Posts tagged jesus movement
What if the 1970s were not simply an evangelical revival like those of old, but the first stirrings of a new spiritual awakening, a vast interreligious movement toward individual, social, and cultural transformation? …What if the awakening is not exclusively a Christian affair, but rather that a certain form of Christianity is playing a significant role in forming the contours of a new kind of faith beyond conventional religious boundaries?
Diana Butler Ross, Christianity After Religion
Oh dear…
The crisis of traditional Christianity, not the rise of the conservative churches, remains the major religious story of the 1960s and ‘70s. The gains of certain denominations notwithstanding, the era witnessed an extraordinary weakening of organized Christianity in the United States and a fundamental shift in America’s spiritual ecology – away from institutional religion and toward a more do-it-yourself and consumer-oriented spirituality – that endures to the present day. In subsequent decades, traditional believers would hopefully cite various revivals or awakenings as evidence that their faith might be regaining the ground that it lost between 1965 and 1980. But nothing that’s happened since, whether in small prayer groups or booming megachurches, has made up for the losses that institutional Christianity sustained during America’s cultural revolution.
Ross Douthat, Bad Religion, 62
I think Douthat’s analysis here is flawed, but the book itself has been really interesting so far.
A Summary of Jesus Movement Media Coverage (Part 1)
In a odd twist, just as the Jesus Movement was getting off the ground in California and elsewhere on the West Coast, Time Magazine published the following cover in 1966:
If the publishers at TIME and other magazines and newspapers had been paying attention, it would have been clear that a large scale religious shift was about to take place.
James K.A. Smith: Tradition for innovation
From the excellent Faith & Leadership blog.
If our cultural work is going to be restorative —if it is going to put the world to rights — then we need imaginations that have been shaped by a vision for how things ought to be. Our innovation and invention and creativity will need to be bathed in an eschatological vision of what the world is made for, what it’s called to be — what the prophets often described as shalom. Innovation for justice and shalom requires that we be regularly immersed in the story of God reconciling all things to himself.
That immersion happens most powerfully in worship — in intentional, historic, liturgical forms that “carry” the Christian story in ways that sink into our bones and become part of us. This is why the unfettered, undisciplined “reinvention” of the church actually undercuts our ability to carry out innovative, restorative culture making. The story cannot shape us, cannot become part of us, in a church that is constantly reinventing itself.
I’ve been thinking about the tension between innovation and tradition lately. Over the past year, as I wrote about the Jesus Movement, it became really clear that the participants in that movement thought that the future of Christendom lay in constant innovation that, and this is the difficult but crucial part, hearkened back to the first century church.
How do you have rock music that leads people towards God? Is it a matter of simply having ‘sanctified’ lyrics? What about other areas of popular culture? What about politics? How do we have a just society when we anticipate the end of the world will happen any minute? These were some of the questions I saw some of the people I studied wrestle with over the course of the movement. If anything, the arguments over these issues have gotten more heated since the 1970s.
