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So I’m wondering: is it possible for a community to hold to both efficiency AND authenticity? We see the virtue of efficiency running deep in everything Americans participate in. We want our food quicker, our PDA’s cheaper, and home appliances are there to make housework easier. We even have a timer for our lights - so we don’t have to get up to turn them on ourselves!)
We want our relationships more efficient too. We funnel into a niche online and find the person or two that meets our needs and focus in on them without having to worry about ever really meeting them in person. Teens today dodge the awkward stage of having to get to know people at their high school because they can go home at the end of the day and login as WARRIOR2122 and kick butt in a video game. We even have online SIMS, a virtual family with virtual neighbors, while our proximal neighbors sit at home alone; just as alone as we are.
As efficient as we’d like to be, there has been a major push among postmoderns (and people in general) to seek authenticity. We want organic food (real, no preservatives or steroids), we want the truth when purchasing a car (picture the “used car salesman” stereotype, and cringe). And of course we want authentic relationships. Much of our journey into “organic church” is a search for authentic relationships. But can this journey be an efficient one? Last September I heard George Barna speak about leaders in the “revolution” he sees spreading across the North American church scene. More and more people are moving toward “authentic” expressions of faith in community. But one thing he said struck me funny. He said that leaders of this “revolution” were not “efficient”. “Not efficient?” I asked myself, “how can this be any kind of revolution without efficient change?” It took me until just a few days ago to put it together. Every single revolutionary in history fled from the “efficient” path, but took instead the radical path that was filled with twists, u-turns, and challenging hurdles. Living as a revolutionary on a quest for an authentic faith and authentic relationships is scary, because we must give up one of the central virtues of the American lifestyle: efficiency. In our house church this past year, we’ve found our gatherings to be fairly “inefficient”. Sometimes we leave wondering if anything happened at all. Other times we feel like we’ve been on a long journey with each other and we leave exhausted. It’s confusing, we make wrong turns, but on our best moments we feel like we’re a part of the revolution. So is it possible? Can we be efficiently authentic? Authenticity, Culture, Doing and Being PostmodernismAuthenticity, Culture, Doing and Being, Postmodernism
Original content by: http://www2.godgrown.net:8881/2007/01/05/the-inefficiency-of-authenticity/.
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