Know Thyself

Len Hjalmarson's post from January 5 is well worth having a read. Part of the ongoing wrestle is not only defining what we're doing, and in what context we're doing it in, but also in who we are as followers of Jesus in a postmodern world.

The order of my wording is deliberate: we are not postmodern Christians -- we are Christians who live in a postmodern world. Jesus transcends all culture, be it modern or postmodern, and we dare not create another level of the "Christian ghetto" in which to insulate ourselves farther from the world. Leighton Tebay mentioned a few months ago that there's even a "Emerging Church" section in the Christian bookstore in Saskatoon -- surely a bad sign when the churchianity marketing machine starts taking advantage of peoples' interest in redefining "church as we've known it" (sort of like all those "radical youth worship" CD's that recycle the same songs over and over and over).

In the original "Matrix" movie (don't waste your time on the sequels, trust me), the Oracle instructed Neo, "Know thyself"; for Neo (and for us), it meant to become comfortable with who we are, and what we are called to do. In Neo's case, it was embracing being "the One"; for us, it's embracing who God has made us to be, and what He has called us to do, and rejecting both the box of modernism and the box of postmodernism (for they both limit us and fail to adequately define us).

We are followers of Jesus. That is what defines us and gives us our identity. Anything else is a form of idolatry.