The New Copernicans: Millennials and the Survival of the Church

by David John Seel Jr.

Reason works within frames, the imagination between them.

Frame shifts do not happen because of a greater application of reason. They happen when the imagination is able to picture reality in a new way—through a new frame.

“when paradigms change, there are usually significant shifts in the criteria determining the legitimacy of problems and of proposed solutions,”

When belief and doubt are binary rather than a fused experience—as preferred by New Copernicans—the stakes are too high to be honest about doubt.

The pluralistic situation presents the religious institutions with two ideal-typical options. They can accommodate themselves to the situation, play the pluralistic game of religious free enterprise, and come to terms as best they can with the plausibility problem by modifying their product in accordance with consumer demands. Or they can refuse to accommodate themselves, entrench themselves behind whatever socio-religious structures they can maintain or construct, and continue to profess the old objectivities as much as possible as if nothing

The fundamentalists hold to their convictions with a closed fist, confident that they have a corner on the truth. On the other hand, the open Christian or atheist holds their convictions with an open hand, always willing to learn more and acutely aware that even at the points of their strongest convictions they might be wrong and that there is more to know than they currently comprehend.

While I’m sure that there is fault on both sides, closed transcendent institutions have a tendency to emotionally brutalize high-profile detractors. Consequently, these prophetic voices’ forward-looking progressive insights are often laced with understandable bitterness and various degrees of anger toward the evangelical institutions from which they are now distant or rejected. There is a growing number following in their footsteps, people who describe themselves as “spiritually frustrated and homeless.”17 The evangelical church needs to find a way to provide genuine seekers like this—with all their unorthodoxy, doubt, and confusion—a home and a safe place to ask unsafe questions.

for New Copernicans the cognitive and intellectual takes a back seat to the relational and the existential.

The problem with the traditional view of evangelism is that it falsely bifurcates destination and journey, placing almost exclusive emphasis on the destination with no reference or regard for the necessity, beauty, immediacy, and meaning of the journey.

We need to stop trying to be the guru, shaman, or spiritual know-it-all to others. Rather we need to get down in the muck with them, those who with us are trying to muddle through life with some measure of personal integrity and open search for meaning. As one friend said to me, “I’ll love you to heaven or I’ll love you to hell. You can count on me loving you either way, the whole way.”2

There is nothing sadder than a Christian fellowship where every song must be victory, every prayer full of faith, every member always smiling and joyful. It is an exhausting pretense to keep up for long, and it condemns those who cannot hide from their fears to further pain of failure and inadequacy. It is actually dishonest. It means that we can never offer our tears as well as our smiles, our questions as well as our certainties, our wounds as well as our victories. It means that we are always keeping Christ out of the very places in our lives where we need him the most—the places of darkness, uncertainties, and fears.5