Reading - From Larry King’s book, Future Talk: Conversations About Tomorrow:
Conversation between Larry King and Dan Goldin, Administrator, National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA).
LK: Where are we going in the next century?
GOLDIN: We are going to extend human presence into space beyond Earth orbit on a sustained basis. ... As we get into the 21st century, it’s going to be back to the moon, to Mars, maybe Europa (a moon of Jupiter), and I foresee in the 21st century our having a research station on an asteroid which could be like the research station we now have on the South Pole in Antarctica. These would be the initial penetrations by humans out of earth orbit. This is the final frontier, as they say on Star Trek. ... Everyone has questions: "I want to know for certain, Mr. Goldin, what’s out there?" It is human nature to explore. I don’t know what we’re going to find, but if we can find a potential for scientific payoff and economic payoff, and if the potential of that payoff is greater than the cost, we go. ... We might go to Europa. ... We need to focus on places that might be in the life zone. Now it is a fundamental aspect of life to answer this question: "Where did I come from?" This is an aspect of life that is very important. I don’t know. Maybe life is unique to Earth and there’s no other life anywhere else in t he solar system. Or the universe.
LK: What do you think?
GOLDIN: I learned in life that I don’t know what I don’t know, and I know when you go to the frontier, you learn. I will not speculate.
LK: Would you like there to be something outside of what we have here?
GOLDIN: I’d like to believe that life is not unique to Earth. There hasn’t been any evidence yet that says life is unique to Earth.
LK: What scares you about the 21st century?
GOLDIN: You’re never going to get me to be sacred. I see unbelievable opportunity if we deal with all these changes properly. I see an opportunity to begin to understand how life formed and evolved, and to answer the basic questions of humankind. I see an opportunity for unbelievable productivity. I’m not worried.
LK: What can we expect to see within the next ten years?
GOLDIN: The international space station will have been completed and we will have figured out how people can safely live and work in space, and the great adventure will begin of people leaving Earth orbit to go on to other planets. We will have a much better understanding of the possibilities for life on Mars and the capability for sustaining life. We will know if there is a liquid ocean on Europa and if it contains life. If they exist, we will find Earth-size planets around stars within 100 light years of Earth. We will peer out to the very beginning of the universe.
LK: This is starting to sound like the job of the Divine.
GOLDIN: It’s the human mind.
Conversation between Larry King and Elaine Pagels, Professor of Religion, Princeton University, and author of The Gnostic Gospels and The Origin of Satan.
LK: We seem to be traveling faster. We are learning so much. Everyone says there’s going to be change-change-change, and I’m wondering what this is going to do to God?
PAGELS: You’re talking about quantitative changes: changes in speed, medical advances, travel, communications and the like. They’ve changed our lives. but they have also pressed with urgency the kinds of questions religion involves: What does it mean? and, What do we think about living and dying? and, What is it for?
LK: So advances in science are forcing answers?
PAGELS: No, they are forcing questions that may be becoming more urgent than before. These are questions about what we ultimately value and what we find worthwhile about human beings. ... People used to locate God in the corners of their ignorance, you know, "This is what we don’t know so that belongs to God." That is, I hope, no longer going to be the case. Certainly our perceptions are changing. The enormous awareness from communications and cultural transformations is making people aware of other cultures. Buddhists don’t talk about God in the way Westerners do, and yet they engage in issues involving the spiritual dimension of life, and that is going to come to the fore. The question of how one perceives a spiritual life is as powerful as ever. ... And, we are seeing the resurgence of the idea that human intelligence may not be the only intelligence in the universe. That’s not provable by scientific means, but for many people, it’s more thinkable than it used to be. It may be that some people are tuned into higher levels of experience other than those they can articulate rationally.
LK: Will there be more religions?
PAGELS: I would guess the answer is yes, but what they will look like, I don’t know. Certainly the groups that exist are often breaking into different variations, and there may be others that join as a result. But I do think there will be new religions and quite new perceptions.
LK: What might some of these new beliefs be?
PAGELS: That would take a prophet!
LK: That’s right. You just teach at Princeton. I forgot. Will religions become more tolerant of each other?
PAGELS: The only religions I know of that are genuinely intolerant as the three Western religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. But we are going to see a borrowing from one for another, a mingling, and as a result, we will not see these as much as separate paths as we have seen in the past. ... I think people are going to move the boundaries in an attempt to become more open, and that will set in motion others who get nervous and, therefore, more rigid. The answer, then, is we’ll probably see both. There is going to be a lot of discussion in the next century about this because people are becoming aware these traditions aren’t just made in heaven, that they have their own depth, history, culture, and limits.
LK: How are these larger denominations going to maintain their numbers?
PAGELS: I’m seeing a lot of people engaged in simultaneous exploration. While many belong to a synagogue or a church of whatever kind, they also are looking into Buddhism and other forms of religion and practice, even meditation techniques. What attracts many people is that they aren’t being told what you have to do or what you can’t do.
LK: Will television continue to be the means to spread the word?
PAGELS: Yes. That’s one way. The Internet is being used this way already; that’s going to continue. Increasingly, many people are discussing issues involving religion and spirituality and exploring those in their own lives.
Sermon: "A Vision of the Future Church"
This is the last sermon of a series of three on the Future of Unitarian Universalism. Our tradition for the past 5 or 6 years has been to call each January "UU Identity Month," giving us a time to know and understand our own Unitarian Universalist heritage and traditions better. We’ve looked at important Unitarian and Universalist personalities from the past. We’ve looked at theological movements within Unitarian Universalism - early Liberal Christianity, then Transcendentalism in the nineteenth century, and Humanism and the new Spirituality in the 20th century.
This year, Michael, Linda and I decided to tackle the future -- where we’re going as UUs, and what the big issues are that face us into the 21st century. Linda spoke about Interdependence and the clashing and co-mingling traditions of individualism and being-in-community. Michael tackled our current concerns about diversity in our churches.
Because I was away for a two-week vacation, I wasn’t here in church to experience my two colleague’s fine, incisive, and inspiring preaching, but I heard from many, many happy campers! And, with some trepidation, I move on to a culminating "Vision of the Future of the Church."
Best way to start is to quote Economist Sylvia Porter, She said that "one of the best rules of marking forecasts ... is to remember that what ever is to happen, is happening already."
And, there’s a lot happening already. A sea change of transitions and transformations is birthing a whole new world and a whole new set of ways of making our way in the world. We aren’t the Dick-and-Jane world of the ‘50s anymore.
For one thing, we’re experiencing a world deluged with technology. An example is electronic communication, which has created a sea change in the world never before experienced, including a huge shift in religious sensibility.
For another, the rising current of religious plurality. And another, the hybridity of cultural identity; multiculturalism -- the face of America is changing rapidly.
It is really true that today we are sitting on what looks pretty much like a demolition site – it is the modern world; while a new world – the postmodern world – is being constructed all around us.
Postmodern culture represents a paradigm change. It turns upside down our whole way of thinking about and conceiving human communities and systems.
"Modernism" was a period focused on organizing, standardizing, and categorizing reality into one system of understanding. Many people felt like cogs in a vast machine. In the modern world the objective was to know all the variables and control, predict, or manipulate them.
"Postmodernism" is radically different. It has reacted against the cold nature of modernism. The postmodern world hungers for meaning and spirituality that the modern world tended to strip away. Postmodernism takes to paradox and variables and relativity and process as a fish takes to water. Hierarchical structures shift to relational structures.
The postmodern emphasis is not so much on controlling all the variables, but instead on learning, on discovering interactions and exploring many and diverse relationships.
We don’t want to be in denial about future changes by refusing to see things unless they’re from our own limited perspective or only if they feel comfortable. We also don’t want to say, "I’m outta here!" – which is the barricade-building, trench-digging activity that comes from dreaming the past while demeaning the future. The world won’t hold still. Novelist Robertson Davies said that "The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to an idealized past."
The wind blows where it will. Our job is to hoist the sail and catch the wave; even, to be ahead of it. In fact, our strategy as Unitarian Universalists, which is something we’ve done many times before, is to take as our patron saint Noah, who built some new structures and adopted some new strategies in the midst of a sea change for his day.
The defining question for all churches today is what to do about the future. Do they say, "Go there!" or do they say, "Don’t go there!" We have always been heretical, radical, liberal, innovative. We Unitarian Universalists have actually thrived on the milieu created by those words. It seems clear that we not only "Go there!" but I see we have been moving a few jumps ahead already.
But NOT as fast as I’d like to see in the area of technology. Churches have a love-hate relationship with technology. It is now impossible to talk about anything without talking about technology. It is intrinsic and implicit in all of life. It is a part of everything - from sneakers to toothpaste, from genetics to religion, from you to me. It pervades who we are as people.
Through human history, we transitioned from an oral to a literate culture (books), and now, from page to screen. This emergence of electronic culture is truly revolutionary. The technology that is fueling the Postmodern Reformation is the microprocessor, and the product is "The Net." When a church sets out to construct a Web site ministry, it is actually building a postmodern cathedral.
As the Protestant Reformation Church used the book, the Postmodern Reformation Church will use the hypertext of the Net, a nonlinear form of communication that is brought to life on the screen, can be experienced in a multitude of ways, and is altered by the contribution of others at the site. The Internet has become the number one means of moving information worldwide, and it is attracting more economic and intellectual capital than any prior technology in history.
We are at the very early threshold of what might be an enormously effective electronic ministry. Our churches are creating Websites; this church has one that many of you have visited, and it is wonderful to have it. More and more people are finding their way here to our church after reading material our Website.
But, we can be thinking even further in terms of the Web being a possibility for a rich interactive ministry. You know, the younger generations, often referred to as "Net-Gen" (The Internet Generation) can’t imagine a world anymore without the Internet. Look at those kids hard: there’s our future!
The Web is all about relationships and communication. That’s why churches need Web sites and Web ministers: not to have the latest technology, but to have the highest levels of connectivity and communications possible. We can find new ways to meet, to make decisions, to study and learn, to meditate, to interact. This collaborative technology is inventing new ways of ministering that we haven’t even dreamed of yet.
A church named Saddleback Church - I don’t know where it is - made it a mission project to make every member a part of a password-protected intranet. This "intranet" is a highly secure member-only service dedicated entirely to Saddleback Church. One can only anticipate what new heights of communications and service to the Saddleback congregation will emerge now that its 9,000 members are connected to each other and to the church staff.
I would love to see one of our new small Covenant Groups, that will be starting up next month, be dedicated to this examination of the future of our church life. What would an intranet Web ministry for this church be like? The group could spend some time creating many imaginative future scenarios for our church - both positive and negative - which will help us discuss and deal with change.
The future is ours by design or default. Despite the question so often put, "Where is technology taking us?" - truth is, technology isn’t taking us anywhere. Technology isn’t some discreet, autonomous force that functions as an independent variable in history. No one "discovers" the future. The future is not a discovery. The future is not a destiny. The future is a decision, an intervention. The future is a reality that is coming to pass with each passing day, with each passing decision. It is a scenario of possibilities
The Postmodern Reformation Church will consciously intervene to help design this new world. I frankly can’t imagine that the Unitarian Universalists won’t be actively involved in this process. The future is a function of our choices and creations. We must, and we will be, clear and committed enough to the future to be out there, energetically shaping our world.
Of course, the difficult part of this is that Postmodern culture is a change-or-be-changed world. We will have to reinvent ourselves for the 21st century or die. Robert Frost says, "You live by shedding."
Well, what about reinventing ourselves? What is it that we need to respond to that will change us even more? Aren’t we pretty-out-there already? Well, NO! Not really. Not lately. Not far enough!
We need to face some of the changes we’re already experiencing, as a denomination and as a church, and make conscious decisions about what we want to take hold of and go with.
Some of the things I’m thinking of have to do with access and process, spirituality, experience, worship that feeds the senses and emotions, multiculturalism and diversity.
Postmodern spirituality is different from modern spirituality - it is more relational and more sensory. Scholars are calling this "lived" religion, "experienced" religion - a spirituality more internal than external, more individual than institutional, more experiential than cerebral; emotional, communal, narrational, hopeful and embodied. There is a renewed tilting of the head to the heart.
In postmodern culture, feelings are as important as thoughts. Deep feeling is as important as deep thinking. Emotion-work leaves people not just feeling differently but thinking differently. The postmodern challenge of Unitarian Universalist theology is to find a meeting of critical thinking and feeling, and creative feeling and thinking.
"The Way" is not a method or a map. "The Way," in the near future, is an experience. In the modern world, explanation came to substitute for experience. A postmodern UU congregation of the future, likes propositions and arguments, but is also looking for feelings, moods, music, and energy.
The church must provide its people with a moral code, a vision of what gives life value and an experience of embeddedness in a community to which one makes valuable contributions.
Because personal relationships are key in postmodern ministry, performance- and program-based ministries are being turned into relational cell-based ministries all over the globe. Small groups. Again, I bring your attention to the start-up of small Covenant Groups coming your way next month, which will be introduced by your two ministers in their columns in the next issue of the church newsletter.
One of the key issues of postmodern life facing churches is multiculturalism. and racial diversity.
Beatrice Bruteau of Fordham University asks the postmodern question, "How big is your we?" Can we expand our vision of community beyond our own skin, family, race, tribe, culture, country and species? Spiritual life is more than we what believe, it also includes how we relate.
It is the job of the church to cut across all boundaries, whether of biology or sociology, and to see people as one. Church is the place where people ought to breathe most freely and most together. Church is the place where people ought to feel most free to be themselves and most accountable to one another. The future church will work for that day when we know ourselves and are known by others, not only in parts or labels, but fully, even face-to-face.
A key measure of our ability to minister in the future will be this: Can we function among people of great difference? Each one of us must go deep into our heart to grapple with the feelings and thoughts that that question raises -- but we must eventually answer, Yes!" if we would be members of the future church.
America is one of the most religious nations in the developed world. It is also one of the most secular. We are living in a secular society, but a spiritual culture.
Postmoderns prefer a nonreligious spirituality - a spirituality that is not associated with organized traditional religion. Sociologists testify to a "widespread turning inward across the land." There is a huge spiritual hunger, yet at the same time, there is a rejection of Christianity as the kind of spirituality that can slake that hunger.
Postmoderns want something more than new products; they want new experiences, especially new experiences of connection with others and with the mystery of Life. They look also beyond the traditions of an institution for a "self-designed, do-it-yourself spirituality."
Episcopalian atheist James Kelly says, "We love the incense, the stained glass windows, the organ music, the vestments, and all of that. It’s drama, it’s aesthetics. It’s the ritual. That’s neat stuff. I don’t want to give all that up just because I don’t believe in God." He has to find his way here!
Our open and inclusive worship -- incorporating drama, storytelling, aesthetics, ritual -- in a theologically liberal setting –- there can be Unitarian Universalism at its best for the postmodern future.
Here’s an exercise for you to do at home: Take a sheet of paper and draw a line down the middle. On the left side write down the six most important features of this Unitarian Universalist church. On the right side, for each feature, write what you would say if a prospective member said to you, "So what?"
Or, you might try your hand at writing a slogan for this church. It might be, "Where people matter." Or, "A place to belong .. A place to become." Or, "Where the flock that likes to rock."
I’ll be happy to receive any results of these exercises. If you don’t remember them, look for the printed copy of this sermon, soon to be on the sermon rack.
The 21st century has the potential to be a time of galactic imagination, artistic flowering, deep and wide connectivity, and rich new intellectual veins for exploring and expanding the meaning of life. The most revolutionary developments are occurring in our changes of perspective and modes of thinking. Never before have people had access to all the information they could possibly ever need. We are living in a world where the old rules don’t apply as well anymore, and where the old sources of power and authority are being questioned. There is no longer a vision of what anything means - what it means to be human, to be male or female, to be Christian or Unitarian Universalist. It’s all become fluid.
Here are a few things I feel more sure about: In our worship we will present the drama of learning in postmodern forms. Ministry will no longer be hogged by the professionals; all people will be empowered for ministry. Unitarian Universalist churches will exist as preservatories of the past and as laboratories for the future. We will honor the past, finding there the direction, energy, and nutrients necessary for growth and movement. It will be a like a "going forward" to our roots. We will know ourselves as UUs and own our place in the world. We will, at the same time, be both disciplined and unpredictable; we will, at the same time, both love the stability of this institution, and inaugurate it fresh, new, and vulnerable. Our church will be a learning culture. We will operate with flexibility, adaptability, and speed.
We will encourage "fast knowledge" that enables us to keep up and ahead in this fast-paced, always changing knowledge culture. And we will also support "slow knowledge" which brings us into the aesthetic, social, and spiritual dimensions of life; that gives our lives meaning, purpose, and dignity.
The future church is happening now - and here. The future of Unitarian Universalism is already hop- skipping- and jumping into the 21st century. I don’t know of a church better equipped to move forward and grow. We have passion and enthusiasm, we are risk-taking and adventurous, we see the world in terms of relationships; we, in this church, have made a major move into team and shared ministry - and we’re committed to its success; we invite people to build their own theology, to develop their own spirituality; we are seriously engaged in diversity work; we have thrived for years on the ideals and practice of democratic and loving community, and we even have a sense of humor about our foibles.
I leave you with these words of a master of future-speak; he is Allen Kaye, the father of the personal computer. He said: "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." A good role model!
We now enter, together, a time of intense and wondrous invention; may we have the courage to abide and thrive.
Benediction
As we take our leave let us do so feeling the sacredness of life and appreciating its blessings. Let our response not be an amen that is an ending; not a shalom that does not recognize that it’s up to us to bring a better world into being. Blessed is life. Amen and Shalom. -David Sammons
