Part I: What's Happened?

Certainly, our world is not the same as it was a quarter century ago, when I came into this world. Twenty-five years ago, we were marveling at the power of persuasion held by the family television. Already proven in its ability to give us an "insider's look" at the world- as it had just recently done so by bringing the harrowing images of the Vietnam War into our living rooms- we were learning of its profound ability to shape our public discourse into a superficial made-for-TV scheme of shallow one-liners and endless photo opportunities that only the wealthy could afford. Books like Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves To Death" would document this shift in-depth. Fast-forward ten years, and we're marveling over the Internet and its ability to connect billions of people worldwide and allow us to write to our relatives, manage our own finances like never before, and buy our Christmas presents in our underwear from the comfort of home. A few years later, we were learning of the vast cache of knowledge available to us by way of the internet (no longer spelled with a capital "I", such was its wide acceptance into our culture), its ability to endlessly entertain with the success of such "for fun" websites as homestarrunner.com and ebaumsworld.com, and its ability to connect and begin relationships with people we didn't even know were out there through the use of instant messaging, as well as websites such as lavalife.com, match.com and later, eharmony.com. And just in the past five years, we've seen the rise of MySpace and Facebook, where we can all post our silly party pictures and keep tabs on our friends by watching their every move on their "profile", a webpage which is in essence the "face" of a person on the internet. We've also seen the rise of the blog, in which anyone, anywhere, can talk about anything from dirty political rumors to the hot dish they cooked last night. We are able to find what amounts to a college education's worth of information through entities such as Wikipedia, which also allows us to contribute our own two cents on a topic, creating an ever-changing encyclopedic one-stop-shop for the knowledge of mankind, and also an incredibly easy way to blow an entire afternoon online. We can even get an ACTUAL college education as numerous public and private schools now offer online classes and degrees.

We're discovering how dependant we are upon this connection with each other, and discovering the value of everyone's collective ideas available for all to see. We no longer take a "talking head" at his word, but go delving for the information ourselves and come to our own conclusion. Through this conditioning of discovering the truth for ourselves, we have learned that "truth" is much more subjective than we had once realized, and that more often than not, the truth is found hanging in the balance between many perceived "truths". We have become skeptical of anyone claiming to "know the truth" about this or that, as we now have the ability within our fingertips to verify and often dispute that claim. We've also learned the value that our own personal experience provides us, and sharing our experience with others' experiences shapes a much more personal and compelling "truth" than any one claim to the same effect. Summarily, truth is no longer found in any centralized body or structure, whether political, commercial or religious. It is on the topic of religion that I would like to speak to, and I'll use a timeline of my own life experience to illustrate.

I come from a mainly Baptist background, having a grandfather and an uncle ordained into the American Baptist denomination. I spent the first 10 years of my life in fairly traditional hymn-and-sermon Baptist churches. From my young memory, I remember these churches being places of kind-hearted and charitable people, accentuated by weekly potluck dinners and the implied importance of community, friendship and giving. After an out-of-state move, my family made the switch to a local Pentecostal congregation. These incredibly outgoing people were very focused upon seeing the glory of God physically manifested in every moment of everyday life, fighting militantly against the forces of darkness that threatened to overcome the world soul-by-soul, and a very specific teaching of submission to authority; generally speaking, your "spiritual elders"; more specifically, the pastor of your congregation. It was here that I would receive the bulk of my religious conditioning. After spending five years here, my family moved on to plant a church in a nearby town. This church was affiliated with the Baptist General Conference, a fairly conservative denomination, and was to be built on the Willow Creek/Saddleback model of "seeker-sensitive" churches, basically an approach designed for those who had "given up on church, but not on God", as the church literature would say. Here, I was exposed to many new and different ways of "doing church", from high-gloss Powerpoint presentations and tightly-produced worship bands to entire sermon series built on Hollywood movie themes. The entire flow of a Sunday service, and everything else about the way the church handled its business, was carefully choreographed, timed, and- quite often- scripted. The "growth story" of this church, an important part of a church's credibility, is now considered classic: we went from a living room to an elementary school, from an abandoned post office to an old car dealership and finally produced a large-scale fundraising drive to build our own church building. My father served on the elder board, and was also a lay advisor to the Great Lakes Baptist Conference, the regional governing body. My mom was nursery coordinator. My brother drummed for the worship band. I myself was involved in the youth leadership at this church. Simultaneously, I was involved in a youth group at an Evangelical Free denominational church, as well as continuing to serve as a student-leader and worship leader in the Pentecostal youth group at the church my family had left, also serving with them as an assistant camp counselor for two years. I was also occasionally involved in the local Young Life non-denominational organization.

Having such a relatively diverse church background and being immersed in leadership-this and ministry-that developed in me a strong sense that this was just what I was supposed to be doing with my life, and so in high school, I applied for admittance into the strongest ministry-oriented college that I knew of (and because they'd been sending me sweet-looking flyers since I was in 7th grade!): North Central University in Minneapolis. I was excited to gain admittance, and had it all planned out: I was going to start school, meet a girl first or second semester, marry her by junior year, graduate in 4 years and become a successful youth pastor, winning scores of souls for Christ and maybe writing a book or two about it. It'd be great.

I had written, in my admissions essay, of a desire to bring about a "revival"- an oft-used term in Pentecostal circles which typically means a large-scale change or deep shift brought about by the faithful in accordance with God's will. "Revival" usually looked like a whole bunch of people writhing in the aisles or dancing around at the front of the church yelling at God in strange languages. The pressure to "come on down and receive what the Lord had for you" was great; if you didn't get out of your seat or you weren't in the room for whatever reason, you risked "missing out"- the implications of which were never really clear, but you knew it might mean that something in your soul was in jeopardy, so you just didn't even go there. I mostly rolled with it, but I also felt like there was something more to be had, something much more practical, something much less weird, and that's what I wanted to see happen. It seemed to me that the "revival" I read about in the Bible was often at odds with the established order of things, and this revival I kept seeing was like a broken old 33 vinyl record playing on the 45 setting- the same old thing, but much more frenetic, and ultimately annoying. I knew this wasn't "it".

Before I'd leave for North Central, I'd begin to develop some ideas about what this whole thing looked like, or at least, what it SHOULDN'T look like…