This Christian Life

A Real Postmodern Church in Holland

I attended a conference last week put on by V.I.S., a service organization in Grand Rapids doing wonderful things in our community to help people. The conference is held every year and is meant to enhance the leadership capabilities of elders, deacons, pastors in our denomination.

All of that is just an introduction to say I was very impressed by both of the speakers I had. One is Jay Van Groningen, who challenged us to engage our church communities by simply finding out about and providing for their needs. The other speaker was Trent Walker who is the pastor of the “postmodern” church at Harderwyk ministries in Holland, MI. (I couldn’t find a website for his ministry—Watershed. How can you have a postmodern ministry without a website? Hmmm.)

I was very impressed with Trent’s speech. It was good to hear someone else be very passionate about the state that the traditional church is in and why we need to get off our duffs and change to reach out to the postmodern generation. The postmodern generation is simply not going to get the language or practices of the preceding generations. We need to change our medium (not our message) in order to connect with them. A statement he made sums it up very well.

I couldn’t agree more. That statement summed up a bunch of stuff about the postmodern generation that I had a hard time getting my arms around.

Why can’t the church at large understand the issue here? Is it going to take almost dying for us to come to our senses?