Orthodoxy, Postmodernism and Missions

I know that this is a weird reflection given the festive nature of the Nativity season. But, I think it's something that's important that the Church needs to explore and wrestle with especially as we are faced with declining church attendance, lower preference for religious activity and with the potential death of the churches we call home. I don't mean to be the harbinger of doom, or to overly criticize what we do in a mean-spirited way. However, I do think there are many serious flaws in the way that we do mission and the way that we engage the culture around us and present a voice of hope, the same voice of hope that the Church has been (or at least should have been) for the past 2,000 or so years.
Right now, our society is in the midst of a fundamental change and indeed I can see this. Postmodernism is becoming more and more part of the fabric of our culture and our thought. We are seeing the shift from meta-narrative to mini-narrative. We can see this even in the context of modern theology. We see the importance of seeing how the mini-narrative theologies of different cultures and sub-groups (i.e. feminist theology, Latin-American theology, Asian theology, gay theology, and so on) help give us a bigger picture of God and how people interpret God. In modern culture, postmodern people are focused on that mini-narrative, their local story, their local issue. Of course, I don't pretend to be an expert on postmodernism or culture in general, but I can see what is changing. People of my generation don't respond to the same evangelism that their parents' generation did. As the concept of "relative truth" or subjective truth begins to prevail, it seemingly becomes more and more difficult for Josh McDowell style evangelists to succeed. Aside from that, many of the liberal / mainline approaches to evangelism are becoming less and less successful. Those which are, in my opinion, tend to offer freedom without the characteristic prophetic and redeeming voice of God's church. Some Churches offer freedom of belief without responsibility, they offer surface-level discipleship, or at worst they offer a country club style setting for the local elite on Sunday mornings.
We are now at a veritable fork in the road. Just a little sampling of what we're faced with - roughly 10% of those children raised in the church are staying in the Church beyond 9th grade. Up to 80% of college students have never attended a Church service or been members of a church. The attitude towards Christians is an attitude of disdain, and sometimes outright hate. We as the faithful are now paying the price for remaining silent as deceitful heretics like Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and D. James Kennedy were allowed to spew their hateful rhetoric and stoke the fires of fundamentalism in our country. So what do we do? What can we do to reverse the trend? Well, this is by no means a working model, but definitely a start. Because what needs to happen is not choosing a new program or using a new manual for what we do, but rather a change in our understanding of the mission field and how we as Christians ought view the culture and society around us.
First and foremost, the Church needs to cast off the excesses of modernistic and philosophical theology brought to us by the likes of Rudolf Bultmann, John Shelby Spong, Marcus Borg, and other figures like them. The Church needs to return to some form of orthodoxy in faith and practice. It needs to once again elevate scripture and tradition and demote reason back to a place where it is equal to scripture and tradition and not in a position of superiority. Christians need to realize that theology is not an individual exercise, rather it is an exercise that should be done in the context of community. Orthodoxy has been able to weather the paradigm shifts in to medieval society, the renaissance, and into the enlightenment and it has been able to re-express itself in a way that makes sense to the society in which it existed. The solution to our missional woes is not in tearing down the proverbial house of the Church and taking out its foundation and moving it to what I consider sandy ground. Rather, we simply need to remodel. We need to find ways to express and be who we are while remaining committed to the same foundation of dogma and doctrine as established by the Fathers and our ancestors in the faith.
Second, Christians must be willing to change for the sake of continuing Christ's work on earth for posterity. Bishop Kirk Smith made a comment that some people find it difficult to make changes and stubbornly won't, even though they need to in order to grow and become a growing group of people again. The Church that ceases to evangelize loses its scriptural warrant to exist. Some have said that they would have contemporary music in their churches over their dead bodies, others have said that they don't want to evangelize for fear of having the "wrong kind of people" in the church, well unfortunately these people may have to die in order for the Church to grow. It is a harsh statement, I grant, but it is true. Similarly, the Church must re-discover its connection to the Fathers and find a way to express the timeless teachings of the Church in a way that makes sense to people who bear the hallmarks of a postmodern outlook. In other words, the Church must embody Christ's teaching of "I have become all things to all people". If we cease to be relevant, we cease to exist.

Just some musings, by no means a complete thought.