the perfect storm

At the CCPC conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia a few weeks ago, I spoke about the perfect storm into which I believe we are heading.  It’s concocted, actually, by three other storms already raging: one brought about by environmental realities; one by social changes and challenges; and one by the lost of mainline religious institutions. These were my closing words. Let’s recap these three pre-packaged perfect storms and the effect that all three will have on the future of humanity as their systems crash into one another. 1)      The Earth has just about had it with us. We’ve kept the taps at full blast and haven’t bothered to unplug the sinks. The effluent is overflowing and its taking its toll. We may be able to enjoy our back yard gardens, but the planet as a whole is cooking and we can’t or won’t see our role in that process.  So it will continue to escalate, breaking all the supposed warnings and moving on at a pace that has been unimagine. 2)      While that happens, we will continue to lose the cohesive nature of our communities. The global challenges, when they finally come knocking on our doors, will be faced by individuals who have only limited, instinctual knowledge of how to collaborate. In fact, many, if not most of them, will only know how to care for themselves and their families and will turn on those around them who threaten that cohesive unit.  We had to climb out of that worldview a hundred thousand years ago in order to survive.  Can we do it now? If our leaders are not individuals but dollar signs, do you think there will be any impetus to awaken us to other possibilities or do you think it will be more advantageous for the ruling elite to just keep us fighting one another even if only from within our homes, sitting in front of computer terminals. 3)      Unfortunately, the institutions that have nurtured and sustained the narratives that reminded us we could rise out of horror and into cooperation will no longer be trusted to do so. They will long since have lost themselves in the reverie of a masturbatory self-soothing. The communities in which we live will have no common values holding them together and so the value of survival will be the one given most authority.  That value uses everything in its sight for its own purpose. If we’re going down, in this scenario, we’re going down ugly. In this perfect storm, there is no second chance, no waking up and the nightmare is over, no backyard gardens and pleasure cruises that let us forget the hardship away. In this perfect storm, we go down and what’s left when we do is only the legacy of pain we leave to our children. Almost ten years ago, many of you gathered in a church in Mississauga as we launched the Canadian Centre for Progressive Christianity.  It was important work and I spoke about it being time, so obviously time, for that work to be done.  We’d been talking about it for decades, or so I thought at the time.  Turns out it had been centuries and we in the church had not moved in any significant way that would have tested and built communities of trust and action, trust and forgiveness, trust and keep moving toward something better.  We had not moved and so it was time to do so – late, but time.  The phrase “It’s time” became my mantra and it pulled me forward when, so many times, it would have been easier to do what most of our predecessors had done, stop, set up camp, get comfy, build the house, put down roots. It’s time again but this time not just time to think about church. It’s time to think about humanity and what we can do to avert this looming and dangerous storm that is almost upon us.  It’s time to look to those beyond us and see what they are doing, to put our shoulders, our time, our energy to the work of saving – and I do mean saving – the human family from itself. It’s time to pour the energy of prayer and ritual and thinking up and around complex theologies into doing and creating, learning and making right. It’s time to work so hard at getting it right that we risk arrest and detention for doing it. It’s time to live out that liberal fairytale about the way of Jesus, a way so many have walked but too few have accepted as right, a way that puts us at odds with what soothes and sustains us and sends us into a struggle like we have never seen before. I am not interested in doing church anymore – not church that anaesthetizes while it ignores; not church that takes time away from more serious pursuits; not church that refuses to engage the larger community and then perpetuates a distinctive character separating it from the everyday stuff of life.  I am interested in doing good whatever and however I am confronted by it and whatever it calls from me. I am interested in doing good and offering whatever I can to those around me, around the world, who are also doing good. I am interested only in stilling the storm. Using my heart, my passion, my intellect, my hands, my life.  I am interested only in stilling the storm.