In Celebration of a Milestone

by Ben Howard

The first post I wrote for this website is a mess. The writing is stilted and repetitive. The thesis is obvious and uninteresting, and even if it wasn’t, I don’t explain the premise enough for anyone who isn’t reading my mind to understand what’s going on. 

But I hit publish anyway, because that’s what you do, even if you’re naïve about what you’re sending out into the world. And then I hit publish the next day, and the next, and again a few days after that. And then a friend wrote a post for me, and then another, and another. And I’d like to think the writing got a little better, the ideas a little sharper, the jokes a little tighter, and the whole thing a good bit more intriguing.

Today is our 500th post at On Pop Theology and it also happens to be our 2nd birthday. In the two years since the site launched, we’ve published somewhere around 280,000 words (that’s about five books’ worth of writing), and recorded around 30 hours worth of podcasts. I’m really proud of the work we’ve done and excited about the trajectory we’re traveling, and really just kind of exhausted when I look back at it all.

I can’t say enough about the amazing friends I’ve met so far; the brilliant, thoughtful, hilarious, and creative people that have worked with us over the last two years. You inspire me.

I can’t say thank you enough to our readers and listeners. I hope you stick around and I hope we keep being worth your time.

Finally, I can confidently say this site would have stopped long ago if it wasn’t for the continued support and diligence of my friend and editor Sebastian Faust. Almost every word you read on this site has gone through his hands at least once, and he’s kept me from going insane at least a half-dozen times.

The core idea at the center of OPT has always been creativity and experimentation. We want to create a space where you can take an idea out and play with it, bounce it around, joke about it, poke holes in it, have fun with it. It has always been about ideas at play, embracing your weirdness, and in the process coming to a better understanding of who we are.

We have a lot of dreams for OPT in the future. Some of them will come to fruition, some won’t, and I have a hunch that we haven’t even dreamed our very best yet. We’re excited to keep experimenting, keep creating, keep joking, and we want to keep having fun. We hope you’re ready to dive into the theological deep end. ;)

Ben Howard is an accidental iconoclast and generally curious individual living in Nashville, Tennessee. He is also the editor-in-chief of On Pop Theology and an avid fan of waving at strangers for no reason. You can follow him on Twitter @BenHoward87.  

You can follow On Pop Theology on Twitter @OnPopTheology or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/OnPopTheology. If you'd like to support what we do here, you can donate via the button on the right of the screen.
  

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On Predicting the Future

Bad Future Predictors

by Ben Howard 

Contrary to what your semi-annoying friend from high school posted on Facebook, Back to the Future Day has not yet occurred. In Back to the Future 2, Doc and Marty travel to October 21st, 2015, thirty years into their future. 2015. 1985. 1955. This is a time travel movie for the OCD crowd.

A little more than two years removed from that date, I think it’s safe to say that Back to the Future 2, though a fine movie, did a pretty poor job of predicting the future. There are no self-tying shoelaces (not that it kept Nike from gobbling up a patent on the idea), no hover boards, no mini-microwaveable pizzas that come out full-sized, and sadly the Cubs will not win the World Series (I’m pretty certain of this).

Also, there are no flying cars. Nowhere. Yet, there are always flying cars in the future.

When movies or TV shows set their stories in the future they inevitably over-predict the future.  Either the world will be populated by self-tying shoes and flying cars, or else the entire world will fall off the cliff into a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Our visions of the future are so extreme, so hyperbolic, because we can’t really stand the idea of the future looking very much like the present.  Or maybe it’s that we are engaging in the equivalent of children telling bedtime stories to one another, telling fantastic tales to entertain, or getting ourselves freaked out about what is almost certainly hiding in our closet. Since we can’t see over the horizon into tomorrow, we must write our stories and write them large. Since we can never live in anything but the present reality, any and all depictions of the future will be emotionally jarring. We will always feel the anxiety of a time-traveler when we tell these kinds of stories.

Church of the Future?

But that’s an inauthentic way to view the future. It’s not how the future will feel to us when it exists. When the future becomes the present we won’t think of it as “the future” it will just be what exists, now. It won’t necessarily be better or worse, it’ll just be different.

I read a lot of posts on the future of evangelicalism and the future of the church and this tendency to over-predict the future is present in almost every one. Inevitably someone will say that the church is dying, or that evangelicalism is dying, or that we’re on the verge of a new resurgence in the church, or that we’re on the precipice of something new in the Christian world.

However, when you begin to peel back the layers of these predictions, whether they foretell doom and disaster or growth and renewal, they are ultimately not about the future at all. They are about the concerns of the present. Warnings about the death of the church are another way of calling the church to be better; predictions of expansion and renaissance are hopeful projections that the church can keep doing something good, that they can hold it together.

The future will always be a continuation of the present colliding with the unpredictable and the unexpected.  It rarely follows a linear trajectory, and it’s rarely so boring as to be predictable. It’s impossible to live or prepare for a future world that doesn’t exist, and even if it was possible, it wouldn’t be helpful.

We can only live in the present. We can only deal with the issues we have at the moment, not the issues we might have down the line. We’ll inevitably change and adapt. We’ll think differently about some things and some of the obvious truths of the present will become antiquated.

I think we like talking about the future because it lets us put our dreams, and conversely, our nightmares on display. It grants us a way to talk about how we view our day to day existence without having to interact too fully with the present. It allows us to view a world where all the problems we have today are replaced by the solutions of tomorrow. It allows us to experience the rewards at the end of the long struggle known as history without experiencing the pain, trauma, and cynicism along the way.

But that future, the one that solves the problems of the present, will never exist, and that’s okay.

There is always hope...

There will always be injustice, even if we find justice for the oppressed of our time. There will always be war, even if we find peace between today’s warring parties. There will always be pain, even if we tend the wounds and dry the tears of those who hurt right now.

This isn’t cynicism; it’s real life.

 
And when the new struggles come, when the future we’ve always dreamed of comes tantalizingly close, only to be pulled away in an avalanche of the present, the church and the world, both broken as always, will pull themselves up by their non-self-tying boot straps and continue to fight the good fight motivated by something beyond themselves: hope.

Peace,
Ben

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Contact us at onpoptheology [at] gmail.com.

Community and Nostalgic Zombies

I will remember you *da da da dada*
Will you remember me?

by Ben Howard

I loved the show Community. Yes, that sentence is in the past tense.

For the duration of its first three seasons, Community was one of my favorite shows on TV. Not only was it a absurdist meta-comedy which commented continuously on the very sitcom conceits it was enacting, but it also showcased a level of heart and depth that very few shows attempt to achieve. A lot of people focus on the jokes, or the concept episodes, but I loved Community because of the way it explored neuroses, and loneliness, and, well, community.

It mined dark areas of life and found comedy, camaraderie and warmth in the midst of real pain.

The show has never had good ratings and has always been on the verge of cancellation, but it was still a surprise when the creator, show runner and creative force behind Community, Dan Harmon, was fired after the third season.  Harmon was notoriously irascible and difficult to deal with. His borderline dysfunctional personality made him a headache for the network, but it also fed the creative energy that made the show what it was.

Harmon was replaced by two veteran TV writers, but when the show came back for a fourth season a few weeks ago, it was evident that they had not been able to recapture the magic of Harmon’s Community.

Zombie Troy

I will continue to watch Zombie Community, but it will be with a tinge of sadness. That’s the way these lightning in a bottle moments go. When you’re in the midst of it, it feels like it will never end.

I don’t want to bemoan the shift from Harmon Community to Zombie Community too much. I mean, it is only a sitcom after all, but I think it highlights something important in the realm of Christian memory.

The happy feelings I have about Harmon’s version of community exist in as memories, while the frustrated feelings I have about Zombie Community are fostered by a sense of nostalgia. I’m frustrated by Zombie Community because it not only reminds me of something I miss, but it makes me want to return to a past that I can no longer access.

Christians face this problem all the time. We remember the greatness of our past and in our hunger for a better present we try to imitate the greatness that has come before us, but that imitation of the past leaves us empty because it calls us to create a world that no longer exists.

I grew up in a faith tradition that constantly referenced the first century church as a model for life. When questions of church practice were asked, one of the first places they’d look would be the practice of the first century church. The problem with this should be self-evident: the tradition in question exists in the 21^st century which is, quite clearly, not the same as the first century.

The resulting community looks like a Zombie First Century Church, which leaves most people frustrated and nostalgic.

Boldly going we're no church has gone before

I understand the appeal of the past. When we look to the past we look to things that we know worked, we remember things we know we enjoyed, we see things that we know were beautiful, but it is impossible to remake the past. It is impossible to recapture the lightning we once had.

Christians are not called to remake the past and tilt at nostalgic windmills of a bygone era; we are called to live into the future. Living into the future requires imagination and creativity. It requires us to wrestle with things we do not understand. It requires us to be vulnerable to questions we have not yet asked.

It requires us to learn to love the past and remember it fondly, to be inspired by the things that came before, but to make something new. It requires us to be more than zombies.

Peace,

Ben 

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