Updating our Christian Story for the Quantum era is demanding. As one committed to this challenging proposition, I can attest to how knotty and arduous it is. How to be faithful to our tradition, but also make sense of our faith in this new illusory, relative, and uncertain universe?
The last time we did one of these major updates to our faith, we killed each other. We burned each other at the stake, boiled one another in oil, and skinned one another alive. Today, we view that time as an inevitable update to our faith. If we had lived through it, however, it was anything but inevitable. It was a fight to the death. The update was a threat to everything the Church held holy. It felt to traditional, faithful Christians, like the Reformers were tearing the Christian house down.
While we don’t boil one another in oil any more, fear of change is still among us. Consider how many treat the emergent Christians. If you read the blogosphere, you see a lot of demonizing, hating, and name-calling.
Change of the magnitude demanded of us at this moment in history is frightening. If it were easy, it would have been done by now.

click pic to check out a project we did at nrcc


However, if we’re going to invite young people back into the Christian spiritual community, simple and easy won’t do. We need a fundamental rethinking process that is demanding and deep. Cooler music, social networking, and tattooed ministers won’t do it.
Jesus was relevant in the pre-modern world before 1500, was relevant from the Enlightenment era to the present, and will be relevant in the Quantum era as well. However, it will be a painful transition to find his essence and translate it into this new way of thinking.
But if we don’t…
Our children won’t follow Jesus.
Young people will continue their polite dismissal of our spiritual tradition.
I’ve thrown in my lot with the future. Though I love my Christian family, I’ve concluded I have no option but to participate in the update.
And I’m grateful to be in the company of so many others.
When I hear my Christian family in the media or on social networks fighting so vehemently to keep Christianity wed the old ways, it can be disheartening. But I heard a phrase that informs the challenge before us.
“How many snowflakes does it take to break a branch?
….“Only one. The last one.”
I don’t know how many voices will need to be added to bring a new Reformation to our Church. I don’t know when it will happen. But if each voice is a snowflake, I want mine to be one.
 

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