It\u2019s hard to move into a new office without spending some time exploring the past. <\/p>\n\n
Digging into a 20-year-old box, Drew University evangelism professor Leonard Sweet time-warped back to his Ph.D. studies as he dug through layers of onion-skin paper smudged with real ink and an ancient substance called \u201cWite-Out.\u201d <\/p>\n\n
\u201cI went from being an archeologist to, as I dug deeper, a paleontologist. I found carbon paper. This thing need to be carbon dated, it was so old,\u201d he said, speaking at a global forum for leaders from 150 Christian campuses. \u201cI looked at this and I said, \u2018Sweet! This is from a defunct civilization.\u2019 But you know what? It was from MY civilization. I\u2019m a Gutenberg person. \u2026 My world was shaped by the book.\u201d <\/p>\n\n
Now that world has passed away, even if the rulers of many fortresses haven\u2019t noticed. <\/p>\n\n
Sweet believes there is one fact of life that clergy and religious educators must learn \u2014 pronto. If they refuse to do so, he said, they will have as much success as someone who tries to make \u201ca credit-card call from a rotary telephone.\u201d Here is that fact: \u201cIf you are born before 1962, you are an immigrant. If you are born after 1962, you are a native.\u201d <\/p>\n\n
Calendar age isn\u2019t everything, Sweet conceded. It\u2019s theoretically possible to be a 70-year-old native or a 20-year-old immigrant, in the land of digital dialogues and postmodern parables. But immigrants who want to leap from the old \u201cCarpe Diem\u201d world into what he called the culture of \u201cCarpe Manana,\u201d must be open to learning languages, customs and skills from the natives. <\/p>\n\n
\u201cI am an immigrant,\u201d he said. \u201cI am having Ellis Island experiences every day.\u201d <\/p>\n\n
While trained in church history, Sweet is best known for his attempts to peer into the future of the church. He draws rave reviews as a speaker in both liberal mainline and evangelical gatherings, while writing waves of books with trendy titles such as \u201cQuantum Spirituality\u201d and his futuristic trilogy \u201cSoulSalsa,\u201d \u201cAquaChurch\u201d and \u201cSoulTsunami.\u201d <\/p>\n\n
The history of education has included three landmark events, said Sweet, speaking in Orlando last week to leaders of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities. These were the creation of the Greek alphabet, the invention of the printing press and the arrival of the World Wide Web. Colleges and seminaries can handle the first two, but most are doing little to face the implications of that third shift, other than buying hardware and software. They have re-wired their campuses, but not their brains. <\/p>\n\n
Immigrants lead these institutions and many have replaced their rose-tinted glasses with \u201cblack-out shades,\u201d said Sweet. Nevertheless, they know the natives are restless. <\/p>\n\n
When seeking answers to big questions, the natives don\u2019t want to sit in orderly rows and sing tiny sets of hymn verses interspersed with bulletin-board announcements, all of which precede a long lecture called a sermon. When they sing, they prefer flowing songs that seem to last forever while they stand enraptured in an atmosphere of worship. <\/p>\n\n
They are not pew people. What they want, said Sweet, is faith, and even education, that is \u201cexperiential,\u201d \u201cparticipatory,\u201d \u201cimage-based\u201d and \u201cconnective.\u201d They want a faith that is timeless and timely, at the same time. They want truth that touches all of their senses. <\/p>\n\n
This will be traumatic for leaders of America\u2019s aging mainstream religious groups, said Sweet. They feel comfortable with people with blue hair, \u201cunless it shows up on a 16-year-old kid.\u201d Many worship in sanctuaries containing images of a Savior with pierced hands and feet, yet they panic when young people show up who \u201clook like they fell out of a tackle box.\u201d <\/p>\n\n
Truth is, these natives are swimming in information, but they lack perspective, he said. They don\u2019t need the help or permission of authority figures to find their own information about politics, technology, morality and even religion. <\/p>\n\n
That is when the immigrants must be willing to listen carefully to their questions, said Sweet. The natives have information, but many are asking, \u201cNow, what do I do with it? How do I test what is good and what is bad information? How do I turn that information into knowledge and then that knowledge into wisdom?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s hard to move into a new office without spending some time exploring the past. Digging into a 20-year-old box, Drew University evangelism professor Leonard Sweet time-warped back to his Ph.D. studies as he dug through layers of onion-skin paper smudged with real ink and an ancient substance called \u201cWite-Out.\u201d \u201cI went from being an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":610,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-837","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n