2023 Evangel Gathering - Friendship and Flourishing for Missions

W orkshops • 37

b. “Any text claiming a religious truth that has made a profound difference in the lives of generations of readers across time and space .” 3 3. Holder helps us recognize how the catholicity of spiritual classics helps our own generation recognize its cultural blind spots.

a. Mapping our blind spots: Space (place) and time (year)

1) Timothy George’s “Generational Mapping Model” helps leaders visually identify their generational location.

2) Draw a Kingdom chart where the X axis shows place and the Y axis shows time.

b. Space. The Copernican Paradigm Shift (Science of Cosmology)

1) Earth is not the center of the universe.

2) Geographic Location: family, ethnicity, nationality, class, etc.

c. The Perennial Paradigm Shift (Theology of Time)

1) My generation is not the center of time.

2) Temporal Location. This generation.

d. Western blind spots in 2022

1) Structural secularism vs. active secularism 4

2) Consumerism, noise and busyness 5

3 Arthur Holder, ed., Christian Spirituality: The Classics (New York: Routledge, 2010), xix. 4 George M. Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1996). 5 Robert Sarah and Nicolas Diat, The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 2017).