THE CRISIS OF BIRTHSTOOLS

The Crisis of Birthstools

By Leonard Sweet www.leonardsweet.com


Recently I was asked by a business journal to nominate "the #1 change that would address a major social issue and make society incredibly better."

What would you say? For the Christian there's only one answer, of course. But what do you say to a corporate audience in a consumer culture where, as Rabbi Shmuley Boteach puts it, "Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed [have] been replaced by Andy Wilde, Deepak Chopra, [and] John Gray."

This is the challenge and crisis of preaching every Sunday. How do you lift up the Messiah's message of the cross in the midst of a Mars Hill culture where consumerism is the #1 religion? How do you present the cross as the most powerful metaphor for transforming lives? How do you hand people the Bible and tell them what they're getting--the essential text for solving every crisis out there?

Postmodern culture isn't the first crisis culture. Culture and crisis go together like A&W, A&P, and Abercrombie & Fitch. In Chinese characters, crisis is represented by danger and opportunity. In Hebrew, it's "mash-ber," a word also used for "birthstool," a seat upon which a woman sat as she gave birth.

If ever there was a movement for birthstool creativity, it's now. Of all the leadership arts, creativity and imagination are some of the most "in crisis" in the church. Unfortunately, the postmodern imagination is proving more creative at faking reality than at fixing reality. Compare what you can do with the SimCity cyber game with what we're doing in Harlem, Watts, and other similar cities. We consume in our real lives--even our church lives--and we create in our cyber life.

What if the church were to measure success not by budgets and buildings, but by creativity and imagination? What if society were to measure success, not by the size of bank accounts or biceps, but by the strength of brains and birthstools? A consumer culture is built on earnings, yearnings, and bottom lines. A conceiving culture is built on God's grace where the "top-of-the-lines" in life are given freely, tended conservatively, and distributed liberally. If conception doesn't replace consumption as the primary GNP in the church first, it never will in the wider culture.

The challenge for the church is to give postmodern culture a "witness" to become a place which measures success by its conceivings rather than consumings. Any gospel that says and does otherwise is a product of "this present evil age" (Galatians 1:4).