Emerging Spirit @ The United Church of Canada Emerging Spirit @ The United Church of Canada

When we talk to leaders about Emerging Spirit, much of what we hear reflects a clear awareness that the church needs to change if it hopes to become more relevant to people between the ages of 30 and 45. Yet people are also very conscious of the risk of selling short the gospel in the attempt to reach new ears.

How can leaders communicate the good news of justice, truth, love, and transformation to an audience that has largely been raised in a postmodern context that has worked to deconstruct these concepts? Can the gospel be presented in an effective way to 30-45 year olds living in a post-Christian, postmodern nation like Canada without watering it down or catering solely to consumeristic expectations? Indeed, what does the gospel have to say that is relevant to the lives of those in this audience?

Colossians Remixed (InterVarsity Press, 2004) is a brilliant resource for those who find themselves confronted by such a challenge. Authors Brian Walsh, a chaplain at the University of Toronto, and Sylvia Keesmaat, a professor of biblical studies at the Institute for Christian Studies, bring their expertise together to explore how an epistle from the Apostle Paul might have been heard had it been read by a church surrounded by a postmodern culture.

Walsh and Keesmaat start this exploration by recounting a discussion about Christianity with "William," a self-proclaimed postmodern who finds the absolutes contained in the biblical text not only alien, but offensive. For William, like many postmoderns, meaning is found not in absolutes, but in the dance of dynamic, fluid, interdependent relationships. The authors show that for many of those raised in a postmodern context, the certainty found in the Bible is perhaps more apt to provoke suspicion than it is assurance. The historical and cultural context we read the gospel from shapes how we understand what it is saying to us.

Paul's epistle to the Colossians was also written and heard in a particular historical and cultural context, one that Walsh and Keesmaat point out had a lot of similarities with the postmodern, post-Christian context we find ourselves in at the start of the 21st century. The authors see "empire" as the common denominator of the Christian communities of both first-century Colassae and the 21st-century postmodern world. Like the Colossians, whose understanding of the gospel was shaped by their context as part of the Roman Empire, the 21st-century postmodern reading of the gospel is formed by the current empire of consumeristic global capitalism. The authors describe how the gospel's confrontation of empire is the common theme which can speak with authenticity to both "Nympha," a Colossian first-century merchant of textiles, and "William," the 21st century postmodern.

Walsh and Keesmaat use faithful exegesis and creative revisioning to "remix" Colossians and show how it "begs to differ" to the cynical, nihilistic elements of postmodernism. As well, the authors go verse by verse through the epistle to build a Christian ethic of environmental responsibility to confront the 21st century idolatry of global consumerism.

Colossians Remixed is on the cutting edge of new ways to present the gospel in the postmodern context.

This article originally appeared in the November 2005 issue of Emerging Spirit News.