Hurricanes of Change

On Wednesday we saw how Hurricane Mitch, which flooded Honduras, changed the course of the Choluteca River so that the sturdy, well designed and well built bridge no longer spanned the river.

Back through history, every few hundred years a hurricane of change has blown through civilization altering its course massively.  This is not unusually evil, nor is it especially good.  The changes can have horribly evil consequences, but some good things can happen too. But after the hurricanes, civilizations are changed.  The pattern we see is that these hurricanes of change accompany changes in how civilizations handle information.

An early hurricane took place about 2,500 BC when writing was invented.  This completely changed how society handled information and allowed for all sorts of changes to take place:

Another smaller hurricane occurred about 500 AD when political rulers fully realized the power of controlling information.  When Constantine adopted Christianity, it was not all good; he used Christianity for military and political advantage, a gross distortion of the good news of Jesus:

We had a hurricane blow through civilization about 500 years ago, rather coincidentally, with the invention of the printing press.  This meant information could no longer be controlled by the privileged few; books and ideas could be spread by the printing press. The time became ripe for the Reformation, with all its changes in Theology, and then the Age of Enlightenment, which spawned the Modern Era:

In the Twentieth Century, discoveries in physics shook up the certainty of the Moderns, making conditions ripe for another hurricane, the eye of which is the explosion of the internet, which, by the way, is a very new and very different way of handling information:

Post-Moderns and those who follow them have and will have a very different world view from that of Moderns.  It is not necessarily a better world view, nor a worse world view; but it is different and may become increasingly different, arising in large part from accepting and dealing with information differently.

At Community Life Church, we realize that we must see what is going on in this latest hurricane, which may last for many years, if we are to relate to our Post-Modern generation, if we are to play our part in lifting individuals and communities in our society during and after this current hurricane of change. We don’t have all the answers as to what this will look like, but we are counting on Post-Moderns themselves to help us on this journey.