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

The Christian church seeks to be a community rooted in faith and engaged in the world.

We root ourselves in faith through worship, spiritual practices, caring for each other, and learning together. We yearn to share our faith with those we love and with a world that is hungry for spiritual food. We want our own lives to have meaning, to make a difference for good in God's world.

All of this means that God calls us into relationship with the world, all of the world, not just those people who look like us and think like us. We are called to understand this world in which God calls us to minister.

The world has changed! And you know this.

We no longer live in a world where:

• we get dressed up and walk to church on Sunday
• a man works for one company for 40 years and then retires
• a woman takes care of the house and family and a man takes care of the money
• we get our information from the radio and the newspaper
• we keep contact with friends primarily through letters

Much of what we are experiencing as a church is not particular to us. We are at the end of an era.

We are swimming in a sea of change and if we are not to be overcome we need to be able to recognize and name the currents that move us. Sometimes the magnitude and extent of the shift does not clearly register, but it is clear that what was before no longer holds the power it once did. Social scientists and philosophers name this fundamental shift as the movement from modernity to postmodernity. There are many ways to characterize this movement, but the easiest definition of the postmodern age is that is not the modern age. It is something different.

What are the societal changes that have most affected the church and ministry in the last 20 years?

We will explore some of the characteristics of this shift and the implications for ministry in this series of blog posts.

Excerpted from the Emerging Spirit booklet, "Congregational Ministry in a New World," which can be downloaded here in full, along with study questions (log in required).