The Road Trip That Changed the World

For someone who was immersed in the culture of the road, the rhythms and commitments of faith were almost incomprehensible.

Ours is a culture in which a constant searching for happiness is the ultimate goal, meaning that believers find themselves constantly reevaluating their faith, testing that faith’s ability to deliver our culture’s vision of the good life.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, commenting on the religiosity of contemporary culture, notes that in the West we now have “a generation whose principal desire is to feel [God] rather than worship Him.”13 In such a climate, faith becomes just one rest stop on the highway of life.

Contemporary life becomes a constant rolling of the dice to pull off the impossible. Our lives may be great, but if one area is not up to scratch, we feel that something is amiss. Thus we suffer from a permanent restlessness. How do we chart and plan a life of meaning and happiness

The average person in the West carries around in their head a set of assumptions that are culturally imbibed. Assumptions such as the idea that spirituality is preferable to organized religion, that love is a feeling not a discipline, that if something is mundane it must be boring, that individual freedom trumps the collective, that travel broadens the mind, or that we can do what we like as long as it does not hurt anybody.

The team found that young people were not interested in overarching stories that explained the world. Instead a smaller, coherent personal narrative that gave a sense of meaning to the individual was what the young people centered their lives around. Ideas like the eternal, heaven, or an afterlife were of little importance. Instead, real-time individual happiness and well-being was the ultimate goal.

These people were not looking for transcendence, for sublime moments when the divine hand behind creation was revealed. Instead they were lost souls, on the road, looking for meaning in a secular world.

Like moviegoers who suspend their disbelief when they enter the cinema, the religious are seen as doing the same when they enter spaces of worship.

In a superflat culture where nothing matters, we escape into obsessions and hobbies, interests that bear little ultimate consequence. In a commodified culture, we move and shift around meaning, giving weight to things that do not deserve mountains of time and attention. The twenty-first century will be a century marked by conspicuous consumption but also a flagrant misuse of time.

Today, honesty and authenticity no longer mean truthfulness, but rather a transparency concerning one’s deepest wants and desires and an openness about one’s determination to indulge in them.

the secular version of shalom will be delivered by good organization, effective government, sound economic policy, and effective medicine and scientific advancement.

Their views are an attempt to live a contradiction, a set of beliefs that defy logic. Their approach to faith and life is one built not on an intellectual set of beliefs; rather it is shaped by pragmatism. It is a do-it-yourself ramshackle construction thrown together, light enough to pick up and transport when consumer culture demands that we change allegiances. It is the ideal moveable shelter for the psychically homeless of the West. Perfect for enjoying the sunny days of twenty-first-century hedonistic culture. It is, however, a shanty that is most definitely not adequate shelter when life’s storms truly strike.

physical and spiritual and metaphysical hopelessness you can’t learn in school no matter how many books on existentialism or pessimism you read.

Life is not about moments of pleasure. It is about a naked, face-to-face encounter with God.

Our efforts to craft a life of pleasure, or even a life of good works, would pale into insignificance in the face of the reality that each of us must face death and God. Kierkegaard reminded his culture, so obsessed with comfort and with crafting a life that is free of the negative and the annoying, that the essence of life is an encounter with our fragility and mortality, an encounter which leads to God.

Maybe we need to stop looking at the quantity of those who claim to follow and start looking to the quality of the devotion of our hearts.

Another pastor from a church well known for its innovative approach to ministry shared with me that despite his church’s growth, there had been a sharp decline in those contributing their time, ministry, and finances—that despite the church’s public success story, the spiritual character of the congregation was deteriorating. He told me that the church had made it so easy for people to turn up, that they just switched off upon entering the worship. Attendees consumed the worship experience the way one would consume an hour-long TV program.

Yet despite its strangeness, it is a reminder that our attitudes here and now echo through eternity; that when we worship, pray, serve the poor, share the gospel, read the Word, these things matter in ways beyond just what we can experience through our senses.

When you compare the Bible to the scriptures of other religions, what is striking is the normality of the Bible. There are not gods or spiritual entities under every rock, or exhaustive descriptions of heavenly battles. Abraham is not taken away from the earth to another spiritual realm. God does speak to him, but the arena for his discipleship is the everyday. His relationship with the spiritual does not drive him away from everyday life, but instead pushes him deeper into it. The transcendent is to be found in the midst of the ordinary.

The need of the hour is not for a church that is relevant. We do not need to infect the world with a generation of believers who are hip and cool; we need a Church, and we need believers who are deep.