Church for a changing culture: an introduction to alternative worship

2: Youth culture, modernity and postmodernity

Alternative Worship is not an attempt to make 'youth church'. Alternative Worship in most places is adult church within contemporary culture. The majority of those involved are in the 25-40 age bracket, although the methodology can be used for people of any age.

Our picture of what is going on is confused by the way we talk about 'youth culture'. The usual forms of Alternative Worship clearly use many aspects of 'youth culture'. But the thing we still call 'youth culture' is no longer just for the young. It was a youth culture when it began with the first teenagers back in the 1950s. Now it is the culture of 50-year-olds too. The teenagers of the 1960s still live in the 'youth culture' they created - still produce it - even though they are now in middle age. Everyone under 45 has grown up entirely inside it. It is not a thing you grow out of anymore - there is nowhere to grow out to. Even if you wanted to.

Churches have, for the most part, struggled to come to terms with cultural change since the 1960s. One way of coping has been to enclose all engagement with contemporary culture in a box marked 'youth'. The assumption has been that young people need culturally relevant Christianity if they are to stay in the faith, but that they will 'grow out of it', leave 'youth culture' behind and accept the older forms of church as adults.

But we no longer 'grow out of it'.

To locate the problem of cultural change in youth misses the point. 'Youth culture', as it has developed over the past few decades, is just the most blatant symptom of the underlying journey of Western society from modernity into postmodernity.

Modernity, the underlying cultural phase of the last two or three hundred years, centred around belief in objective and verifiable truth mediated through language as a rational and stable medium. Got that?

Science, the supreme embodiment of modernity, carried all before it, and the Church was obliged to alter its discourse to suit. The questions of modernity were 'Is it true?' and 'Can it be proved objectively?'. So Christians engaged in rational arguments about proof, historicity and so forth, and non-rational aspects of the faith were an embarrassment - to say nothing of the supernatural [which is what many preferred to do]. Forms of worship during these centuries tended to be based on words and reasoned argument, doctrine sung as hymns and spoken as sermons. Rational persuasion came to be seen as the best conversion technique.

However, since the middle of the 20th century there has been a deep cultural shift - at root a shift in knowledge about how we know things.

It is now recognised that all human knowledge is conditioned by culture and language, and that claims to have found universal truth should be treated with [at the least] great suspicion. It's important to note that the postmodern condition does not mean that there is no such thing as absolute truth - in spite of many loose claims. It is more correct to say that, even if you find absolute truth, you cannot prove that it is absolutely true. You will always be forced to make unprovable assumptions at some point - in short, to act in faith.

The starting point for postmodernity is the realisation that all human knowledge requires an act of faith, all human truth claims are provisional, and all human understandings are incomplete.

Faith, in the broadest sense, has been relegitimised as a mode of knowledge. In the wider culture responses vary. There are those who act faithfully, choosing to believe and build on truths they know they cannot prove, risking futility but considering it worthwhile. There are those who act faithlessly, taking advantage of the end of truth claims on their lives, autonomous and unheeding of the cost. In their religious impulses, the faithful construct belief systems from deep inner need, while the faithless shop for feelgood spiritual experiences.

But few on either side look to Christianity. In spite of the widespread concern for spirituality in our society, most people believe, tragically, that it has nothing to offer.