Paris to Strasbourg to Geneva, Part I

Note: Photos have been added to the previous blog post.

It's July 3 and I am now in Geneva. The past week has been overwhelming time-wise, and I have ended each day too tired to blog. Paris has been in a heat-wave, with temps in the upper 80s and high humidity. This has left me with heat rash and mosquito bites. Much of this week has been spent with my daughter Bethany and her boyfriend Kyle Leichter doing more "touristy" activities (Versailles, the Louvre, etc.) However, I am pleased to report on two events more in keeping with the theme of my sabbatical.

The first involves my service at the American Church in Paris. I wrote about this church in a previous post. I was pleased to participate in worship on Sunday June 28 with a full sanctuary of worshipers at one of three worship services that day. During the week I have had extended conversations with Senior Pastor Scott Herr about the church and its ministry, and I led a discussion on "Spirit, Power, and Community: Church Order in the New Testament from a Reformed Perspective" to about 15 church leaders.

The ACP is in many ways what the North American church will be like: increasingly multinational (over 50 nationalities are in the congregation) and struggling to bear a faithful witness in an increasingly secular culture. Like many American churches, however, its leadership has yet to adapt its way of thinking to 21st century realities. 1970s solutions don't fit 2010 problems. We are in need of a new Reformation like the one 500 years ago. That movement addressed the realities of a world turned on its head by a new means of communication: movable type and the mass distribution of the printed word. Our new Reformation must deal with an even more dramatic communication revolution: the instantaneous global communication made possible by the internet, and the resulting deluge of information overload. Combined with the shift from word-based to image-based media, this creates what I call "communication inflation" -- the cheapening of communication by its overproduction and the debasing of words by more emotionally powerful (and easily manipulated) images. The overproduction of communication cheapens all communication, and makes it more difficult to sort out the wheat of meaning from the chaff of trivia and propaganda. These are sea changes in the global culture that will not be undone. It remains to be seen how Christian faith will adapt to these new realities. However, we can anticipate a change on the magnitude of that which happened in the 16th and 17th centuries.

However, there is still much we can learn from the previous reformation. The contributions of Calvin and Knox still ring true. My presentation on church order borrows from the Reformed ecclesiology of Calvin (through Knox). A powerpoint outline can be found here: http://www.plainsandpeaks.org/Default.aspx?tabid=512&DMXModule=1288&Download=inline&mid=1288&EntryId=550.

In my next post I will talk about my visits to Versailles and Strasbourg as part of my pilgrimage.