1. Mediation, and Spirituality in
the Postmodern Context
Joshva
Session 8

2. Main themes
• Worship
• Spirituality
• Image, Intimacy and Global Awareness
• Implicit Religion

3. Resources
• Peter Stephenson Christian Mission in the Postmodern World,
Some Introductory Thoughts. 2001
http://www.postmission.com/articles/pomisgen.pdf
• RANDY ROWLAND AND SALLY MORGENTHALER, A
MISSIONAL INCARNATION OF CHRISTIAN WORSHIP IN
POSTMODERNITY.
http://ekhardt.com/fresno.dome/pm723paper.pdf
• Roger Lundin The Culture of Interpretation: Christian Faith and the
Postmodern World. 1993.
• James W. Fowler, Faithful Change: The Personal and Public
Challenges of Postmodern Life. 1997
• Rowan Williams Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement.
Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2000.
• Ursula King (Editor) Faith and Praxis in a Postmodern Age. 1998
• Don Cupitt Mysticism After Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell 1998.

4. Spirituality in a Postmodern Age
• Faith and Praxis in a postmodern age by
Ursula King pp.98-112
• Spirituality represents the move of
phenomenological studies of religion into a
new key stressing subjectivities and
experience as over against dispassionate
objectivity, the soul rather than the form of
religion. Spirituality is a hidden dimension
in a largely materialistic world

5. spirituality
• Modernity and loss of spirituality or private
mode of religious expression
• Spiritualitas – celebration of the Christian
mysteries particularly eucharist
• Spirituality is described as an attempt to
grow in sensitivity, to self, to others, to
non-human creation and to God, or as an
exploration into what is involved in
becoming human (U King)

6. Postmodern Spirituality
• Dialectic between the spirit within us and the
spirit beyond us – Ultimate Reality by reimaging
and renaming
• Samuel Rayan – three models of spirituality 1.
distributive spirituality where some follow a
spiritual life while others do not 2. alternative
model where the same persons alternative their
activities between spiritual practices and other
engagements 3. Interpenetrative model where
we all are spiritually engaged in all our actions
so that actions and contemplation are integrally
connected.

7. Mystic Spirituality
• Mysticism after Modernity, Don Cupitt
• Internalising God within the self
• Dissolving oneself into God
• Spiritual marriage
• Mystics play games with language and are
aware of the enemies who tend to seize
upon a careless word

8. Postmodern Mission through worship,
spiritual encounter and implicit
experiences
• Peter Stephenson’s article
• A Suspicion of all Big stories – Response
– Come clean with the church’s past (Ian
Paisley evangelical? Adams liberationist?)
- Examine ourselves for oppressive
tendencies (respecting rights of all?)
- Search ourselves for signs of syncretism
(uncritical of new technologies?)

9. Christian Mission
• Distrust of Authority and institutions
- Live for Today (too materialistic – having
life and having it to the full)
• Global awareness – ecological
destruction; human rights, destruction of
ethnic cultures, racial and religious
intolerance; sexual discrimination, abuse
of animals
• Longing for intimacy

10. Mclaren
• Brian McLaren in The Church on the Other
Side said, .If you have a new world, you
need a new church. You have a new
world..32 If we desire to be the salt of the
earth and the light of the world, we must
become an incarnation of the body of
Christ engaging our postmodern culture.

11. Postmodern Values and Worship
• Experience - Postmodern worship gatherings
are holistic experiences.
• Participation - A worship participant in an
emerging worship gathering can expect
opportunities to participate personally in the
experience, whether that be in dialogue, or
movement around the room to stations of
activity, or moments of quiet for personal
meditation.
• Dan Kimball, Emerging Worship: Creating New Worship
Gatherings for Emerging Generations (El Cajon, CAGrand
Rapids, MI: EmergentYS;Zondervan, 2004),

12. Postmodern Values and Worship
contd..
• Image Richness - These gatherings make use
of imagery in a way not valued by modern
churches. Art is often used as means of
expression, rather than an illustration. Art is
used as a doorway to understanding scripture.
• Connectedness – Kimball promotes a house
church structure, in which most worship
gatherings would be smaller intimate events.
Monthly, all of the churches would gather for
larger worship experiences.

13. • Holistic Approach to Scripture - Kimball
describes preaching as an invitation to take part
in the story of scripture. There is a renewed
appreciation for mystery. Sermons are more
likely to provoke thought and leave questions
than provide simplified answers.
• Organic Organization - Emerging worship
gatherings, while ordered and planned,
tend not to follow a rigid, linear,
predictable formula. A sermon, for
instance, may come in separate pieces
interwoven with other interactions with
scripture in any particular gather time.

14. Hyper-reality
• At it simplest level Baudrillard suggests
that in our image saturated world images
(of TV, cinema, internet, computer games,
mobile phones, CCTV, Web Cams, digital
cameras etc), representation has
saturated reality so much that experience
takes place a distance from the things we
are viewing. J K Smith
http://churchandpomo.typepad.com/

15. Hyper?
• the person who spends hours making
amazing iMovie recordings and shows of
his life and family, whilst in the ‘real’ world
his marriage isn’t great and his spiritual life
needs attending to. The computer-edited
version of the world is more ‘real’ than the
real world.
• Baudrillard calls this experience ‘hyper-
reality’.

16. Simulations of Reality
• The representation of something, anything is not seen as
a way to connect to the reality behind it, rather it
becomes a reality in itself. Again in other words we
become obsessed with the image itself, how cool it is,
rather than the truth of what it is about. So we pay large
sums of money not for trainers that are the best for
running, but for the experience of the image attached to
the trainers, which has little to do with running at all.
• This causes us to be focused on the intensity of am
image rather any need for real meaning, depth is
replaced with surface, and the ‘phantasm of authenticity
which always ends up just short of reality’ (The Revenge
of the Crystal, 1990).

17. Simulations make reality
• Yet whilst simulations are separated from
reference to reality, they become my reality. For
instance movies make me cry and connect to
‘real’ feelings, a beer advert makes me thirsty,
watching the Asian Tsunami on the news shakes
my faith. There is an implosion of surface
simulation into reality. Images don’t just shape
reality, they have become the thing that
preceded reality! They absorb, shape, consume,
and produce what we see as reality.

18. Lifestyle attached with things!
• Baudrillard asks if we ever buy something
because of what it does and not because it is
attached to a style, or lifestyle? Are we really
more than the fulfillment of images of an
aesthetic and image of reality.
• If I buy tools for the car, are they the best or do I
buy into the colours and shiny adverts they show
them as a the tool for the cool tool guy. Does my
computer work better or does it make me feel
like part of the ‘cool’ that goes with using it
(apple any one?). All our food seems attached to
a style, ‘Aunt Bessie’s’ yorkshire puddings,
Tesco’s ‘Finest’ etc.

19. Hyper-real Church:
•
How much of the emerging church discussion,
movement is caught up with hyper-real images of
church. We’d rather blog, podcast, write about the image
of a better and more authentic church than actually be
involved in ‘real’ church. Emerging church can function
as the pastiche, edited iMovie of church, that has not
correlation to reality.
• We are trapped in trying to incarnate church to our
culture, by the pursuit of the superficial and hyper-real.
What if real church doesn’t look like the idealized images
we are endlessly portraying about church.

20. Fetish Church
• By more re-branding, more image management. We call
ourselves missionaries in a post Christian context, we
buy the missional church books, we postulate the new
and even more ‘real’ church, and avoid the reality of
doing and being church even more. The aesthetic of
church becomes the message. The space of
engagement with the aesthetics of our culture, become
pastiche fetishes, that end up being consumed, and we
eventually leave them for something more real. We
become the very thing that we despise and
pathologically move on to a new fake hopeful and yet
even more artificial constriction of church.

21. Pastiche & Nostlagia Church
• Pastiche church is the temptation to take the
aesthetics of other church traditions, of those of
our culture, and to patch them together in a
superficial manner. In other words we use
images at random, project them over some
music and see it as an experience, or we make
aesthetical art spaces, that degenerate into
consumer therapy, self justified with the user
experience, as ‘authentic’. Our worship
experiences becomig self authenticating.

22. Critique of the above suggestions
• 1. Tendencies: Abstract into Real: recognise that every-time we
re-imagine church we are in the west a people who will struggle to
translate that into any reality, and are bent, distorted towards finding
the re-imagining to be real itself. Maybe this is the ‘sin’ (inherent
missing the mark) of our current culture.
• 2. Trapped in Consumption: And at the heart of our bent towards
the hyper-real, and fetish of church, is our entrenchment in
capitalism and the market place. We need to really understand how
capitalism has captured our understanding of what it means to be
real, and find some ways out of it into non-commodified forms of
church, to find the spaces between the doing of church and the
consumption of church that will enable a liberating and ‘real’
change.
3. Evaluate our Ecclesiologies:
Then use that understanding of our tendencies and the snares of
consumerism to assess our current and suggested future forms of
church.

23. Postmodern construction of
Spirituality
• Temporary Communal Allegiances
• People still seek community but with minimal
hindrances to commitment beyond one's comfort
zones. The notion of voluntary association has
become dominant with increased mobility and
the emergence of multiple and overlapping
communal allegiances.
• Communal allegiances in the postmodernist
perspective offer liberation from constraint
enabling a new impetus to explore diverse
religious expressions and worldviews. This
works simultaneously at global and local levels
• http://www.vcce.org.au/pdfs/indic_pomo_paper.pdf

24. Consumer Identity
• Postmodern religious construction occurs in a
consumer context because capitalism has provided
the buying power, which underpins the availability of
diversity and difference. Consumerism entered the
picture when it became easy to "shop".
• What has taken place is a process where religious
commitment has been supplanted by consumption
nurturing a person's spirituality. The deregulation of
religion has mutated into a range of spirituality
resources. Religion has become both a container for
cultural conservation and a source of radical change.
The realm of choice has opened up tremendously for
most people in the affluent societies, giving
unprecedented opportunities to chose lifestyles and
beliefs from a range of options.

25. Human Interest Story
• Spirituality can be seen as an aspect of the
autonomous subject where religious expression
becomes increasingly the product of individual
biographies, patterned after similar human
interest stories. Tracing individual paths of
biographical identity construction is done by
studying the actual practices that are adopted to
make sense of life. Needless to say,
autonomous spiritual subjects, who construct
their own religious identity through peculiar
patters of practices not only create new
questions for social analysis, but also for
ongoing religious activity.