Just
do it!
eBay makes shopping an experience. Journalist Stewart Alsop,
analyzing the phenomenon, calls it "nail-biting, thrilling
fun." eBay works in our experience-oriented economy. What
keeps shoppers returning to a store? Not just the products.
As one patron said, leaving a new Greenwich Village eatery
called Peanut Butter and Company, "This is very much an experience;
it's not just a sandwich."
Postmoderns
are not willing to live at even an arm's length from experience.
They want life to explode all around them. And the more extreme
the better.
Tom Beaudoin,
a Gen-X Christian with a theology degree from Harvard and
a body piercing, says that piercing and tattooing "reflect
the centrality of personal and intimate experience in Xers'
lives." Tattooing is branding in a brand culture, the marking
of a spiritual experience.
The pursuit
of dreams, emotions, and extreme experience is not unique
to this era. Every expression of romanticism in history has
tilted toward the experiential. But never before has experience
become the currency of a global economic system.
| American
Demographics (April 1999) esteemed the quest for experiential
faith one of the nation's most important cultural trends.
Yet the numbers turning to the church for guidance in
this soul quest are becoming fewer and fewer. A spiritual
awakening is taking place largely outside the Christian
church because churches, in the words of journalist Chip
Brown, "were more interested in repressing ecstatic experience
than in nurturing it. Rapture (the emotion), not to say
healing, was certainly not on the agenda of the church
I was packed off to each Sunday morning." |
Living
in
EPIC Times
To
connect with postmoderns, the church will become more:
Experiential
Participatory
Image-driven
Communal
|
To be
sure, experiences can become idolatrous as well as addictive.
Postmoderns collect experiences like moderns collect stuff.
The church must offer Christ-initiated--or what Donald Whitney
calls "Scripture-induced"--experiences.
Count
me in
A fellow eBay-er calls the auction site a "participant sport."
I felt such an adrenaline rush during my weeklong bidding
war over an 1827 pewter communion token. eBay has made me
into a global trader. It's exhilarating.
At eBay
the power belongs to the people, not to the producers. In
electronic commerce, the buyer sets the price. It/s the medieval
bazaar come to life in cyberspace.
Some call
this haggling the "age of participation." Others call it the
"horizontal society." Postmodern people take cues not from
those above them but from others around them. There are no
more bosses, only clients.
The Web
typifies the trend. Online, we're all experts: we're all priests,
we're all doctors or lawyers or architects, we're all authorities
in whatever we're chatting about at the moment.
And we're
already seeing its impact in church. The rituals of marriage
and remembrance are becoming more EPIC.
More than
clinking glasses, weddings also feature pull-the-kiss-from-the-hat
performances, the surrender of the keys, and couples presenting
to each other symbols of the things they bring to their union.
Do-it-yourself
funerals are at a record high. More people are burying their
dead without embalming, mortuaries, or cemeteries. More participatory
rites are being created alongside official rituals, including
ad hoc shrines, white caskets that mourners can sign,
and eulogies in which almost everyone present has got to say
something.
The problem
is no longer onerous taxation without representation. The
problem now is worship without participation. In the church,
representation simply isn't enough anymore.
Get the
picture?
Visit
as many of the more than 2 million eBay sites as you want.
You'll find each one has an image of what is for sale. Each
image comes to life with story and sometimes music. Each site
tries to draw you into a relationship with that image and
story.
eBay is
not alone in using images to establish relationships. NCR's
ATM machines are "transforming transactions into relationships"
according to their ads. Agency.com is dedicated to what it
calls "interactive relationship management." Its slogan: "It's
not the medium, it's the relationship."
The lesson
for the church is simple: images generate emotions and people
will respond to their feelings.
Postmodern
culture is image-driven. The modern world was word-based.
Not until the fourteenth century did truth become embedded
in principles and positions. Its theologians tried to create
an intellectual faith, placing reason and order at the heart
of religion. Mystery and metaphor were seen as too fuzzy,
too mystical, too illogical.
The church
now enters a world where metaphor is at the heart of spirituality.
Propositions are lost on postmodern ears; but metaphor they
will hear, images they will see and understand. These come
as close as human beings will get to a universal language.
Indeed, it seems clearer than ever that metaphysics is nothing
but metaphor.
Someday
I will hold up my Bible before a congregation, shake it, and
yell at the top of my lungs, "This is not a book about propositions
and programs and principles. This is a book about relationships."
The church,
not Hollywood, ought to be the world's greatest image factory.
The greatest image in the world, the image that draws people
into real, life-giving relationship, is the image of God in
Jesus the Christ.
I want
my community
One of
the favorite words used in the context of the Web is "community."
eBay is in the business of building communities, they say;
theirs is less an information source than a social medium.
The paradox
is this: the pursuit of individualism has led us to this place
of hunger for community, not of blood or nation but communities
of choice.
More than
buying and selling, the electronic emporium is about posting
messages on bulletin boards, discovering new friends, and
launching relationships at the eBay Cafe. One user said, "eBay
is bringing people together to do a lot more than trading
goods. We are trading our hearts."
Don't
laugh.
eBay may
just be the closest experience of small-town America available
to postmoderns. Where else can they find people with similar
interests (whale oil lamps, in my case)? Where else can they
be drawn into community around a single purpose? Where else
can they tell the stories most central to who they are and
find people eager to hear them? Where else can they participate
so fully and have their lives changed by the experience?
Nowhere
else.
Except,
perhaps, the church.
And isn't
that what the gospel is all about?
Leonard
Sweet is professor of postmodern Christianity at
Drew University Theological School
Madison, New Jersey
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