What it Takes to Change

So here it is, my first blog at age 60! It’s a double outing… I’m admitting my Luddite status, as well as my age! But it’s not full disclosure, I will tell you all the things I don’t do in a modern, or rather “postmodern” fashion. Quickly I’ll tell you that I don’t tweet (I know the president will be discouraged), and I don’t even Facebook… For people under 20 that technological absence is now cutting edge!

So possibly my first point is that if you wait long enough, you become novel again!

Having entered ministry work in 1983, at the dawn of the World Wide Web, and certainly far before cell phones, I have seen our culture grow further away from both the institutionalized church, and even the informal church.

By the time we reached the new millennium, my complaint was that the culture had received an inoculation against Christianity. In other words, like a vaccine we had just enough awareness of what Christianity was about, that most people felt that they knew enough about the faith that they rejected it, and felt justified.

But having now waited two more decades, I realize that we are very much more in line with the first century culture from which Christianity was both born and spread. The ignorance of Christianity has gone back in time some two millennia.

And that is actually a great advantage!

This really struck me with two different stories. One came from our own afterschool program at Trinity Lutheran Church about a year ago. At our first chapel, (a time when we set aside after school snack time to talk about faith), I asked the question, “Who has a favorite Bible story to share?” I assumed that the puzzled response was due to the fact that we had several new students, who may have been unaware of what chapel was about, or I also thought that many of the students may not have a favorite Bible story, and a few students may not know any Bible stories.

Someone interrupted the silence with the question “What’s the Bible?” I said “Great question! Who knows what the Bible is?”

We had 16 afterschool students in the program that day. Four out of the 16 raised their hand. 75% of those children between the ages of 5 & 12 had never heard of the “Bible.” That indeed surprised me. Had someone asked me head of time, I would’ve assumed that the number would be reversed.

Fast-forward one year. At a recent retirement gathering at Cornell for one of our important Christian leaders, I was sitting across from a junior enrolled at Cornell who had been involved in the campus ministry which hosted the event.

He shared with me the story of a class which he had in his first year at Cornell. It was an Anthropology class, and the class was discussing a recent book assignment, (I don’t know what the book was), and the student made the comment that some of the themes in the book reminded him of the account in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve.

He reported that the professor validated the comment, but the oblique stares which he received from his classmates, indicated that many of them were unfamiliar with his reference.

So the professor asked the class (interestingly about the identical size of our afterschool class… the Cornell student reported about 16 or 17 students were enrolled in the class), “How many people are familiar with the story of Adam and Eve?” 1 hand was elevated… While another hand was elevated to shoulder height. (Apparently a half-vote… maybe the student had only heard of Eve, but not Adam?)

The culture has shifted. We are now no longer immunized against Christianity by any partial knowledge of it.

Now we might anticipate that that sort of public reporting or “outing” in an Ivy League school is always suspect. Maybe there was the reverse halo effect, with many students refusing to vote for fear of being “outed.”

Now here’s another interesting part of the story – the student who shared the story with me was named “Adam.”

The word “anthropology” comes from the Greek word for “man.” The Hebrew word for “man” is “adam.” Here we had in an Ivy League school, in an anthropology class 1/16 of the students who had never even heard of the story of Adam and Eve; a story that is shared by three faiths that represent at least one half of the world’s population.

What does it take to change? Maybe just waiting! Or maybe a new blog! Let’s see where this thing goes.

Peace,
Rob