epiphany

I have attended dozens of seminars and conferences ....mostly for the fellowship and time out of the office ...at church expense… how is that for honesty? Some of them have been helpful, good and timely wisdom for life and ministry. But I must confess that for all the time and money invested, moments of epiphany have been rare. I do, however, remember one moment of emotion so complicated that no single word can describe it. How do you mix fear, dread , confusion, insight and hope.
I can not remember the speaker’s name but more than ten years later I can remember his passionate appeal and some of his words reverberate in my mind to this day. He said something like this ....., In very important ways our children will not be like us...... They will have different values , different preferences, and they will not share our loyalties to institutions and traditions. They are being shaped by cataclysmic sociological and philosophical forces and it will be our ultimate challenge to transmit to them the absolute essentials of our Christian faith. In response to his words, I remember the weird mixture of relief and fear. Fear that those troubling words could define the future (demise) of the North American Church but also glad that a personal devil, finally had a name. For years I had been wrestling with a growing awareness that for whatever reason we were not effectively ministering to an entire generation now called ”postmodern” . The old gospel presentations, appeals to logic , four spiritual laws etc. met with blank stares, a language not understood.
A lot of people attending the seminar that day left shaking their heads at the alarmist rhetoric. But the speaker was right all those years ago. His words have proven to be prophetic and the church is still attemting to deal with the implications of the future reality he described, now present.